I have a close friend who’s a doctor.
In one of my conversation with her and some other friends she made it very clear
why the ‘Love’s Labor Lost’ – an episode
of ER ranked by many critics as one of the greatest episodes of television
ever made – is a hack job from a professional perspective. She makes it clear
that every step of the process where things go wrong would never happen in a
professional medical environment. While
I will admit I think there is a certain degree of nitpicking here, I can understand
and even respect why a medical professional would take offense at this portrayal
of her profession on one of the greatest series of all time.
I am also aware that showrunners of
great shows do not have to like or even respect each other’s work. In Difficult
Men author Brett Martin expressed the mutual disrespect that Shawn Ryan and
David Simon had for each other’s groundbreaking series The Shield and The
Wire. Ryan argues that The Wire moved
too slowly to get started, which to be fair is a problem many critics of
television had when they first saw it. Simon’s critics are far more problematic
as he argues that the cops behavior towards their superiors, their informants
and actually killing a cop, were unrealistic. (Considering some of the details
of corruption that have come to light about the Baltimore PD during the era
Simon was following the squad as well as having technical advisers, there is a
bitter irony to Simon’s criticism.) I personally thought both series were
masterpieces, but I could see the logic that some fans might have: The Wire´s
fans thought The Shield was unrealistic; fans of The Shield thought
The Wire was boring and slow-moving.
What I find far harder to accept is
when a certain group attacks a series for reasons of representation that would have
no logical place in the context of the series or when a successful show-runner chooses
to deliberately critics a less successful for one out of their own
grievances. I have seen several examples
of this over the years but there are two critical ones that I wish to discuss
because they lay bare the idea of outrage as criticism as well as division in
the pop culture wars.
In 2014 Transparent became
Amazon’s first smash success as a streaming service. I vividly remember how immense
the raves and reception were when it debuted in the fall of 2014. It was the
first streaming series of any kind to win a Golden Globes for Best Musical or
Comedy, the first of three that Amazon would win over four years for three
different shows. Jeffrey Tambor would win dozen of accolades for his work,
including two Emmys for Best Actors in a Comedy, a Golden Globe, a SAG award
and two Critics Choice awards. During its peak – from 2015 to 2017 – the series
would be nominated for 28 Emmys and win eight.
It would be nominated for Best
Comedy in 2015 and 2016 by the Emmys. Joey Soloway, the showrunner won two Emmys
for Best Directing.
These awards were completely
merited. I watched the first three seasons of Transparent and I thought,
by and large, all of them were masterpieces. Not merely because of the
performance of Tambor, but the entire cast. Judith Light, Gaby Hoffman and Jay
Duplass did some of their best work on the medium and Kathryn Hahn should have
won an Emmy for her extraordinary performance as a rabbit who has a complicated
relationship with the Pfefferman family. Soloway used the story of Maura, a man
who has decided in his sixties to begin to transition into becoming a woman,
into a telling a story about Judaism, sexuality, family dynamics and the mess of America. There’s an argument that Transparent was
one of the great shows of the 2010s and certainly one of the most important. I
listed the third season premiere ‘Elizah’ as one of the 50 greatest episodes of
the 21st century in 2019 and I stand by that decision.
Then around Season 4, the series began
to fall apart. A large part of the problem was that stories about how
problematic a personality Tambor was behind the scenes became public knowledge. Amazon ended up cancelling the series
abruptly but a Musical finale ended up being filmed – without Tambor. But even
before the controversy around Tambor began to arise, certain voices among the transgender community
began to argue against Transparent being an accurate representation of
the struggle because Maura was being played by a cisgender actor and not a
transgender one.
This criticism never made any
sense. As Soloway said during the making
of the series and in numerous award acceptance speeches, Transparent was
loosely based on her father’s coming out as trans three years before the series
was released. And because the series was
about Maura transitioning to becoming a woman, it would have been logical to
have Maura played by a transgender performer at the start of the series. (It is
conceivable that Soloway might have gotten to that point at the show’s conclusion,
but it never got that far.)
Also, it’s worth remembering that
in order for Soloway to get the story made, she had to go not to a cable network
or even Netflix but Amazon, a streaming service that at that point had no
reputation as one of quality and therefore nothing to lose. I imagine that it
was hard enough to get the series produced even with a cisgender as the
lead character: had she done what the trans community wanted of her, Transparent
might very well never have gotten made at all. And this was not a position that the LGBTQ
community had at the time: many of the awards the show ended up winning were
from organizations like GLAAD Media, which named it the show of the year four
years running.
But to a certain branch of the
transgender community, that was irrelevant. And it plays to a larger discussion
that is always held among certain minority groups when it comes to almost any
show that it is not portrayed in a certain way. I remember reading a long article
criticized Orange is the New Black because it portrayed Uzo Aduba’s
landmark character of ‘Crazy Eyes’ in an offensive manner to ‘mentally unwell people.” This year I read an article on Westworld which
argued that it was secretly a white supremacist show because the fourth season
told the story of a slave revolt where the slaves led an uprising and destroyed
their masters. (I’ll let you fans of the series take that one apart.) And taking
the cake was a critique of this year’s Academy Awards where a female critic
decided that Jamie Lee Curtis’ Best Supporting Actress win was proof the Oscars
were homophobic and that by given All Quiet on the Western Front Best
International Film, they were celebrating Nazism. (If you can make sense out of
this, you’re smarter than me.) I honestly expect in a few years people will
start criticizing Pose for being homophobic because none of the
characters identified as non-binary and why is white showrunner telling a story
about African-Americans in the first place?
This is the fundamental market
behind the outrage-industrial complex that masquerades a criticism. No story
can ever be told without outraging some major group; no series that we ever
loved when we were younger can be considered quality because it violated some
construct that was only consider reasonable today or because the showrunners
were monsters. It is outrage marketing disguised as virtue-signaling. And while
this is bad enough when it is held within the internet, it is worse when the
showrunners decided to pile on as is in the next case I will discuss which
involves a showrunner critiquing another show-runner.
I can’t remember exactly when this
criticism took place: I am assuming based on the timing that it was some time
in the summer of 2012. I do know that it involved an interview of Shonda
Rhimes, who readers of this blog are well aware I do not think highly of.
At the time Rhimes dominance of ABC
was not yet in full bloom. Grey’s Anatomy was in the midst of its eighth
season but people were beginning to wonder how much longer it could keep going.
Private Practice, the spin-off of the series she had created was in what
was going to be its final season, and it had never been regarded particularly highly
by even the most devout fans. Scandal had debuted that spring, but it
had not been a sensation; in fact, it had barely been earned a second season renewal.
In 2011, she’d had another series called On The Map and it had been cancelled
after only ten episodes. Rhimes was successful, but Shondaland was not an
institution.
Around that time, Amy Sherman-Palladino
had launched her first major television series since the disastrous The Return
of Jezebel James in 2008. Sherman-Palladino, as many of you are very aware
had been the creator of one of the best series of the 2000s Gilmore Girls. She
had been working in television a decade longer than Rhimes, writing on the classic Roseanne as well
as working on several failed series and the moderately successful Veronica’s
Closet before she was fired in 1999. Bunheads, a superb comedy-drama
on what was then known as ABC Family, starred Sutton Foster as a chorus girl
who impulsively marries a man and drives with cross country to a New England
town to meet his mother and eventually helps her run her ballet troupe.
Somehow in this interview the
subject of Bunheads came up, and in one of those casual comments that
Rhimes sometimes makes, she asked why Sherman-Palladino didn’t hire any
African-Americans in her cast.
Now I don’t pretend for a moment to
be unbiased into which of these showrunners works I like more. I have always
loved every single one of Sherman-Palladino’s series. I loved Gilmore Girls,
part of me is still bitter Bunheads was cancelled even after a
decade, and I absolutely was delighted when she managed to finally get the
accolades and awards she was long overdue for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in
2017. (I have not yet watched the last
two seasons of the series, but that is strictly because I have yet to fine the
time. One day I will.) I have never liked Rhimes’ series and while I grant you
they may not be set in the same worlds strictly, they’re not even in the same
universe.
The consistency in a Rhimes’ series
is conflict. There are no close friendships, marriages are merely passing
fancies (how many times have the characters on Grey’s Anatomy married,
divorced, then remarried) and everyone is always struggling for an advantage to
destroy someone else. With the sole exception of Private Practice, I’ve
never seen a Rhimes’ show with a single character that is likable or even tolerable.
They’re nasty, unpleasant, and you wouldn’t want to ride in an elevator with
one, much less have them help you in a crisis.
By contrast, there are few
unpleasant characters in any Sherman-Palladino series, and even if they’re not
likeable, they are at the very least annoying in a humorous way. Perhaps the
best example of this are the characters that Liza Weill, who has had roles on
every series that both women have created, plays on each series. In her largest
role on How To Get Away With Murder, Weill played Laurel, Annalyse
Keating’s acolyte and occasional bedmate, who was ruthless and vindictive and
willing to kill someone she suspected might have done damage to Annalyse down
the line. In the first season finale of Murder, she ended up killing an
innocent woman because she blamed her for ruining Annalyse’s life.
By contrast, as Paris Gellar on Gilmore
Girls, Weil’s character was always trying to move forward, always competing
for an advantage, always destroying in order to get what she wanted. The difference
was critical: no one took Paris Gellar’s ranting seriously and at the end of
the day, she really was a good and loyal friend to Rory, despite – maybe even
because – they were always competing for everything. Paris was as prickly as
Laurel was, but you always knew she was human. I never sensed any humanity in
her work as Laurel.
And it’s worth also noting the
difference between the behavior on-set. Sherman-Palladino has been a successful
showrunner, writer and director at a level that Rhimes rarely is. She had
worked with dozen of actors over three major series, many of whom are always
willing to work with her over and over again just to be part of her projects.
In more than two decades, I have never heard of a single bad work-experience
from any of the actors or actresses who worked for her. The only person to ever
get fired from a Sherman-Palladino series was… Sherman-Palladino. She and her husband
were fired from Gilmore Girls after the sixth seasons for reasons that
to this day have never been clear.
Compare to that to the constant
changeover of actors and actresses over the decades on Gilmore Girls alone.
Hell, in a recent podcast involving Katherine Heigl and Ellen Pompeo this week,
we actually got confirmation of the kind of boss Rhimes could be. On the fifth season of the show, Izzie
Stevens had one of the worst arcs in television n history when she began to
hallucinate her dead lover Denny and not only see him but -have sex with him. This storyline may have a resolution that was
appropriate but when Heigl was asked by Rhimes to include it for Emmy selection
that year, she refused point blank. Heigl ended up leaving the series abruptly
the following season, and very quickly developed a reputation as ‘difficult’; her
once promising film and television career never developed. That season alone
showed a series of inexplicable firings that never made much sense: T.R.
Knight, whose relationship with Rhimes was problematic over the years of the
show, was abruptly killed off at the end of that season and Brooke Smith, who
had been hired as a quasi-replacement for Isaiah Washington the year before, resigned
before the season was half-over with no explanation either by the actress or for
her character.
On top of all of this, Rhimes was
still the more successful showrunner in 2012, far more than Sherman-Palladino.
So her decision to fundamentally punch down was something I always considered
contemptible. It had nothing to do with the quality of Bunheads or the acting;
it was a petty concern that Sherman-Palladino nevertheless felt compelled to
apologize for.
You might well have noticed that
all three of the showrunners I have mentioned in this series are female. This
is deliberate. I could have used this argument just as easy for any of the many
series that are run by men and have had examples of complaints about the
problems of female or the lack of minority characters on the series.
I’ve done so for a deliberate
reason. We keep hearing over and over in recent years that one of the major
problems that we are having in Hollywood is that the toxic environments behind
so many of our favorite shows are due to the fact that so many of them are run
by ‘bad men and the culture’ they leave behind. A recent book called ‘Burn It
Down’ will soon be released making this very argument.
This is an easy argument to make.
It’s simple and feeds into a narrative that is believable. The problem is, it’s
not true.
We know that it is hard for women
to rise in the television industry, so we want to believe that fundamentally
they are incapable of the same flaws that their male counterparts are accused
of. This is just not the case. It is very possible that even a showrunner as
enlightened as Jill Soloway can be attacked for the illusion of not being
inclusive. It is possible for a showrunner considered as much an ally as Shonda
Rhimes is being the kind of boss who many actors would prefer not to work with
and who can be vindictive towards certain of her performers. And in an era where
women are supposed to help each other up, it is very possible for a powerful women
to attack another powerful one. As I have indicated in previous articles on
this blog, we can also not deny that certain female showrunners – Frankie Shaw
the most prominent – can be guilty of the same kind of sexual dehumanization we
have accused those such as Joss Whedon of.
It is not easy to accept this fact,
particularly considering how much of a loss it might be considered for the
industry if powerful females are guilty of the same behavior we regard the sole
culpability of ‘Bad Men’. But as a society we must. If equality is to count for
anything in our culture, we must consider that there can be Difficult Women as
much as there are Difficult Men or Bad Women as much Bad Men. Otherwise any real attempt for change is
pointless and just another way to provoke outrage. We can’t just Burn It Down.
We have to build something in its place.
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