Criticizing Criticism Series: Yet Again The New York Times Won't Let Us Just Love TV Without Analyzing It To Death

 

As a TV critic I have enormous respect for the men and women who do this job either in professional capacity and an online one. I've expressed admiration for writers such as Alan Sepinwall and Nikki Stafford and I have huge respect for those such as Ben Travers for the Hollywood reporter as well as those who write for online publications. This is a tough job and you do it well.

What makes a good TV critic is someone who can manage to keep their analysis of a TV show basically on television itself. You reflect on what it was like in the era the show was made, you draw parallels to other television shows and given when the show was made you try to read outside factors as to how they might have affected things. At the same time the best are fans as much as they are critics and they can tell you why so many people keep going back to TV over the years.

This is one of the reasons I have far less patients for those non-critics, mostly academics, who will look at television shows – or honestly other works of art – and essentially try to read deeper context involving gender, racial, or socio-economic readings into them that almost certainly were never the intention of those who made the art in the first place. It is one thing to interpret something that was written or produced over a century ago and try to get into the creator's mind. But the closer we get to the current day – which is basically so much of television – that kind of reading becomes almost ridiculously highbrow. It takes a real special person to look at The X-Files with not only the glut of work written on it at the time but with nearly every creative force linked to the show still alive and available for question – and then say with complete sincerity: "This is what they were actually saying with their work."  Vince Gilligan is still alive; you could ask him if your interpretation is correct. That you think you know better than him what he was writing twenty years ago is arrogance that truly should be saved for academics.

That is a big reason when I looked at the Times earlier today and saw an article with the headline "These 4 shows heralded America's Fall" I thought to myself "Here we go again."

To be very clear ever since Trump was elected in 2016 everyone with a post-doctoral degree and his mother who also has a post-doctoral degree has been trying to explain how America could let this happen. The overwhelming number of these articles were written not so much with a sense of dismay but rather the attitude can be expressed with 'Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah!" Because America was of course paying the prices for institutional racism/late stage capitalism/ the patriarchal state/interleague sports/ etc. And of course every one of those writers saw it coming a mile away but only chose to tell us when it was too late to do anything.

One of the smaller subsets of this was trying to find a way to look at so much of popular culture to 'explain' why America would vote for Donald Trump. (That the electorate might find something appealing about his message is of course something the academic never considers because the American people are all ignorant idiots.) They looked at reality TV (of course) superhero movies, shows involving the war on Terror, The Walking Dead and quite a few other comedies as well. The contradiction that Hollywood is by far the most left-leaning industry in America (aside from academia, of course) was one these scholars never chose to look at closely even as they were doing a deep dive into Game of Thrones and comparing it to neoliberalism. (I'm guessing there's some paper on that out there by now.)

All of this demonstrates what I was consider the difference between a scientific theory and academic theory. In scientific theory the scientist find a hypothesis then perform experiments to either prove or disprove what you believed in once before. In academic theory – and while this is speculation I think there's a manifest truth – the academic starts with a basic conclusion and then finds evidence that proves their original point while jettisoning any inconvenient facts that might disprove it. And because academic theories never have to be put into a real world setting you don't ever to have to deal with the possibility that you are completely full of crap.

Which brings me to today's article. The article is written by a man named Stephen Marche. Like the overwhelming majority of people who write for art I'd never heard of him before today. Marche is a Canadian novelist, essayist and cultural commentator, who writes for Esquire. His biggest piece for the Times include 'The Closing of the Canadian Mind' and 'The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido'. Most recently he wrote: "America Came for Canada. We Said No." The titles alone tell you just where he stands on most issues. Oh and I didn't know this before but he also co-authored The Last Election with Andrew Yang, which is the definition of progressive fiction, someone actively rooting for America to collapse as well as The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.

This is a guy who to be very clear is  not only actively rooting for America to collapse but seems to be looking forward to it. You can tell that by the subtitle of his piece: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men 'predicted the societal fracture and decline of the United States.'

Now credit where it's due The Sopranos and The Wire are shows about the death of the American dream. Both David Simon and David Chase have been very expansive about that. But the rest of this article has the idea of calling them 'a televisual Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Critics, at the time of their release, saw them collectively as prestige antihero television. We can now see they all had the same antihero at their core: America itself."

Again "we". Last I checked there hasn't been some kind of meeting saying that all of these shows are about America's failures. Marche is saying his opinion and his alone counts for the masses, which is as arrogant as anything Trump says. And I have a feeling when he watches shows like this he's providing commentary akin to: "That's it! Show them how screwed America is! Die American Dream, Die!"

And his  'interpretations' of these four classic series are ridiculous to the point that, if you saw them anywhere but a left-wing journal, you would dismiss them as the ravings of a madman.. He argues that Breaking Bad is a portrait of a 'capitalist overlord run amok', an allegory about the material rise and spiritual decline of Silicon Valley. Like tech lords Walter White sells an addictive product, produced by a proprietary formula, along global  logistics networks, that generates a pile of cash so big the money is virtually meaningless…Seen from the vantage point of 2026, it's almost too on the nose that Mr. White joins forces with a crew of white-power supremacists in his relentless quest for impunity."

Wow. I mean, wow. So the show only worked because of Bryan Cranston. No mention of the brilliant direction and camera work, the cartel, Gus Fring, Mike, Saul Goodman. I have to say Vince Gilligan would be stunned to know he was actually writing about Silicon Valley this whole time. And as a side note you've essentially taken out everything that made this show enjoyable for viewers and basically turned into an academic thesis. Walter White himself would think you're a lousy chemistry teacher.

His reading of The Wire is better but it's worth noting that he focuses on 'journalism erodes, beset from within and without. The police devolve into a military force imposing its will with ever more desperate brutality against the most vulnerable citizens."

I'm sorry, did the Unit ever  kill a random black person when I wasn't watching the show? Was Marlo Stanfield and his crew not bad but misunderstood when they killed of 30 members of the drug war and left them in high-rises as tombs? Wasn't 'Hamerstdam' the most realistic portrayal of harm reduction both the good and the bad?" Where was the warning about the corrosive effects of hyper-capitalism that Marche is talking about in one of the poorest and most Democratic cities in America? Oh and that he wrote the entire essay and didn't mention Baltimore once, really makes me wonder if he watched the show,

Mad Men is, of course, a series that is a reflection of the Trump era, making America great again. It's about the darkness inside American life. 'The countercultural critique of advertising is that advertising turns values into slogans and emotions into products and once a feeling has been sold, it's gone. And Marche reads that one of the most polarizing endings in TV history is, of course "that the counterculture the authentic opposition to corporate consumption of human feelings – just wants to buy itself a sugary drink under the slogan "It's the real thing." Transaction is the only reality and everyone sells out."

Again that's not what actually happened on Mad Men and it ignores the very real rise of feminism in the characters of Peggy and Joan and it really does leave out the entire show. But why let reality get in the way of a good academic thesis?

When it comes to The Sopranos he's closest to reality about how we are willing to cheer a gangster on and that everyone in America is out for themselves. "It offered a critique of the emerging hypocrisies that justified self-interest above all." But even here he's making stretches comparing a minor character who appears in a single episode to a 1947 film critic who was responsible for a book showing the rise of the Weimar Republic as part of the soul at work.

The only way I  can read Marche's article is as the worst kind of  cherry picking. He had his pre-ordained conclusion in mind and he basically picked random quotes from episodes, melded them with his own interpretation of the show and then put them together with enough academic words that he sounded intellectual. But like every other academic piece on television – or honestly much art in general -  it uses a lot of intellectual words to basically say very little.

Marche also knows that his audience is also very left-leaning which means by definition they have a bias towards believing the absolute worst about American values, capitalism and democracy. And by framing his judgments in such a way, as always, the burden is on those who disagree to prove a negative. None of this is remotely the kind of subjects that Vince Gilligan, Matthew Weiner, David Simon and David Chase and his writers had in mind when they were writing these incredible TV shows and I suspect when they read this article they will be astonished about how loosely their work has been interpreted by yet another highbrow academic. Considering that in quite a few of these shows they express great disdain for intellectual and how little use they have in the real world I suspect they'd actually be amused – Simon in particular might actually think "At least he didn't bring up the Dickensian aspects of my show."

I loathe articles like these for two big reasons. First as someone who has respect for academics and who can see them occasionally do good things with television analysis when they choose to see the kind of writing involving cherry picking and ten dollar words that would frankly be lacking in a college thesis on the subject, much less a supposed academic, Marche's article triggers all the worst impulses me.

The second is as a TV critic and fan because it is yet another horrible example of a critic taking several shows that I was a huge fan of that I've watched multiple times and that I have celebrated due to their multitude of great things – acting, writing, directing, all the technical aspects – and essentially turning it into a self-serving, presentist lecture. It's yet another academic telling me we can't have nice things or if we have them, they must be turned into either homework or spinach. Furthermore it's another example of conservative derangement syndrome making connections to things that just aren't there – Elon Musk to Walter White? Really? – and knowing that because your article is written in The Times it will be taken seriously.

It makes what is, by any standard, already a difficult job for people like me all the harder. The main thesis of this series has always been that the masses basically view all critics as highbrow intellectual snobs who look down on the average viewer. Pieces like this basically confirm all the worst things about people like me. In my pieces I've always made it clear that my opinions are just that – my opinions – and I never try to substitute my judgment for the viewers. I think all art is subjective and what I take away from it is different than from what others will. Writers like Marche make the blanket assumption that what they take away from something is the only thing anybody should take away from it – and that's the definition of entitlement.

Marche, like every other academic, thinks that it is the job of entertainment not to provide an escape from the world around us but to hold a mirror up to it, not to give us respite from the horrors around us but to tell us just how horrible things are and how horrible they always will be. Given just how lousy the last decade in particular has been for so many people there's an argument that what the world needs is escapism and a way to find enjoyment. Marche, like his brethren, want their world to see the glass always half-empty, to always be in  sackcloth and ashes. I would feel pity for him were he not making such a good living by arguing how horrible the world is. In his own way he's capitalizing off the misery of the masses just like the right does.

So to end this essay I'm going to take a page out of Marche's own book and make an analysis of why he was really drawn to these shows – an analysis I think it's more pertinent – and that he left out.

All four of these series have a white man at their center who believes either by education or his position that he is superior to everyone, his colleagues, his friends, even his family. It is clear to many of those who encounter them just how toxic their personalities are and they seem to do much of what they do just to prove that they're smarter then everyone around them. All of them judge everyone by standards that they can never make and more often then not when they go into 'the real world' they quickly learn how little their skills apply when they leave the comfort of their safe spaces.

That describes the average academic writer to a tee just as much as it does all of these leads. Only I should be clear it's a lot more fun to watch Don Draper or Jimmy McNulty then it is to read the turgid prose of someone like Marche analyze what they are doing.

So in conclusion while Marche will claim he's writing to explain a deeper thesis or to provide a larger narrative about America, in our heart people like me know the real reason he wrote this essay:

I did it for me. I was good at it. It made me feel alive.

Yeah deconstruction, bitch!