Peak TV Is Brilliant To Watch. It's Also Incredibly Hard to Enjoy Or Escapism Vs Grim Reality: Why The Former Always Wins More Viewers Than The Latter

 

I loved every minute of Seth Rogen's The Studio which is a love letter to Hollywood, warts and all. And because Matt Remick is such a cinephile I have a pitch for a storyline next season in case he's interested.

I suspect, though I don't know for certain, that Matt Remick admires the works of the great Preston Sturges, arguably the greatest comic writer director during the 1930s and 1940s. So perhaps next time Matt needs to be persuaded to make a movie that reflects the need for commerce over art (as we saw when he had to be pushed into making the Kool-Aid movie) someone, perhaps, Patty could remind him of Sullivan's Travels.

In that iconic film Joel McRea's character is known for making slapstick comedies during the depression. He wants to make a serious film about the experience of the hobo O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Matt can go on a riff about the Coen Brothers film here if he chooses.) He disguises himself as a bum, travels the world of the downtrodden and depression and endures many misadventures. The climax comes when Sullivan finds himself in a camp where someone is showing a movie for the homeless and indigent  and for the first time he sees these people laughing and happy. They're watching his most recent film, the one he denounced as a meaningless comedy to studio heads at the start. Sullivan returns to Hollywood, realizing the best thing he can do if he wants to make the world a better place is to keep making his escapist, dare I say, brainless comedies.

It's striking how, in the 80 plus years since that movie was made, it is hailed by so many critics and filmmakers all of whom have devoted their lives to arguing that Hollywood's purpose is to make the same kind of serious views of the world. They've seen this film, hailed it as genius, but they've devoted their entire careers to basically ignoring the lessons of Sullivan. Perhaps that's because it would mean acknowledge the one thing no artist can ever do – that the bosses have a better idea on what the people want then they the artist.

So much of the inner conflict in Hollywood over the years has been the idea of escapism versus realism or Bambi Versus Godzilla as David Mamet once put it. Despite the fact that the audience has made it clear over and over in the last half century they prefer escapism, by and large those in cinema – or as this article will deal with, television – feel it is beneath them to produce that just because the viewers want it. They seem to take it as a personal offense that the viewers prefer formulaic shows to the kind of high art they want to make, though few will take it out on the public. (There are exceptions of course.) Personally I don't think anyone tunes into a television program of any kind wanting a reflection of the dark and horrible world they live in today. They can do that just as easily by turning on the news. I've always watched television to escape from the horrors of the world or the troubles that I've personally had to deal with: I want to forget the horrors around me, not be reminded of them.

And part of me wonders if the reason television is in such economic trouble today is at least in part because the vision of Peak TV worked too well. I'm not just talking about how cable and later streaming fragmenting the viewing audience to the point that so many of today's services are bordering on insolvency. I'm saying that maybe from the start all of the greatest TV showrunners were so focused on their vision – and so many critics on celebrated existence – that they chose to misread what the audience was watching instead. I was reminded of that yet again watching the Emmys this week and it's worth a brief reflection on it here.

During the first decade of Peak TV – roughly 1999-2010 – there were three truths. The most critically acclaimed shows were almost all on cable, they were all much darker then the kind of fare we had on network television and they all had far smaller audiences than what was on network TV at the time. I don't think this was a coincidence.

To be clear I overwhelmingly loved and enjoyed almost every drama and many of the comedies on HBO, Showtime, FX and AMC (the major producers of all of the Emmy nominated series during this era). But I was not blind to the fact that network TV was showing series that were just as acclaimed and on a weekly basis watched by anywhere from three to five times as many people as the average cable drama or comedy. I'll concede that there might have been fewer people who had subscriptions to cable in this period but make no mistake we have to consider that at least part of the reason they were not watched by the same number of people was because of how dark, depressing and hopeless they were even when they were simultaneously spectacularly acted, written and directed.

I spent the majority of that decade watching as many, if not more, of the best dramas and  comedies on network television during this period. And I can't deny the major differences in tone by all of them. The West Wing (which even in my 20s I knew was just wish fulfillment rather than even a possibility reality) argued throughout first Aaron Sorkin's and  then John Wells's tenure the idea of smart, intelligent people working through the political quagmire for the greater good. 24, for all the moral ambiguity of Jack Bauer and his actions, was surrounded by people at CTU who were working together for a common goal to save the country from the threat of terrorists. Lost was about survivors of a pane crash learning to work together on a mysterious island against increasingly bizarre circumstances. One of his quoted catchphrase was: 'Live together, die alone." Even House, which was as close to any network show getting an antihero at its center during this period, worked because he had a team of professionals who were working towards saving a patient's life, as much against their boss as medical odds.

And during this same period the procedural flourishes as never before as both Law & Order and CSI became part of the collective consciousness and created countless successful spin-off that lasted beyond the decade. Personally I got as much value out of many of these shows as I did The Shield or The Wire and based on the audience numbers during that decade, the overwhelming majority of viewers preferred them to.

If there's a common theme between all of these dramas it's the idea of community, working together and setting aside your petty grievances you have with your co-worker to work towards a higher purpose. This may very be an unrealistic portrayal of the world but that's no doubt why they are so successful and have such a part in the collective consciousness. (You could make the same argument for shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer as well, even though it never had anywhere near the same ratings as the other network dramas.) As much as Tony Soprano and Walter White may have an effect on the cultural consciousness (and I recognize and applaud every bit of it) the problem with being an antihero who does horrible things is that after a while it becomes increasingly challenging to watch them and it producing diminishing returns. Much as I loved watching Vic Mackey skirt justice or see how broken the system was in Baltimore, there was something pleasing about watching Jack McCoy argue for the integrity of the legal system against evil or Gil Grissom use technology to put bad guys away. I knew the world didn't work that way but it was nice to believe for an hour it did.

Truthfully even before 2016 the world of the antihero and the dark tone of cable had started to wear on me, though it had less to do with drama but rather comedy. Specifically the comedies on HBO which were all basically variations on rich, white people calling each other horrible names and moving upward with each new season. That was the common thread I saw between Girls, Silicon Valley, the few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm I could stomach and Veep. There was no community, camaraderie, just a bunch of spiteful profanity based insults that weren't even that funny.

I didn't get much rewards from the other critically and popularly acclaimed force on network television known as Shondaland, which essentially argued given enough wealth or power African-Americans and the LGBTQ+  community can and will be as despicable and redeemable as white men. All of these shows, as a reminder, were either greenlit or aired the majority of their episode before the 2016 election. I was rewarded by other dramas that walked more of a gray area – Homeland, The Americans and Better Call Saul rank among the greatest shows of the era – but it was rare to find shows that celebrated community. Perhaps that's why one of my greatest joys during the period leading up to 2016 was NBC's Parenthood a show that told a story about family sticking together especially through the hard times.

By and large audiences seem to approve of comedies that celebrating family no matter what form. I speak not just of Modern Family which I only enjoyed retroactively but ones that involved adopted families such as Glee and The Big Bang Theory. By this point I was keeping a top ten list which I published on an alternate site. During this era the number one or number two show on this list every year was The Good Wife, one of the few courtroom dramas still on the air and one of the hardest to define shows genre wise. It was one of the last high rated network dramas to be nominated for Best Drama.

It's worth noting that by and large during this period audiences continued to embrace escapism and that would often mean either period dramas or fantasy dramas. Both Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey became critical and audience hits during this period and while I never saw much in either, as a way to escape reality they always succeeded in that.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election I think the viewing public wanted more escapism then ever, considering what was unfolding in Washington on an hourly basis. What Hollywood by and large chose to give us was even darker and more unrelenting portrayals of the world such as Ozark, The Handmaid's Tale, Succession and Euphoria. All of these shows and these companions argued community and personal relationships were things of the past and that the bad guys had officially won. There were exceptions – Pose became a critical and audience hit – but that has been the rule from television ever since.

I had no use for any of these shows during this period. I needed to escape more than ever. Perhaps that's why I, like so many other people, found so much comfort in This Is Us. To be sure it was greenlit while Obama was still President but it never backed away from the idea of family and trying to stay optimistic in a bleak world, even during the horrors of Covid which it dealt with.

And I don't think it’s a coincidence the reboot essentially became a fixture on every service, whether it was network television, cable or streaming, during this period. Viewers needed to escape from the world during this period and the best place to do this was the past. God knows Westworld wasn't giving us cause for optimism. I took refuge in some of these reboots, most notably Twin Peaks: The Return. I needed something wondrous and strange and David Lynch was more than willing to give it. And I found it in some of the better comedies of this era, such as The Good Place or Insecure or a different kind of workplace drama The Bold Type. I also increasingly found refuge in shows that could take us into the surreal as Bill Hader did so well in Barry and Donald Glover did on a weekly basis in Atlanta.

I'm not committed to the idea of Peak TV being dead and buried the way so many critics have already written its obituary. What I do believe is that the mood for the kind of dark and unrelenting view of the world in television that was championed by it  essentially expired in the public consciousness after the last decade. Everything has a shelf life and the idea of antiheroes engaging in bad behavior week after week was always going to grow tiresome even among the viewers who loved it at its peak. (And as I've pointed out, that number was never as big as the majority of the shows I've listed.) I think collectively the audience is exhausted of having to root for bad guys in every show. We want to see community and we want to escape.

At the halfway point of the 2020s I find increasingly that the shows I consider classics are those that have embraced the standards of community and human connection. This has overwhelmingly been true in comedies. That's one of the reasons I'm grateful for Ted Lasso is because it seems to have inspired a series of comedies where were not watching bad people do bad things and laughing at them for failing but laughing with them as they try to work towards a common goal.

This is true of two series everyone agrees are the best of the decade that have finished their runs: Reservation Dogs and Somebody Somewhere. This trend has been seen in almost every comedy series nominated for Best Comedy that debuted in this decade so far: Abbott Elementary, Only Murders in the Building, Hacks and this year Shrinking and The Studio. And while we can argue about The Bear being a comedy or not, it is a story about family and the relationships you build in the workplace.

The dramas that I have been drawn to the most during this decade so far are a balance between this sense of community and escapism. Both can be found in procedurals such as Will Trent and Dark Winds and in a different and more satirical one in Slow Horses. Escapism I've found in the period dramas like The Gilded Age, the beautiful landscapes and ridiculous behavior we find at The White Lotus and the utter insanity that is Yellowjackets.

And on many levels I find it encouraging that the winner for Best Drama this week was The Pitt a show that is a throwback of great dramas I watched in all the best ways. It shows a group of underfunded workers at an inner ER working at a system where the patients never stopped, fighting a battle they can't win, and at the end of the day dealing with some of the worst trauma imaginable. And yet despite everything at the end of a horrible day that is sadly becoming more typical daily, they still find a way to come together as a community and to keep going. They know they won't get credit but they known too many people depend on them so they keep putting one foot in front of the other. There's something inspiring about that, something with a heart that's been missing from too many of the dramas and even some comedies I've watched over the years.

I don't deny the bleakness of the world today, nor do I pretend its not going to get worse before it gets better. And I don't deny that so many in Hollywood, whose politics have always been counter to what is going on in the country in the past decade, must find it hard not to let that bleakness affect their work. I ask them only to think not of themselves but the audiences that they've been trying to reach with their art. No doubt they want to escape from the real world as much, if not more, then they do.

I get the need why so many of you feel like Joel McRea at the start of Sullivan's Travels, that you have an obligation to hold a mirror up to the world so the audience can understand. But as Preston Sturges pointed out, sometimes the best thing you can do for those very people is not to show that world but help us escape from it. That's a good lesson for Matt Remick to learn and it would be good for all of us if you did too.