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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
I mentioned the prestige angle on a different thread. Personally it's not really the intrinsical quality of the shows or lack thereof I'm fascinated by, but their role as taste markers, which separates the haves (taste and socioeconomic status) from the have-nots, the educated from the animal-like masses.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
One of the bitterest of the many bitter ironies of the digital age is that the explosion of television options and web-based platforms featuring cultural writing has led not to a flowering of creativity and a golden age of critical insight, but an all-consuming monoculture. A cargo cult where the trappings of a few groundbreaking cable shows from early in the millennium have hardened into tropes that power a legion of inferior imitators.
Meh! Of course this happened. It always does. Every creative movement goes through a period of potential, a glorious period of fulfillment, followed by a period of repetitive mannerism. Renaissance painting did, Hollywood film did, TV in the past couple of decades is no different. You could start with Twin Peaks which established the form, and Oz the first HBO series which extended it's possibilities. The Golden Period would include The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Carnivale, Rome and a couple of others, Breaking Bad was late to the party but definitely fits. Since then it's been a matter of emulation and tinkering with previous ideas. It's not worthy of the hyperbolic disparagement in that article though. Many shows aren't so much bad, as less good. Still preferable to most of what was being produced twenty-years ago though.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
I think the article as a whole is bullshit, though it contains a few nuggets of truth (the underrated ability of film to tell a contained story, for instance, and Westworld being a bit naff in the end). It's hung entirely on a narrow definition of "prestige" TV which allows it to make criticisms (angsty white men!) that just don't stand up when you allow in the likes of The Get Down or Big Little Lies or even Fargo.
More to the point, the "Golden Age of Televison" bollocks isn't about TV being better than any other medium, even on average (though for what it's worth I do think it's uncontestable that there are many more hours of extremely good art made in the TV medium than the movie medium each year right now). It's about (American) TV being better than it ever was before.
And this:an all-consuming monoculture. A cargo cult where the trappings of a few groundbreaking cable shows from early in the millennium have hardened into tropes that power a legion of inferior imitators.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
I mostly fall in line with the "This is bullshit" side of the argument. Although I do think it's interesting that the "prestige TV" that I've been watching recently has all originated on "normal" TV rather than HBO or Showtime.
But there are definitely some things from Prestige TV that drive me crazy. Some things that signify "prestige" like accurately rendered recent-history clothing and cars are clearly, at worst, harmless. Others, though, like the glacial pace of action in some sections of some shows; or the consciously non-episodic nature of narrative arc on TV which is deliberately broken into bite-sized episodes (worse on Netflix and Amazon originals because they're more designed for binge-watching); can be utterly madenning and utterly unnecessary, yet are seen as demonstrating that the show in question is high-brow, and are used instead of actually providing quality drama.
The only thing the author really gets right is that it's silly comparing blockbuster films like The Fate Of The Furious with, say, Westworld. Westworld should be compared with not-that-great high-concept SF movies like, say, Passengers.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
Reginald Christ wrote: There are some harsh descriptions of brilliant TV in there (I'd go to bat for Breaking Bad and The Sopranos even if they are shows about "angsty white criminals" whose awfulness "makes us feel better about our own failings")
Second, The Sopranos' selling point was not whiteness but quite the opposite - the otherness provided by the conventional Italianness, the lumpen atmosphere, the macho 'working class' culture, the swearing and the violence. The same could be said about Justified - the characters might be white, but they belong to that wild scary white otherness. They might as well be Ukrainian. Similarly to The Sopranos, Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.
I would give him The Wire's McNulty, a bland character created to provide a focal point of relatable whiteness amid the scary blackness of the show (as well as eye candy for the female viewers). Actually I don't remember McNulty's equivalent in Simon's book. The casting of Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens also seem to respond to the same criteria of attractive familiar whiteness.
Even Mad Men let viewers take part in guilty pleasures. He dresses like a Republican! He cheats on his wife! He smokes! He drinks at work! He sells stuff! He's sexist! But he's so alpha...Even the way the camera dwells on the whisky falling on the glass is erotic. It's the lure of the forbidden.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
Vulgarian Visigoth wrote: , Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
McNutty is what makes me wary of watching the whole damn shebang again. His stupid drunk car crashin cheatin tortured asshole behaviour is about the worst thing in the show, even before you get to last season serial killer plot shark jumping.
But season two's Frank Sobotka story arc, aw fuck it's beautiful. Even with Ziggy. Maybe especially with Ziggy.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
Amor de Cosmos wrote:Originally posted by Vulgarian Visigoth, Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
Vulgarian Visigoth wrote:Originally posted by Amor de CosmosOriginally posted by Vulgarian Visigoth, Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
He acts like a Far West gunman. And the most attractive villain is a neo-Nazi. It's the safety net provided by fiction which allows us to find him interesting - in real life we would only find him repulsive.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
I dislike the phrase 'anyone who argues (x) has lost all credibility in my eyes " as being too dismissive but anyone who argues that The Wire was about 'angsty white men' has lost all credibility in my eyes. There were angsty white men in the show though I'm not sure that 'angsty' is the first adjective that comes to mind to describe McNulty. 'Idiotic', or 'simian' perhaps. Carcetti perhaps deserves the label a little more, Frank Sobotka, too, but angsty is inadequate to describe his mental state. But in any case, it's the black characters who are the most fully realised and in many cases approaching the status of tragic heroes. Leaving aside the brilliant but cartoonish Omar, D'Angelo, Stringer, Bodie, Mike and others are surely the heart of the series far more than McNulty.
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Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV
Amor de Cosmos wrote:Originally posted by Vulgarian VisigothOriginally posted by Amor de CosmosOriginally posted by Vulgarian Visigoth, Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.
And the other stuff AdC said.
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