Imagine it’s a Sunday evening, and you and your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend are settling in to binge-watch one of the big TV shows you’ve been missing. You fire up the Netflix or Amazon Prime account and peruse your options–
A high school teacher turned crystal meth dealer (Breaking Bad)
A contemporary American politician in the vein of Richard III (House of Cards)
A mesmerizing nihilist (True Detective)
A zombie apocalypse (The Walking Dead)
Wait a minute. Anybody sense something rather odd in this line-up?
Drama has always dealt with bad guys and misfits, but this group is distinguished by the fact that the bad guys and misfits seem to be the ones we’re rooting for. We like watching Bryan Cranston’s Walter White throw his middle-class morality away. We like watching the hijinks of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood, even though Underwood never gets the comeuppance that Richard III got. And who isn’t captivated watching Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle deconstruct, Nietzsche-style, the morality of contemporary bourgeois American life?
Even the zombies, though perhaps not the heroes of the piece, exercise a rather creepy fascination over us. We are both repulsed—and attracted.
Isn’t all this odd?
And it’s especially odd when you consider that we in the West, and especially in the U.S., live in what is purportedly the most progressive, self-aware, scientifically and technologically advanced age in history. Human reason has exposed the myths of religion and philosophy. Nature has been disenchanted. The world of politics, while always an arena of dysfunction, nonetheless promises more material good to more people than ever. One’s best life is available, if not right now, then as a result of a little risk and hard work. Even those living in the lower echelons of our economy enjoy luxuries undreamt of by the hedonists of former times.
But if this is all true, then why, in our stories, and not just on television, are we so interested in characters going off the reservation?
A. In watching TV or going to the movies all we want to do is escape for awhile. It’s fun to watch characters doing things we would never do.
B. This is not a representative sample of what’s on offer, even on TV. What about Sleepy Hollow? Downton Abbey? Call the Midwife? Foyle’s War? The characters in these dramas are more traditionally heroic, are they not?
C. The shows mentioned are written and produced by liberal Hollywood elites who delight in preening themselves as disruptors of the moral status quo. Perhaps feeling guilty for the kind of money they make, they make “edgy” entertainment to prove that they’re still anti-establishment figures.
D. Our fascination with such shows is a symptom of a deep malaise. While it’s true that we enjoy a remarkable degree of material prosperity in our culture, at the same time we realize, if only half-consciously, that we are spiritually bereft. Something has gone deeply wrong, we just know it, although we can’t quite put our finger on it. The characters in the TV shows mentioned compel us because their decisions expose the fact that in the contemporary world we’re playing tennis, as it were, without a net.
Circle the answer that best represents your view.
The image above is reproduced courtesy of HBO Home Entertainment under the following license.
