an ode to middlebrow TV and em-dashes

When someone asks if a TV show is "good", it's actually a very complicated question. Much more so than if a movie is good. TV shows are tricky. They're long. They're in your life for years, or for a weekend in a binge. They're not just a long movie, they have their own structure, their own tropes. You have to want to hang out with their characters. They have to build episodic as well as big picture stories. And, yes, they are longer so they have more room to slip up, for you to need to explain "I thought it was good, though in season three it got slow," or even, "there's some lines in season one that don't hold up,” and more room for something meaningful to you to happen in passing one episode, 45 episodes in. When I was 17 I wanted to be a screenwriter for TV, mostly because I'd just finished the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and cried so hard that I thought "I want to be so powerful I can make a stranger sob about a guy I made up."

It is also the cross to bear of those of us who can enjoy bad things but recognize good things that when a not-good show has good elements, we have no one to talk to about them, because those with good taste are watching good shows, and those watching bad shows can't appreciate the transcendent parts. 

All of which to say, I have watched a lot of TV, much of it bad, some of it good, but most of it a mixed bag that I never have time to get into when someone asks. Below is a grab bag of assessments of TV I have watched or rewatched recently.

Suits:

Suits is a perfectly fine show, elevated by moments of sublimity. 

Those moments are largely — and I think this even outside of my own subjectivity to romance approached on the diagonal, and a square face and fond eyes — in the acting of Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter, an immensely arrogant man that I should hate. I have actually met Gabriel Macht in person and he does not have the charisma of this character (no shade to him, a perfectly polite and scruffily handsome father of two), so I believe this to be Acting.

The production values of the show are respectable in that mid-2000s USA show way, Gina Torres is a treasure, someone should have thought sooner to have Gina Torres and DB Woodside kiss, there is some camaraderie and the occasional fun hijinks. But the real centerpiece of the show is the love — throughout the show it moves back and forth on the spectrum from platonic to romantic, but it's always love — between Harvey and his girl Friday assistant, Donna. 

Once, when we were watching Paper Moon, Daniel said that he loves in movies when people say "I love you," without saying "I love you," and I agreed vehemently. Harvey and Donna are the epitome of this, constantly making gestures — and even grand declarations — while rarely saying the words. It comes down to this: Donna has left Harvey's office, for reasons that are complicated, and he's been getting by but it's clear he's lost a metaphorical limb. Then she comes to his apartment and says-without-saying that she'll return to the firm, and we get this moment (:31) which absolutely destroys me and while I'm a romantic fool I also think it's a truly lovely bit of acting.

The Good Wife:

The Good Wife is largely an Actually Pretty Good show; it has all the elements of a procedural but the weekly cases are interesting, the production values are markedly CBS but not distractingly so, the actors are good and also hot but in interesting ways, it attempts to engage with race in Chicago in the legal system in ways that are...eesh but could have been eesher given the time period and creators.

Here, again, a central romance slays me -- and I'm not alone. Once I heard Sarah scream from the living room, so loud and hysterical I thought minimum it was a rat maximum it was a burglar, but when I came out she just had finally gotten to the episode where Will and Alicia get a hotel room.

However, the piece that stands out to me here is Julianna Marguiles' performance as Alicia. She imbues the character with this incredible — stillness. The show begins as her public-figure husband resigns and goes to prison due to a scandal. And she really makes you feel that the experience of this has at once given her a power and caused her to live a little outside her own life, makes you wonder whether the stillness is strength, or numbness. Julianna Marguiles is of course very beautiful — if demonstrably a not very good person — more now than when she was younger, and has this amazing sort of delicate bear-like expressive face, with one tiny muscle quirk she conveys five emotions at once.

Chris Noth is also impeccably cast as the charismatic asshole politician husband and Josh Charles as the boyish old flame who is also kind of a dick but talks all soft and mumbly just to you. I had to stop rewatching this show because I was staying up too late to watch more episodes and I'm an adult with a job and responsibilities. 

Lucifer:

Lucifer is a profoundly embarrassing show to be watching, so what a relief that I am not watching it, less of a relief that that's because I finished all six seasons. Lucifer is a genuinely cheesy, not good show that strives at these real moments of insight, pathos, comedy, philosophy. It gets away with it, almost, sometimes, through charisma and chemistry and true camp which, and this is the part of Susan's list that everyone always forgets, is not self aware but has to be striving for something big but miss the mark spectacularly.

How I Met Your Mother:

I used to, I was reminded recently, think this show was good (in my defense I was 18, and still very into Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Allyson Hannigan loyalty)). I occasionally rewatch it because it is, simply, there. And it is, like so many other sitcoms no one I respect would ever say were Good, a strange alchemy of likeable actors having fun hanging out with each other and, I'm so sorry, a few actually funny jokes (including a solid who's on first pastiche), and, I'm even sorrier, some actual moments of pathos. Neil Patrick Harris, for all he is now correctly assigned cringe, achieves some world-class fond gazing at Robin and, later, at his baby daughter. Those people are all believably codependent friends who spend too much time together (the dream), and it makes you really really really wish they had cut even one half of the fat jokes and date-rapey bits so that you could just uncomplicatedly enjoy a fun little white people in the city that is an LA backlot friendship show.

Anyways I also admire Cobie Smulders' constant willingness to do bits that make her genuinely offputting/not hot.

Gilmore Girls:

I am SO sorry but every time I watch Gilmore Girls I like it less. (But I don't stop watching it, so)

House:

House, on the other hand, I like more now. It's fun, and silly, and mean. Robert Sean Leonard has a face I have loved to watch since Much Ado About Nothing, and I love his strange little antagonistic romantic dynamic with House. I love that in theory House gets away with his bullshit because he's a good doctor, but really it's because it's fun for everyone else — Cuddy and Wilson and Cameron and Foreman, they all are having fun I'm sorry. Life is too long and too short to be bored. This show is fun and well acted and can be just as easily clicked off after half an episode as after five — a perfect thing to be rewatching. I've said it before and I'll say it again, they should stop trying to get House to stop doing drugs, he's fine. I'm not an 'I can fix him' girlie I'm a 'leave him broken we're having fun' girlie.

Criminal Minds:

Criminal Minds is not a rewatch, I am still watching it for the first time, due to it being seven million episodes on the theme 'men can't handle a single bad event happening near them without becoming a serial killer.' Like most procedurals, or shows in general, its fun is in its main characters. My besties, the members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, who fly around the country on their private jet solving crimes and having trauma. It is, of course, copaganda. Strangely, it very frequently acknowledges that the killer is likely a former cop or military member, and it has more than one episode about a corrupt police department, but of course these are always superseded by our heroes, our FBI friends JJ and Spencer and Derek who have integrity and need to weed out the Bad Apples who are not symptoms of a larger problem but small glitches we have to take with the system. The first two seasons have Mandy Patinkin and that's enough, quite frankly. I enjoy this show, but only because I watch it on my computer and skip through all the scenes that actually show the torture and murder. Why would I want to watch that???? Tell me what happened and solve it, I'll take your word for it. Under this system, each episode is only like 25 minutes for me.

Veronica Mars:

Veronica Mars was good when it came out and it's good now. Good not perfect, but good. It influenced me in more ways than I will probably ever know, coming into my life at a time (10th grade) when I needed a strong female role model and an image of how a Cool Teenager Could Be. (Tragic to imagine that…what…Euphoria fills that role now?) I first got online to use the Television Without Pity (RIP) forum where people found where you could buy clothes from the show (ty for my men's American Eagle satchel that was impractical and uncomfortable and I carried for years). My heart was broken by the show over and over again, and just when I thought I was immune, that 4th season came out five years ago and ***** **** and I lost my mind and Rob Thomas and I are still not cool. I rewatched seasons one and two recently and they made my chest hurt once more, and sometimes I hear a song from the soundtrack and have to sit down for a moment. I hate feeling things.

The West Wing:

There are marriages and divorces less complicated than my relationship with this goddamn show. I hate it. It formed me. It's incredible. It destroyed American politics in a very real way. It's funny and romantic and devastating. It's the cringiest thing I've ever seen. Aaron Sorkin should be brought up on charges. I don't even know which ones. It showed me the first glimpse of the career I now have. The camaraderie. The absolutely deranged sexism. The perfect cast. The way imagining myself in it got me through some of my hardest days in DC. The way imagining themselves in it got some of the absolutely worst people into DC. The casual racism, accurate to 90s Democratic policy. But also when the Black congressman says to Leo “don’t try to tell me how to be a leader in the Black community you look like an idiot.” The deeply moving unfathomably intimiate decades-long friendships of these men and women (mostly men). How fucked up it is to assume that the best way to run a country is all your old (mostly men) friends. When men think they're a Josh Lyman it's a red flag but I'm a Sam Seaborn. I don't actually think writing the State of the Union would be that hard but it would be super annoying. I am never not lowkey watching this show.

Sex and the City:

Ditto Sex and the City. It's the show I pop on while I put on makeup. It is better than many give it credit for. It feels lived in, a hard thing to accomplish, achieved I think through good acting, 90s production values, and location shooting. Carrie has all the character flaws everyone says, it has the lack of diversity that everyone says, its takes on gay and trans (and we won't even talk about bi) people are extremely mmmmmmmmmmmmmm dated. But it remains a comforting chronicle of the neuroses that develop over the decades if you continue to date as a straight woman. And, I will go to my grave arguing that to this day to show women in their 30s being hot and stupid and annoying and fun and slutty and immature is, if not revolutionary, then revelatory. You can’t be what you can’t see, etc. And to show women with Carrie's hair texture is nearly unheard of. It remains close to my heart. We shan't speak of the remake, a show I will never rewatch but am legally required to keep watching til I die or it does.

Lovesick:

I'm going to go actually good, if light, show about three English people in Scotland doing love and friendship and roommates and stuff. Antonia Thomas, the main woman, is so beautiful. Whenever I'm like oh shoot what should I watch while I eat this toast or whatever, Lovesick is a safe bet and, unlike many other shows, makes me feel better and softer and tenderer about the ideas of vulnerability and love. I actually don't get why this didn't blow up more.

Best,

L