The New Yorker Radio Hour - Emily Nussbaum Likes to Watch

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

For decades, critical praise for a TV show was that it was “not like TV,” but more like a novel or a movie. That ingrained hierarchy always bugged Emily Nussbaum, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her criticism in The New Yorker. She has been compared to Pauline Kael, but Nussbaum—acknowledging the compliment—is quick to point out that she has never written about movies, nor has she wanted to. She was inspired to be a TV critic by “Television Without Pity,” a blog site of passionate, informed fans arguing constantly. In her new book, “I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution,” Nussbaum argues that the success of serious antihero dramas like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad” has led many to devalue mainstays of TV, like comedies and even soap operas. It’s time to stop comparing TV to anything else, she tells David Remnick.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. I think what America wants to know, Emily, above all, is how do you get to watch TV for a living? How do you get to be a TV critic? How did this happen to you? It is a scam that I have pulled off to my satisfaction. But at the same time, the amount of television has grown so substantially that all TV critics do is complain. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Whenever I read an essay by Emily Nussbaum about some new show, I know I've got a lot more TV to watch. Emily brings this incredible level of insight and intelligence to her writing, and at the same time, there's always a quality there that's best described as joy.

Emily writes all the time in The New Yorker, but she also has a new book coming out called I Like to Watch, arguing my way through the TV revolution. It's not just a collection of reviews. What the book does is articulate Emily's unique. point of view on the medium. I caught up with Emily No. Bam last week. I think it's important for people to know that what you set out to be was a scholar of Victorian literature. Well, the truth is I roamed around a little bit for a while before that. But it's true that I was in graduate school. I had a plan to write my dissertation on the public woman, the overlapping categories of actress, Jewish, and prostitute. So that's what the world was spared. is that dissertation.

I was very obsessed with Daniel Duranda. I had a lot going on. Now, what kind of TV watcher were you growing up and until this time, as a budding academic or would-be academic? Well, as a kid, I liked to watch TV in the way that a lot of kids did in the 70s when I was a little kid in the 80s. And I had shows that I loved. I loved MASH.

I loved WKRP. I loved taxi. I loved a lot of sitcoms, actually. I remember I used to be very nice for babysitter, so they let me stay up and watch the Love Boat and Fantasy Island when that was the big... Hot stuff. Yes. And actually, it did seem really perverted.

Kind of hot, like Love American Style in a slightly earlier day. That was fantastic. I have a great fondness for Love American Style. And also, there was actually an aftermath version of that called Undressed on MTV. So if anyone's listening and they remember Undressed, it was an amazing show. I'm going to head for the archives. Yeah. I like, you know, it's one of the things about TV was that it had, I think,

it was both clean and mass cultureish and it had this titillating slightly dirty candy element to it. But TV criticism growing up, at least in my memory, especially in some place like the New York Times, was that television was essentially, as my parents used to call it the idiot box, except there was this thing called PBS. There was this quality, classical music concerts,

British television series based on Dickens or Trollope or Austin or something like that. There was that, you remember that Saturday Night Live Skipper? And there was the John. Tales of ribaldry. And so you would read these very stern, unfun, columns of TV criticism. Well, a sense of shame hovered over the entire industry

that I think afflicted the ability of people to respond to it as critics because it wasn't taken seriously. It was something that people were embarrassed about. And that included people who love television. But the main way of praising a television show was saying it wasn't like television, that it was more like a book, that it was more like a movie. Something happened. I mean, I like to watch one of the great, funny, dirty titles of any book.

It's just fantastic. But I like to watch, in some measure, is about individual shows, but it's also about what's now commonly called the Golden Age of Television. So what happened to set that off? A lot of people will say, well, the Sopranos happened. That was the singular tripwire event. You're saying, hold on a minute. Well, I love the Sopranos. I think the Sopranos is a brilliant television show.

But I think that one of the ways in which the Sopranos was praised has to do with this attitude toward television. When people praised the Sopranos and when people talked about HBO, whose slogan was, it's not TV, it's HBO. it was a way of praising something as transcending television. And I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the same time as I was watching The Sopranos. I love that show equally. It doesn't look very good, especially at the beginning.

It was made in a very TV way, visually. It didn't look like a movie. It has these formulaic structures. It's four acts. It's broken up by commercials. And it's about a teenage girl who has these special powers to fight the forces of darkness. But it's essentially a myth. It's a beautiful, expansive fairy tale myth with a dark side that's about sex and mortality and feminism.

And to me, these very substantive issues. And I think it's a very aesthetically ambitious show. But it is hard to talk about it in that way, or at least it was when it first came out. The language to talk about the Sopranos was there. And I feel like it magnetized a lot of attention in a way that made it harder for people to talk about the wide range of TV, to talk about comedy, to talk about network TV, to talk about soap opera-like things. There were all of these embedded hierarchical class-based biases. Now, one of the distinguishing features you say in your book,

not just implicitly but explicitly, is that the soprano is essentially a male-centered show and that there was a gender prejudice at work here when you're making a distinction between quality, non-quality, sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The gender prejudice is a big part of it, and that's definitely a factor in what I'm saying, but it's not the whole thing. What I'm talking about is a set of qualities that people reflexively praise versus a set of qualities that people reflexively condescend to. And some of the qualities that the Sopranos had were that it was cinematic.

It seemed like a movie rather than TV. That it was about violence rather than sex. So it made it seem substantive. That it was about a middle-aged man who seemed like a character that. was a weighty character with Gravitas, and that it was made by a singular creator, which made it seem otorist. But I could almost hear that otour,

David Chase, leaping through the microphone to say, well, wait a minute, it was a very capacious show as many seasons and many hours long, and a lot of the characters who were most interesting were women. Yes, that's absolutely true. Look, my problem is not with the Sopranos.

It absolutely has fantastic characters. It's the diminishing of other things. It's the diminishing of other things. way that the gravity of the sopranos, the magnetism of the sopranos, essentially blotted out other shows. So one of the big themes, both in this book and certainly in this golden age of television, is the rise of the anti-hero that's a big figure and set of figures in television. What is the lineage of it, and where did it go? Well, I mean, a lot of people would talk about the original anti-hero on television or the most significant anti-hero as Tony Soprano.

I actually have a piece in my book that talks about Archie Bunker. And it talks about Norman Lear, who's this huge hero to me and big influence on me. But it also talks about something pretty complicated about All in the Family, which was one of the most popular shows. I mean, it was the most popular show in the country. And people loved Archie Bunker, who was a bigot, who was also lovable, who was complicated and funny, and split the audience in half in terms of their responses. to him. Who are the key anti-hero figures of the Golden Age? Obviously, people talk about Tony Sopranos

and anti-hero Walter White on Breaking Bad and Don Draper. I think that's all true. And I think that those shows, which formed these kind of volumes about masculinity that came out starting around the turn of the century, are this extremely significant change on TV.

And one of the things they did that previous TV hadn't been able to do is put this central character on TV that simultaneously attracted and alienated people. Is it an all-male category? No. I wrote a whole piece about how Carrie Bradshaw

on Sex and the City is actually an unclaimed anti-hero. I actually feel like she as a character was designed to have a very similar effect on the audience that I feel like viewers often reacted with this mixture of identification and distress at her behavior. But one of the things that those shows did

is they smashed open the door for the kinds of characters that could disgust and confuse audiences in ways that were artistically meaningful. And for women, especially, like there have been a million different characters in the aftermath that are also characters that behave poorly but are terrifically charismatic.

Fleabag is a recent show that has a character who behaves like a complete jerk in many ways is also extremely lovable and fascinating and her charisma is destabilizing to audiences. But she's just one example. The last few years have marked a huge level of just improved inclusiveness in the kind of stories

that are told on TV. This is exciting. And inclusiveness of those who were making it. Yeah. A lot of the best shows of the last few years have just been straightforwardly

made by women and people of color. I mean, that's... Who would be exemplary of this? For me, the breakthrough year, I always say this, was there was this year on ABC when Shonda Rhymes, Kenya Barris,

and John Ridley were all making television shows. They're all African-American creators, and their shows scandal, blackish, and American crime, this very serious drama, could not have been more different from one another. And so none of them had to be the black showrunner on ABC. To me, that's the ideal. Yeah, carry the weight of the whole thing. So that's the ideal.

I'm talking with Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker's television critic, and she's just published a book called I Like to Watch, arguing my way through the TV Revolution. Now, Emily, what else set off what's now considered the golden age? What's the role of technology? in this, for example. Okay. To me, a lot of what happened since the turn of the century in terms of the changes in TV has to do with things like DVRs. Suddenly TV, which had originally been something that would just sort of extrude into your living

room like cookie dough and then disappear. It was a disposable superficially live thing, even though it was taped. It was a text that you could save, rewind, and share with people. You could pause it. People don't even remember this, but it was a radical change. It basically meant that you could make shows that had a certain kind of visual beauty or density, needed to be decoded, needed to be revisited. You couldn't do that before.

Before that, when you created TV, it had to be extremely simple. People had to know what they were looking at immediately. It couldn't bore or confuse you. It couldn't upset you enough to turn it off. It actually had to have certain simple qualities. Once the technology changed, it could expand in its ambition in really remarkable ways. shows could get slower, faster, cable change things, and then the internet. There would not be modern television in the way there is without the internet.

Because? Because it changed the way the audience interacted with shows. I mean, to me, one of the things I love the most about TV is the unique relationship that it has with the audience. And I say this as a fan of a show. Well, you were in on this really early. You were involved with something called Television Without Pity. What was that? Television Without Pity was this batch of.

site filled with threads on every television show imaginable from the West Wing and Buffy to a lot of reality shows. It began as a site because there were a group of people online who watched Dawson's Creek and were perpetually frustrated that it was such a bad show and it sort of that it should be better but they were passionate hate watchers. And from that grew this enormous site. And it had people from Hollywood. It had journalists. It had all sorts of regular TV watchers, and 24 hours a day, it was people yammering about shows in enormously granular and Talmudic ways, like just, you know, threads about hating things, threads about loving things, different relationships.

When I was in graduate school, I was on television without pity all the time. And to me, this was actually the basis for my idea of television criticism. television criticism as a passionate argument, television criticism as something related to fanhood, even if it was being critical of a show, there was this kind of emotional attachment and a kind of freewheeling gonzo voice. It was great.

Was there a critic model for you? I know you get compared a lot, and it's hardly an insult to Pauline Kale, and probably that's because you're a woman, you're right for the New Yorker, there's a very personal direct mode of address that both writers take on. I think you don't completely love the analogy.

I have no problem with the analogy. I mean, it is a compliment. People love it. And I see the things that we have in common. The only thing I always say in response is there are a lot of TV critics I know who came from a background in writing about movies. I did not. I came to writing about TV because I love TV. I don't have a film studies background.

And when I was growing up, I probably, I mean, I occasionally read The New Yorker, so I probably read her reviews, but I'm not someone who, was directly influenced by her. If I named writers that I was directly influenced by, they're often not arts critics. Who would they be? Grace Paley. I read Grace Paley very aggressively, and I love the specificity and strangeness of her voice. I loved Nora Ephron. I loved, I mean, when I was in college, I read Mary Gateskill. It's funny, I'm always asked to name, I mean, there are obviously, there are critics that I love, but I was not planning to write. criticism. It seemed mean. So I was trying to avoid it, but obviously I failed or became meaner. Now, you feel that you're in conversation all the time with all the various people writing about

television and also the internet itself. You tweet a lot. Yes. You have a very strong social media presence as I do not. And I wonder how that's nourishing, irritating, and well, Just what role it plays in your writing? I think everyone knows the downsides of Twitter. It's definitely a strange way to communicate. On the other hand, as a television critic, it's been definitely joyful and nourishing. I mean, one of the main things about Twitter is that it gives me access to a global television audience. And every few months, I just say, what's out there that I haven't noticed that's really good?

And it just pours in. It just pours in, and I put it on a list, and I try to catch things. And so I end up seeing shows like, please like me, which is this wonderful Australian half-hour show by this guy, Josh Thomas. This is this humane, funny mixture of comedy and drama. He's this young gay guy. And it has this unusual sense of humor and unusual treatment and mental illness. It's an Australian show. I would never have really caught up with it unless people had mentioned it to me.

So part of the way I use the Internet is trying to break out of my own bubble. So it's not just the shows that the people that I know in person or at the New York or are, talking about. Emily, you have a busy life. You write. You watch tons of television. You have a couple of kids. You used to have a life in which you read 900-page Victorian novels, serious literature.

Is reading serious reading, steady reading, getting squeezed out too much of the lives of people? How do you feel about that? I mean, I wish I had more time to read. I mean, these

discussions about anxiety about what's taking over people's attention span are just recurrent. And I just, I can't make a big statement about that. I mean, I love reading novels and I love watching good television shows. And it just doesn't seem fruitful for me to compare the value of them. All I can say is that there are television shows that I've watched that have had the same kind of weight and depth for me as anything that I've ever read. Emily Nussbaum, thanks so much. Thank you so much. Emily Nusbaum's new book is called I Like to Watch, Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution. You can read everything she writes for us at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianne Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Andres O'Hara, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Monfay Chen and Emily Mann. Karima Walker contributed additional sound design. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Churina Endowment Fund.