Wow! Stay tuned for more exciting comment threads on Boing Boing where we discover some people didn’t enjoy popular TV shows, while other people did enjoy them!
Reminds me of this…
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I saw bits and pieces of the series, and I recognise that it was very well made, but the pilot is the only episode I’ve seen in its entirety.
However, I’m an ex-methhead with a doctorate in psychopharmacology. It was just a bit too close to home for it to work as entertainment for me.
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The Expanse, The Guild, Weeds, Dexter…that’s about it.
I was a fan of Burn Notice as well, but that took a few episodes to hit its stride.
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It is selfish because he has a family to take care of. All he had to do was take the money and things would be fine but he had to put his pride above his family.
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Yes they’re pretty different but I think it’s obvious they share the same DNA. The style and pacing and the way they build tension are quite similar. Which makes sense if most of the crew came from BB.
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Same here. Similar to Dexter, when he switched from getting the bad guys the cops couldn’t get to actively obstructing the cops from getting the psycho serial killer because he (Dexter) needed to be the one to get him. Switched the whole original premise of the character and why I could relate to him.
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I guess it’s a matter of taste. Once I realised that this desperate put-upon chemistry teacher with cancer was in fact a passive-aggressive raging selfish arsehole I wanted to see what further disastrous decisions it would drive him to and get more backstory about what made him a raging selfish arsehole. The show delivered for me on both counts.
For example, it turns out that the former partner who “ripped him off” actually didn’t rip Walt off. Walt did an ego-driven ragequit from the startup and demanded the then-paltry amount the stock was worth to end his partnership.
Choices:
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Accept money for your cancer treatment from the former partner you walked out on before the company became valuable that’s offered in part as consideration of your work for the company and in part because it’s the decent thing to do. Never see the partner again.
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Become a drug kingpin, endangering oneself, one’s family, and one’s community because of your ego.
By the way, toxic masculinity is a major theme in Breaking Bad.
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yeah, i completely missed that show. i wonder if it would work for me now or not.
yikes. congratulations on getting away from that life… i can’t even imagine what you went through. i can see how it wouldn’t be your cup of java, in that case.
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I worry about a show that goes too long between the making the arsehole the hero (which arseholes love!) and the resolving of the just deserts (which seems to happen more on television then IRL).
It does attract a certain fan base, the shows with all too human unheroes. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Apprentice
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It was the only time in my life when I wasn’t chronically lonely and miserable, actually.
Not sustainable, though [1]. And there was plenty of drama and damage along the way; not everyone I knew made it through alive.
[1] At the peak of it, I dropped a third of my body weight in six months (got down to about 45kg). Regularly hitting 100+ hours of continuous sleep deprivation ain’t too healthy, either.
I sleepwalked through a few seasons, somehow, and then it suddenly got good. I don’t know what changed, but I’m glad I stuck with it.
They bring him to the edge of total and well-deserved ruin a few times in the series. In those cases, he squeaks out of disaster by not being an arsehole (or at least not posturing like one).
As for just deserts, it’s left vague in both Sopranos and Mad Men if the arsehole anti-heroes get them in the end. Tony might very well finish his meal with his family and continue his life of crime, and Don might go on to further fame by cynically exploiting the counterculture. Alternately, that blackout ending of the Sopranos might be Tony taking a hit, and Don might not be the literal auteur of the Coke commercial and might end up worse for running away.
In contrast, The Apprentice, like most reality TV, actively and unambiguously encourages and rewards arseholes. Since we live in a broken society that does plenty of that already I have no interested in watching the semi-scripted versions on TV.
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Sounds like those other 3 shows make arseholes easier to identify with and offer compassion to, IRL, and the arsehole would have to watch to the end to get the point or be left with such existential questions. It’s not so much that the shows embolden arseholes, it’s that the shows encourages their enabling. So many characters -reacting- to the arsehole, such power! The Apprentice is scripted too, and has not had a great impact on management IRL.
It’s my pet theory on how we wound up with the President we deserve: our arsehole tolerance has been moved, significantly, by the culture. We have a prank video culture, a freedom to take rather than a freedom to take responsibility. [shakes fist towards Hollywood]
I’m gonna get back on my own lawn now, before these whippersnappers give me the angina.
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The people writing those fictional shows trust that most of their viewers are decent enough people to recognise an arsehole and enjoy the dramatic wringers he’s put through at the same time we study the character flaws that make him an arsehole.
The reality shows*, on the other hand, just shrug and assume that their viewers all want to be arseholes and give them the vicarious thrill of seeing which arsehole on the show gets to be king of the fecal hill (pay no attention to the fact that the winner is still a vassal of the host and producers).
Your pet theory isn’t far off, especially since reality TV usually gets far larger audiences than Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Sopranos and Game of Thrones (another fictional serial chock full o’ arseholes) do. Reality TV culture has indeed upped American culture’s already high tolerance for arseholes.
[* scripted as opposed to fictional]
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While agreeing, I’m not putting them on other hands. Scripted reality shows have furthered the fictional celebrating of assholes, shown more and better toadies for non-assholes to act like (the talkative ineffective opposition is a favorite character). On the one hand we have popular scripted fictional arses celebrated on TV. Further along that hand we have even more popular scripted reality TV arses on TV. We’re marinading in them.
Enough of us choose them in the Living Room, and one of them wrote his way into the voting booth, where we also chose him. So, I don’t see two opposing forces, with fiction that calls itself fiction on the clean side of things. I think fictional TV arseholes are a gateway drug.
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The substances called gateway drugs aren’t necessarily the start of a downward path. Some people are ok with a cocktail or a spliff every night before going on with their normal lives. For others, booze and pot are either abused or become gateway drugs.
For the latter type of addictive personality, fictional TV arseholes work that way. Lots of people thought Tony Soprano and Don Draper were anti-heroes worthy of emulation not only in appearance but in behaviour. In the end, that tells you more about those people than about the characters or the intent of the writers. That’s where I make the distinction.
I’d rather see fictional villains and anti-heroes who are more than moustache-twirling cardboard cutouts – we do ourselves a disservice as a culture when we pretend that the sociopath is some kind of space alien living in a volcano lair instead of a human being with the suburban McMansion and the the family and the office job on Madison Ave. The fictional shows about arseholes are more often than not character studies written by non-arseholes that help us identify the arseholes around us.
Reality TV just gleefully shouts “everyone’s an arsehole, so join in the fun.” If fictional TV featuring arseholes is pot, this is cocaine (which I suspect is a critical substance in the reality TV industry).
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You just summed up the whole show.
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‘those people’ need us all to be a little more responsible with what we leave out. I don’t want a nanny state, I just want the West Wing back, more or less.
I’m quite sure it used to be handled within the hour, like arseholes should be.
These season long arsehole arcs belong on daytime TV, and court TV. They don’t work for me. I appreciate nuance like few others, but adding nuance to an arsehole is literally like counting hemorrhoids!
I like your analogies. Thanks!
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