For nearly a year, I’ve been brewing
an entry entitled “Men Really Want Power.”
It’s one I’ve struggled with, because although it’s a theme of many TV
shows in this day and age, I find it easier to write about stereotypes leveled
at minorities than stereotypes leveled at (or expected of?) majorities.
But here’s the trend. It’s not only acceptable for TV men to desire
power, it’s weird if they don’t. In
contrast, TV women who actually want power (as opposed to having it
reluctantly, or growing into it) are more often villains than heroes. This phenomenon bleeds into life: there’s
really interesting evidence that decreases in Hillary Clinton’s approval rating
corresponded directly to perceptions of her as power-hungry. Of course it’s hard to separate cause from
effect, here. Is this just a matter of
art imitating the world outside? Or is
it, as I suspect, a subconscious but self-fulfilling pattern that makes
ordinary TV viewers vaguely suspicious of competent, confident women? That bit, right there, is why the Television is Important Blog is called the Television is Important Blog.
The point here is not that TV men or
women should or should not want power. It’s that the wanting of power is such a
presumed truth about men that it doesn’t occur to the shows to condemn the men
for it, while shows condemn women for precisely the same desire. Occasionally, these shows are critical of how the men approach seeking their power. But their wanting it? Well, that just is.
This is one of those that I could go on and on about, which is precisely what’s
delayed me from posting it for so long. So
I think instead I’ll just post a few reviews of shows on which it is a core
matter of uncontroversial fact that men want power.
Taboo
(FX, new. Period drama.)
Watched: three episodes
Premise: In the early 19th
Century, a man returns from 12 years in Africa to deal with the probate of his
recently-deceased father.
Promise: Much as Black Sails turned the gritty world
of piracy into a complex labor dispute, Taboo turns the gritty world of 19th-century
mercantile intrigue into a slog about probate law. It’s
all very atmospheric and murky, and there are a lot of moments that seem
shocking-for-shock’s sake, mostly involving crude references to sex, violence,
or both. The show is rife with mystical
nonwhites, manipulative prostitutes, and other marginalizing tropes. Women, some of whom are savvy, exist only as
impediments or assistants to men’s acquisition of power. At the heart of the show is the central
character’s savvy maneuvering against the East India Company over strategically important piece of land in the
soon-to-be-independent America. What’s
the “Taboo” of the title? After three
episodes, I presume it has to do with incest, but it could also have to do with
cannibalism or stolen diamonds or Native American magic or who knows what
else.
Verdict: If you like Black Sails, You’ll love
Taboo. I, for one, can’t bring myself to
care.
The
Young Pope (HBO, new. Drama.)
Watched: First two episodes
Premise: A young, conservative American priest is
elected Pope and learns to navigate and manipulate the complex politics of the
Vatican.
Promise: The show is over-the-top and
knows it. Its tone is intentionally,
delusionally, self-important. I don’t usually put clips in my reviews, but this one tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the show The central character is standoffish to
the point of cruelty, and sometimes diabolical.
I find him unsympathetic and uninteresting, but the show seems to want
us to think he’s enviable and delicious. The pace is slow-beyond-slow, and the subject
is the political machinations and intrigues of people I do not have any reason
to care about. Women are nearly absent
except as temptresses, manipulators, and mother figures, as one would expect for
a story about the Vatican.
Verdict: It has a certain psychedelic appeal, but mostly I just find it boring.
Billions
(Showtime, Winter 2016. Drama.)
Watched: First three episodes
Premise: A cat and mouse contest
between a hedge fund manager and a U.S. Attorney.
Promise: Dedicated readers know that
I have a strong distaste for “money and power” shows, so I didn’t expect to
like it. But the critics loved it so
much that I also didn’t expect to hate it.
And yet I did. Season two just
started, and I still have a viscerally negative reaction when I recall the
episodes I watched nearly a year ago. This show inspired this entry’s theme, and it
is so very on the nose about the dick-measuring nature of its story. I mean so on the nose: the main
character settles on a bold move when he sees his dog recuperating from being
fixed. And that’s most of what you need
to know about this show. It’s about men motivated
by fear their penises aren’t big enough, who are still somehow portrayed as models
of success in our time. I don’t mean to say
that the show likes its characters. It poses
a moderately thought-provoking scenario about why we’re culturally primed to be
suspicious of the ultra-rich. Here’s a
guy who’s clearly smart, sensible, and somewhat generous, and yet we just know he’s not a hero. But nevertheless, it does present ultracompetitive
ambition as admirable in men, and scheming or cruel in women. The show is also prone to crudeness,
sensationalizing and foregrounding sex in ways that can seem gratuitous even
when it’s being really smart. This is a
show that really wants us to know it’s
using metaphor as a storytelling tool.
Verdict: Well made and casted, with
no shortage of fodder for cultural self-examination, but it doesn’t make for
particularly appetizing television, at least not for me.
Gomorrah
(Sundance, Italian show, new to US Summer 2016.
Organized Crime Drama.)
Watched: Episode and a half
Premise: Power struggles between gangsters,
drug dealers, and ordinary people in modern Naples.
Promise: The challenge of getting a “seamy underbelly”
show to work—like, for example, The Wire, which is stunningly effective at
this—you have to get us invested in the characters right away, before we start
hating them. That didn’t happen for me
with Gomorrah. I found the episode(s) I
watched somewhere between boring and incoherent. Part of it may have been the Italian
subtitles, which required more concentration than I was willing to give
it. But I think more of it was that the
show didn’t give me any reason to think of its characters as anything other
than stereotypically meatheaded, greedy, chauvinistic mob types. Which is fine for them and maybe fine for
many viewers, but not something I’m likely to find appealing. If you’re going to get me interested in a
bunch of Mafiosos, I need to see some emotional depth, some sensitivity,
something surprising, some motivation other than money or power or sexual
attraction.
Verdict: I almost gave this a SimonBaker before
remembering that I actually watched it episodes. Which tells you how memorable I found it.
Incorporated
(SyFy, new. Dystopian Drama.)
Watched: first two episodes
Premise: In a 2074 Milwaukee divided between ultra-privileged
corporate oases and anarchic slums, one man fakes his way into the corpocracy
to rescue a young woman from presumed sex slavery.
Promise: This show portrays a deeply cold, uncaring
world, and doles out information about it in tiny drips. The men are ambitious, that’s presumed; the
women care about family and children.
(Even those with corporate power.)
We are supposed to appreciate the
tactics and motives of a man who ruthlessly pursues power to “save” a maguffin
of a woman who might as well be an object, for all we (or, it seems he) know
about her. The production values are
high, but the story is predictable and soulless,
Verdict: Ultimately, this show seems to embody the cold
corpocracy its narrative critiques. It didn’t
give me anything to grab onto.
In
the Queue: Many new and old
shows!
