Men Really Want Power

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 19^th 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!