Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV

[Johnny Velvet]

EDIT: Removed

[Vulgarian Visigoth]

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.

[Amor de Cosmos]

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.

[Ginger Yellow]

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.

Is just nonsense. There's an incredible flowering of TV creativity at the moment, and only someone blinded by an obsession with a narrow "prestige" label could miss it. Netflix alone is producing more high quality content than all the networks put together did in the early 90s. The thing about the Golden Age of Television isn't that the "prestige" shows are so amazing, it's that there are so many other shows that are.

[San Bernardhinault]

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.

[Satchmo Distel]

Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV

I think a lot of series are being conflated that are really very different in style and intent. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, for example, are totally different animals.

[Vulgarian Visigoth]

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")

I think that paragraph misses the point on two accounts. First, if anything what attracts the middle class to shows like The Sopranos is not the opportunity to reaffirm themselves in their own moral superiority, but rather the chance to escape their safe lives by losing themselves in sexy violence from the safety of their couches, without having to feel bad about it, thanks to the out-of-jail card granted by Art.

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.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV

Vulgarian Visigoth wrote: , Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.

I'm not sure I understand that. Justified was pretty much Cops vs Bad Guys. Or do you mean the audience are the vigilantes? Which I'd question, because the main villain, and several other serious criminals are every bit as interesting as any of the people wearing badges.

[Lang Spoon]

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.

[Vulgarian Visigoth]

Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV

Amor de Cosmos wrote:

, Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.

I'm not sure I understand that. Justified was pretty much Cops vs Bad Guys. Or do you mean the audience are the vigilantes? Which I'd question, because the main villain, and several other serious criminals are every bit as interesting as any of the people wearing badges.

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.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV

Vulgarian Visigoth wrote:

, Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.

I'm not sure I understand that. Justified was pretty much Cops vs Bad Guys. Or do you mean the audience are the vigilantes? Which I'd question, because the main villain, and several other serious criminals are every bit as interesting as any of the people wearing badges.

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.

Well of course we would, that's what fiction allows us to do and why it's so important. It reveals the darker potentials of human nature. I mean, would you really want to meet Lady Macbeth, Ebeneezer Scrooge, or anyone like them? But on the page or stage they're brilliant, and more importantly, recognisable. We need to know them to survive, otherwise we'll become Bob Cratchit or Lady M's old man. Boyd Crowder might not be in their class but he's up there. I want to know what he (or someone like him) is like. Not to get a frisson of illicit excitement but to gain a glimmer of understanding about myself and people I share my existence with.

[Ginger Yellow]

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.

Isn't that the point of Justified? It's a Western in a modern day setting, and those Western values turn out to be incompatible with the modern world, even in a near lawless "frontier" place like Harlan County.

[Haddock]

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.

[Hot Pepsi]

Meet Your Oppressor: Prestige TV

Amor de Cosmos wrote:

, Justified allows liberal, middle class viewers to engage in vigilantism by proxy with an artistic alibi.

I'm not sure I understand that. Justified was pretty much Cops vs Bad Guys. Or do you mean the audience are the vigilantes? Which I'd question, because the main villain, and several other serious criminals are every bit as interesting as any of the people wearing badges.

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.

Well of course we would, that's what fiction allows us to do and why it's so important. It reveals the darker potentials of human nature. I mean, would you really want to meet Lady Macbeth, Ebeneezer Scrooge, or anyone like them? But on the page or stage they're brilliant, and more importantly, recognisable. We need to know them to survive, otherwise we'll become Bob Cratchit or Lady M's old man. Boyd Crowder might not be in their class but he's up there. I want to know what he (or someone like him) is like. Not to get a frisson of illicit excitement but to gain a glimmer of understanding about myself and people I share my existence with.

This.

And the other stuff AdC said.