Poor Writing On Pop Culuture

Vox published a look back at how Seinfeld influenced television the other day. Some of it is quite good, for example their look at how Seinfeld moved the way sitcoms are shot from a multiple camera style where people perform on a stage with different cameras covering different angles, think Cheers, to a single camera style with long shots and close ups, more like a film. The piece's points about how the show changed sitcom writing were also pretty good.

But the author really missed the boat when it comes to looking at the characters. He tries to do it through the lens or contemporary liberal writing about race and I think really misses the boat. For example he claims this about George:

George essentially believes he deserves to have sex with a beautiful woman because he's a white guy living in modern America, and when he doesn't succeed (but Jerry or Kramer do), he grows ever more petulant. He doesn't particularly want to strive to succeed. He just wants life handed to him on a silver platter. 

I think that really get's the character, and the show in general, wrong.

George doesn't "believe" that he "deserves to have sex with a beautiful woman because he's a white guy living in modern America..." he's a pathetic loser who really wants to have sex with beautiful women, not because of "white privileged" or anything but because he's a greedy person. Since he has neither looks, nor money, nor status, he is forced to go through all sorts of contortions to try and achieve his goals. And since he is so shallow and greedy hilarity ensues.

Hence George willing to pretend to be a famous neo-nazi author in "The Limo" as long as he can use it as a way to be able to date tall, blond, aryan-looking women. George doesn't care about the racial or ethical implications or what he's doing, he just wants to get the blond, hence pretending to be a neo-nazi while sitting next to his Jewish best friend no less! These aren't the actions of someone who thinks their race or nationality "deserves" anything, they are are the actions of a shallow person trying scam their way by hook and by crook into what they want. Another example would be George pretending to be an architect or marine biologist to try and impress women.

But it's not just George that is lazy and wants things handed to him. Kramer famously doesn't have a job and mooches of Jerry for almost everything. But even Elaine, the strong female character or whatever, isn't any better put together than any of the others, she's just better at hiding her dysfunction. Sure she has better jobs than George, but once she get's her big break with the J. Peterman catalog she screws it up with idiotic ideas like the urban sombrero.   

This is what makes Seinfeld's comedy about things like race or sexuality so good, and so potentially offensive to some people. George and the gang only address questions about things like race or sexuality when it directly affects them or how they could appear socially. Hence George and Jerry work frantically to try and prove to the world that they aren't gay, while also stressing, "not that there's anything wrong with that!" Meanwhile Jerry get's upset when another man asks his gay acquaintance out on a date while Jerry is sitting next to him. Jerry get's offended when someone doesn't assume he's gay and then goes back to trying to prove to journalists that he's not gay! Or more bluntly George wants to date a woman from Senegal because she doesn't speak English and hence he doesn't have to worry about what to say to her. Or he's excited to date a woman in prison because she is locked up and thus can't boss him around.

In short these characters only address these issues when there's some sort of social advantage to gain or faux pas to avoid, otherwise it's completely irrelevant to them due to their shallow narcissism. That's what made the show so funny.

But the biggest problem of the piece is that they forgot the fact that so much of the show was about pushing boundaries and making reference to themes that normally wouldn't be discussed on network TV. They did this by oftentimes talking about it in an opaque manner, like in "The Contest", but that was one of the biggest legacies of the show and it's a shame Vox missed that point.

Yeah, The Context Of Art Matters

So the new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby has been quite a hit and has provoked a variety of responses.  One thread of criticism that I find troubling was recently voiced by Christopher Orr over at The Atlantic and echoed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

To this end, [director Baz] Luhrmann turns every dial at his disposal up to 11. His colors are as bright as those in a detergent commercial; his musical choices as intrusive as the exit cues on an awards show. The camera ducks and swerves like O.J. Simpson on his way to a car rental, and the cast all share a slightly vibratory, methamphetamine sheen. Topping off such excesses of cinematic technique, this Gatsby is rendered in 3D, an innovation only moderately less absurd than presenting Moby Dick in Sensurround, or Cannery Row in Smell-O-Vision. In short, although Luhrmann's film mostly adheres to the letter of Fitzgerald's novel, it would be difficult to envision a work less in keeping with its wistful spirit.

Now it's clear that choices like 3D and contemporary rather than period music are profound choices for a classic American novel set in the 1920's, but perhaps that is entirely the point.

Some background in case Orr forgot, while not that popular when it was intitally published, after Fitzgerald's death The Great Gatsby became one of the most widely read novels in the American cannon.  The fact that it was read by generations upon generations of high school students, didn't hurt.  Accordingly, it's been adapted four times for the screen already.  In 1926 as a silent film, in 1949, in 1974 as a Robert Redford vehicle and as a television film for A&E in 2000 that in my opinion keeps truest the the letter and spirit of the novel.  This is on top of numerous adaptations for radio and theater.  So while it may be true Luhrmann has gone in a different direction with his version, it's not necessarily because he has, as Orr puts it, "a skill-set tailor-made for comedy that he insists on squandering in ill-fated attempts at tragedy."  Indeed it could be because he's interested in making a movie that is different than the last adaptation that came out 13 years ago.

Let's review the film industry too.  Film makers make movies for all sorts of reasons, but the reason they tend to get huge amounts of money from big companies to make them is to...make money for the big companies, and you make money on a movie by making it popular.  So while making a movie that succeeds in "keeping with its wistful spirit..." may be what Orr wants to see, ticket sales are what others want to see most, and since the "wistful" movie was already made 13 years ago, and this novel's previous adaptations as motion pictures have been less than successful, going a whole new route rather than being some sacrilege might actually be a good idea.  Indeed 3D visuals and a modern hit soundtrack might in fact be a way to get people aren't obsessed with American literature or who don't criticize culture for a living (like Orr) to go see it, and maybe just maybe, get them interested in a great American author.  What's so wrong with that?

I think the problem here is that a lot of "pop-culture commentators" don't know about, or chose to ignore, the very real institutional and structural realities in which the media the criticize (the vast majority of which is negative) is actually created.  It's as if someone wants to write about health care policy but doesn't even know what a hospital is, or how health insurance works.  Such a person could write a lot about doctors they think are friendly or how it feels to have the flu, but it wouldn't be very illuminating about how the system works or what makes a hospital terrible, okay or great.  It wasn't always like this, if you go back and look at some of the great commentary about art from long ago (1980) you find a discussion both about art, and the context in which it originated.

I recently came across a great exchange between cultural commentator Alyssa Rosenberg and Game of Thrones executive story editor Bryan Cogman that illustrates this problem.  I really like Rosenberg but she seemed to have been laboring under false assumptions about how this show is written, or how good drama in general is written, for quite some time:

[Alyssa Rosenberg] I was curious about something I hope you won’t think is too cheeky. Your episode this season had both a lot of equal-opportunity nudity and consensual sex. We haven’t had a lot of the latter on the show for a while. And I was curious as to whether the nudity was a response to complaints from some critics about the presentation of women on the show in previous seasons?

[Bryan Cogman] The equal opportunity nudity just happened to be what was required for the story in that episode! I just got to be the one who wrote it. I mean, look, there could very well have been conversations amongst the producers about that, but I wasn’t privy to it.

So the story drives the writing, rather than some rubric with check boxes to insure "equal-opportunity" in the sex scenes.  Umm yeah, that's how you write a good TV show.  It's great that so many people want to write pop culture commentary, but if this commentary is not going to based on the reality of the media being used it's not very useful.  Instead its a collection of things that annoy you, which far to much of cultural commentary is already.        

Reality And Reality TV

A poet in New York named Drew Gardner recently wrote a great piece about how reality television is giving us an insightful look at many of the troublesome economic trends our country is facing (hat tip to Alyssa at ThinkProgress).  The piece focuses on a new reality show called Killer Karaoke in which contestants attempt to perform karaoke while suffering degradation and/or brutality for cash prizes.  There are a variety of treatments you can suffer on this show, but this clip were a man attempts to sing the stupid 80's single "8675309" and serve the show's host (Steve-O of MTV's "Jackass" fame) a five course meal while suffering electric shocks so painful that they at one point cause him to collapse to the floor, is about as bad as they can get.  It's fairly amazing, if you made your employees at a business perform these stunts you would be liable for a huge civil lawsuit as well as possible criminal prosecution, but on TV it's just "entertainment."

The irony here of course, is that constants on reality shows are in many ways employees, they are just highly exploitable ones.  As Gardner points out:

Capitalist economic systems require one central point of internal logic for them to function; in order to constantly expand profits, workers must be paid less than the value their work creates, ideally as little as possible, as little as the labor market will bear.  In classical economic theory, new value only comes from one place, labor. In order to concentrate wealth for owners, shareholders and managers, this surplus value is then concentrated into financial instruments and forms of rent that charge the workers who created the value in the first place. It is a parasitic relationship.

Reality TV contestants are an excellent object for this kind of relationship, because they are a disposable, easily replaced group of workers. Because their working conditions are not regulated by the Screen Actor's Guild, contestants can work unusually long hours, Some shows require a working day as long as 12-18 hours. Appearing on a show requires temporarily leaving, even risking, one's job. Union pay for an actor on a scripted situation comedy is $25,000 per episode. Reality TV contestants are often paid nothing at all for their work, though some receive a modest stipend. Most agree to work for food and shelter during the time they are being filmed, in hopes that the exposure might lead to some future opportunity, if not just for the sheer narcissistic reward of appearing on television.

Even the rewards a reality show contestant can look forward to are also in decline, much like the wages and wealth of the working and middle classes.  The most you can win on Killer Karaoke is $10,000 and indeed the most they've ever paid out is only $7,800.  This is a steep decline from the $50,000 you could win by being brutalized or humiliated on Fear Factor a few years ago.  Indeed the whole reward system increasingly looks like the "heads I win, tails you loose" nature of our economy.  The pre-Great Recession hit Who Wants to be a Millionaire? almost guaranteed you could go home from the "hot seat" with $1,000 as long as you could get through the easy first round of questions.  While a savvy player could always opt not to guess at a difficult question and instead walk away with $8,000 or $64,000.  Not so with Killer Karaoke, only one person wins, you could suffer cruel treatment once confined in the public realm to things like testimony in Federal civil rights probes and get nothing out of the deal at all.

These trends are not just confined to Karaoke.  Gardner shows how they are quite apparent in more "mainstream" examples of reality TV:

The new economy of reality television has helped American Idol become the most profitable show in the U.S. Its contestants represent legions of unpaid laborers. American Idol presents itself as an aspirational drama, but the perspectives of the show are very much those of the ruling elite. Success in this competition is about pleasing famous millionaires on their terms...The essence of American Idol is not so much the performances of the singers as it is the dramatization of the unbridgeable class divide between the ruling elite panel sitting behind the desks and the average citizen contestants standing on stage.

The early rounds of American Idol feature inappropriate contestants with little or no talent who are intentionally let through the cattle call weeding process. This represents an ugly and compelling entertainment spectacle that allows viewers to enjoy the drama of a few elite upper class celebrities verbally torturing some unfortunate neurotic caught in their web. These early scenes are job interviews designed to go horribly wrong. The hopeless contestants seem to deserve this fate because their grotesquely delusional overestimation of their talents and complete lack of understanding of what is expected of them by their prospective employers violates some primal sentiment of self-preservation in us. What they are really being punished for is not a lack of talent. They are being punished for being socially maladapted. Sadistic spectators at a ritual enforcement of conformity, we enjoy watching these sickly deer being culled from the herd.

It's in other shows as well, Dragon's Den was a British reality show (adapted here as Shark Tank) in which a panel of smug millionaires listen to (largely bad) business proposals and agree to finance or reject them.  As Charlie Brooker pointed out, the "insights" of these millionaire genesis often aren't very insightful at all, and instead just sound like some upper class twit trying to sound like that champion of economic success: Vito Corleone.

In many ways, Killer Karaoke, just takes these trends to the logical next step, by removing the millionaires and letting us all cheer on the "miracle of the free market" from standing somewhere on the post-modern factory floor.  The contestants are just the mistreated day laborers and Steve-O is just the lucky one who managed to make foreman of the work gang:

[Host] Steve-O is consistently lucid and endearing on the show, even when the occasional shadow of substance-induced derangement briefly passes over his face. It's clear he is not really involved in the design of the stunts, which are extreme by game-show standards but lightweight compared to some of the activities featured on Jackass, which often veered closer to self-harm-oriented performance art than reality TV. Steve-O is very much a traditional game show host in this role on Killer Karaoke, an updated Bud Collyer. He stays out of the action and keeps to the role of explaining the stunts and drawing comments out of the contestants. In a recent interview about the show, he said, "Breaking bones and sticking things up my ass was not getting any easier." It's clear that he has a strong grasp of the economy of the show, and perhaps about reality TV in general: "It's about the misfortune of others and exploiting people's willingness to sacrifice their dignity and well being just to be on TV for a brief moment." Steve-O's host character is an expert on ill-advised activities who has happily gotten himself promoted to a upper management position.

In fact, the whole bare bones nature of Karaoke is itself a window into the increasingly unsustainable middle class rat race and might offer us clues on our future:

Instead of notes from a panel of wealthy authority figures, the contestants, rather, get one line of instruction: "No matter what happens, do not stop singing." All that is expected of them is to remain committed to the performance of the song in absurdly unacceptable circumstances. This mirrors being middle class in a country where a middle-class lifestyle has increasingly been an unsustainable performance that is only possible to continue though reckless borrowing. Is it that much of stretch to imagine a similar electric shock system being utilized on Amazon.com warehouse workers when the GPS units they're forced to carry indicate they're not moving fast enough? Currently these warnings come in text messages. 

Is this where our society is going?  I don't know, and after all this is "only a TV show."  But at the same time it might be a lot closer to home that we like to think.  I for one find this possibility quite frightening.

Where did the Working Class Go?

Another fall, another TV lineup, with oh so many of those staples of American culture; the sitcom.  But while watching the previews I was struck by something, where did the working class people ever go?  It was quite something for someone who saw all those reruns of sitcoms growing up that are filled with the working class and even downtrodden.  The simple men and women or “Cheers”; the family that lives in public housing in “Good Times”; and who can forget “Punky Brewster” who most certainly didn’t get a luxury car for her 16th birthday.  It reminded me of a great essay I read from the critic William Deresiewicz who had a similar epiphany on his own a while ago:

I was listening to an interview with the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had just published his memoirs. Jones is gay and black, and when the interviewer asked him what his father had thought about his becoming a dancer, Jones, somewhat testily, said something like this: "You don't understand. This wasn't a middle-class family. The goal wasn't to become a professional: the goal was to better yourself." The first thing that hit me about this was that it had nothing to do with race or sexuality. The second thing that hit me was that it had everything to do with class, specifically the working class—which, I suddenly realized, I never heard anyone talk about.

Exactly. To watch even good television today is to miss any reference to the non-rich.  “Modern Family”, probably one of the funnier shows on TV these days, is a great example. It deals with issues like same sex couples raising children and interracial marriages, and for that it should be commended. But while embracing diversity in some ways, it ignores them in others. Everyone is rich on “Modern Family”, everyone is devoid of any of the material pressures that “Modern” families presumably have dealt with during the great recession.  Totaling (one of several of the) family cars becomes a hilarious inconvenience, not the terrible blow to the family finances it would be to the majority of “Modern” families. Indeed the fact that one of the main characters is a real estate agent during the biggest drop in property values in decades but never is even worried about this says enough.

When the non-rich, non-middle class people do have a sitcom focused about them this uniqueness (dare I say this example of diversity) is ignored.   The comedy “Two Broke Girls” is instructive in this regard.  It’s a show about two young women with no money who have to become waitresses in New York and is typical low brow sitcom affair (although it does have theme music by Peter, Bjorn and John which is awesome.)  But when people wrote about it, especially urban well to do liberals, they focused more on perceived racial slights than on the fact that this was the first TV show in a while to focus on the other eight million people in New York who aren’t rich and don’t take car services to drive to the grocery store.  As Deresiewicz put it, “What we talk about is race and sexuality. (Or in the academy, race, gender, and sexuality, the great triumvirate. The humanities, despite their claim to transformative significance, have all but forgotten about class.)”   “Two Broke Girls” is thus unfair , unlike much praised “Gossip Girl” or the greatest work of drama since Aeschylus, “Sex and the City.”  Even if making a show set in New York with no working class and poor people is as unrealistic as one with characters who only confirm to certain stereotypes.

Other genres of TV only exacerbate this trend.  Just look at the rise of so-called “AspirationalTV” over the past two decades.  Once confined to late night pot boilers like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “Aspirational TV” is now a prime time staple and has all but taken over MTV.  Once upon a time, you know during the Reagan Administration, shows about rich people behaving badly were the exception, think “Dallas” or “Dynasty.”  Now it seems there are desperate housewives (who are rich) and real housewives (who are ungodly rich), with no other housewives, or say wives with jobs anywhere to be seen.

It’s remarkable that perhaps 80% of the American public’s current material conditions are ignored in that most populists of all medias, television.  But it does make some things understandable, like how a man could say he thinks 47% of all Americans are parasites who are “dependent on government,” and still be in the running to become the next President of the United States.

Why Don’t You Read a Book

Recently, I got around to reading some of the reviews that came out about Game of Thrones Season Two.  Despite being one of the best shows on television, the reviews I saw where rather mixed.  Much of this can attributed to the “frustrated-English-grad-school-casualty” philosophy that tends to dominate a lot of critics in this day and age.  Critics, especially critics in New York, seem to see their role in life as being to attack everything, well everything but Sex in the City, and write in a sort of preening/whining Village Voice-esque tone.  In addition, Fantasy has always been a denigrated genre in American literary circles and I suspect the same goes to for the world of TV.  But what I can’t stand is when critics are just simply wrong about historical fact and use their ignorance of history as a way of attacking a TV show.  Emily Nussbam took a typical stand in her review in the New Yorker: From the start, the show has featured copious helpings of pay-cable nudity, much of it in scenes that don’t strictly require a woman to display her impressive butt dimples as the backdrop for a monologue about kings…”Game of Thrones” is not coy about the way the engine of misogyny can grind the fingers of those who try to work it in their favor.  An episode two weeks ago featured a sickening sequence in which King Joffrey order one prostitution-a character the audience had grown to care about-to rape another…But while the scene may have been righteous in theory, in practice it was jarring, and slightly incoherent, particularly since it included the creamy nudity we’ve come to expect as a visual desert…But there is something troubling about this sea of C.G.I-prefect flesh, shaved and scentless and not especially medieval.  Leaving aside the fact that all TV shows are “scentless”, that is they are a visual and audio based medium not an olfactory one, what struck me was that last sentence where open sexuality is described as “not especially medieval.”  This is utter nonsense. To begin with the books the TV show was based on was heavily based in medieval history.  Most fantasy, especially stuff that comes from Tolkien, creates a world where technology might resemble the Middle Ages but human behavior seems to have for more in common with Victorian norms and mores.  Romance looks a lot like it does in Withering Heights with distant lovers constantly pining away for each other.  The world Robert Jordan created in his “The Wheel of Time” series has no swear words stronger than “blood and ashes” and no one is ever dirty.  George R.R. Martin, who wrote the books, deliberately set out to create a world that resembled life in the Middle Ages, and did a huge amount of historical research before he began writing.  Accordingly, the show maybe set in a fantasy realm but it does resemble the period in history it was based on, even in the portrayal of sexuality that seem to get Nussbam all in a tizzy. Life in the Middle Ages was nasty, brutish and filthy.  Violence and cruelty were regular parts of life and ever present, much as it is in the show.  Common games played in that era by villagers included one “sport” which consisted of a group of men chasing a pig around a fenced in area, such as a village square, armed with clubs beating the pig to death while spectators cheered them on.  Another one popular with young men in France was to take a cat and nail it to a tree through its abdomen.  Participants then take turns standing in front of the dying cat with their hands behind their back trying to beat the cat to death with their face and forehead.  You proved you manliness and skill by killing the cat without it managing to scratch out your eyeballs.  These types of cruelties seem shocking to our modern sensibilities but they were rather tame compared to what people did to other people in that age.  A common problem you would face as the host of banquet or feast was people getting drunk and stabbing each other to death with their daggers at the dinner table.  French nobles solved this problem in later centuries by introducing the practice of hosts providing silverware for attendees, as is the modern custom, with knives with rounded off tops to make it harder to stab someone to death.  This is why your table knives have rounded off tops.  Even this level of violence was relatively tame compared to life during war time, where most tactics involved slaughtering your opponent’s peasants and burning his lands to the ground to reduce his incomes and prove he was unable to defend his friends and subjects.  Raping and pillaging was seen as a normal and effective way to reward your men for the hard work of taking a town or city.  Witnessing a town being "put to the sword," that is the methodical killing of all of its residents, was probably a “jarring” experience as well.  All of this is recorded fact, but I’m sure if it was put into the show-especially the cat game-it would be dismissed as “unrealistic” or “outrageous” by people like Nussbaum.   Sexuality and gender relations were also very different from contemporary American customs.  Medieval life was a bawdy and social affair, every day-especially for the nobility-was never ending parade of social customs and rituals done with others.  Hypocrisy and contradiction was built into all forms of life.  The entire ideal of courtly love seems so foreign to how we live today it seems to have come from another civilization.  As Barbra Tuchman points out in her great book about the 1300’s A Distant Mirror: If tournaments were an acting-out of chivalry, courtly love was its dreamland.  Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on another man’s wife, since only such an illicit liaison could have no other aim but love alone…The fact that courtly love idealized guilty love added one more complication to the maze through which medieval people threaded their lives.  As formulate by chivalry, romance was picture as extra-marital because love was considered irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements…Guided by this theory, woman’s status improved less for her own sake than as the inspirer of male glory, a higher function than being merely a sexual object, a breeder of children, or a conveyor of property. In no way did people in this time act like well to do New York professionals without computers and wearing goofy tights and they were not “prudish” compared to modern American sexual customs.  In the crowded dense world of the medieval city numerous people would sleep in the same room.  A common practice would be for the master to sleep with his wife in a bed in a small room with his servants sleeping on the floor only a few feet away, obviously being personal witness to whatever would occur.  One English King fathered 16, yes 16, children out of wedlock, another age 29 married a six year old for a variety of political purposes.  He fell ill and died before the holy wedlock could be consummated.  A popular story of the 14th century began with the line “a Priest and his lady went off to bed.”  There are records of the building of a Cathedral in Italy that document contributions from all aspects of medieval society including wealthy merchants, local guilds and “Rafela, a prostitute.” This is how people lived for centuries, but put a scene like that in the show and no doubt critics would complain about its lack of “realism.”  But this is because of their ignorance of history, not poor production choices.  Their world was simply very different from our own.  Thus Joffrey’s cruelty might shock modern critics like Nussbaum but in no way was it “not medieval.”  Patriarchy and male superiority were hallmarks of medieval life, Joffrey as a king could do as he pleased and he never would have to worry about being arrest by the NYPD after being accused of sexual assault by a chambermaid, unlike modern political figures.  Indeed history records a French nobleman, Gilles de Rais, who acted like a modern serial killer before finally being caught and burned at the state.  The legend of Count Dracula is based on the myth of a Romanian noble “Vlad the Impailer” who was famous for impaling captured Turkish soldiers on large spikes.  These examples might be extreme but they give a picture of Joffrey’s behavior being quite possible. What we see here is an attempt to distill all of the ways that people can look at life through the narrow lenses of early 21st Century American rich people.  When something comes along and points out that in no way is our own culture and ways of living “normal” or “natural” some people seem inclined to push back.  But this is wrong.  While the world of Westeros may be a fictional creation of one man’s imagination, it’s a powerful reminder of the different possibilities for how people can live and interact.  And we shouldn’t dismiss it because the possibilities, both good and bad, for change in our own society can seem quite unsettling.

TV is Not Free to be You and Me

This spring there were two big breakout hits on HBO, “Girls” and season two of “Game of Thrones”.  While epic fantasy set in the mythical kingdom of Westeros makes for smashing TV in my opinion, it became clear that “Girls” is probably the more controversial of the two shows.  Because nobody really goes out and does actual “reporting” on what happens in our world these days on the internet, criticizing “Girls” became something of a cottage industry among bloggers and commentators.  It didn’t hurt that the show is set in New York (the most important place in the universe) about a group of highly dysfunctional 20’s something women and is filled with awkward/hilarious sex (the most important subject in the universe) scenes to boot.  This made for great commentary about all sorts of hot button subjects in American life; Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coats let loose a typical critique.

But reading these types of arguments I was struck by how narrow their subject matters of identity are.  Gender, race and sexuality seem to encapsulate the be all and end all of who a character—dare I say who we—can be.  This of course is a profoundly limited way to look and human beings and identity.  While Ta-Nehisi might be right that “Girls” doesn’t have a very racially diverse cast, I think that “Girls” brings an element of diversity that is often overlooked: it is filled with unhappy, miserable people.   Just think about it, with the exception of a few shows (“Curb Your Enthusiasm” comes to mind) TV is a non-stop parade of happy people with interesting lives, great careers and loads of material security.  The ignored group on TV doesn’t strike me as being an ethnic group at all, but people who say hate themselves, or have dead end jobs or are miserable every day.  I think this this is a big reason why a movie like “Office Space” or a show like “The Office” became such hits, finally something about people who are profoundly dissatisfied with life and their jobs was made.

When American TV tries to deal with unhappiness it is often forced to simply borrow from other countries.  Some of this probably has to do with economics; TV execs probably figure that no one wants to watch a show about some guy who is dissatisfied with his life but can’t make any meaningful changes to it either or someone who starts her morning acting like the protagonist from “A Single Man” (a really good, really sad movie by the way), staring at themselves in the mirror and saying “Just get through the god damn day.”  But I think it also has to do with the history of American entertainment, which largely comes of out things like vaudeville and 19^th century commercial theater like what’s shown in “Old Man River”.  Most American TV shows that deal with unhappiness are adaptations from other countries.  “The Office” or course comes from Britain and the only American show I’ve seen that puts unhappiness front and center, “In Treatment”, is a development of an Israeli show, with some sections of dialog simply translated from the original Hebrew script. 

When sadness, frustration or misery does get shown in American TV it often takes on an almost petty quality.  Izzie gets sad in “Grey’s Anatomy” because the chief of thoracic surgery yelled at her (fyi Izzie this is what chiefs of thoracic surgery at major American hospitals do, they are ornery leaders who yell at people who fuck up, what they aren’t are people who think their role in life is to make you feel better).  Izzie also has big existential conundrums, like which gorgeous highly successful doctor she will date, sure is hard being Izzie.  “Girls” breaks this mold by serving up miserable characters, going nowhere in life, in terrible relationships doing things like eating cupcakes for breakfast.  Now maybe adding an inter-racial lesbian couple to season 2 would diversify things some on the show, but if she was a professor of journalism at Columbia and she was high power executive in the high tech field living some 2 million dollar loft in so-ho while they both find life to be a fun and interesting adventure where everything works out in the end, I think something would be lost as well.  Personally I’m glad that one of the most ignored groups in all of American culture, unhappy people, finally gets some screen time.