For nearly two decades, we’ve been told that this is the Golden Age of Television: The smartest, deepest storytelling, the most nuanced and morally complex characters, are found here.
Perhaps it’s time for a reconsideration.
Thursday night, on ABC’s “Scandal,” Olivia Pope, the protagonist — long established in the show’s vernacular as a “white hat,” or good guy — beat a wheelchair-bound stroke victim to death by pulping his face with an aluminum chair.
It was a lengthy scene, and even for a Shonda Rhimes soap that bills itself weekly on “OMG twists” — gruesome scenes of torture and dismemberment, politically expedient murders and illegitimate war, rape, kidnapping, blackmail, and one interminable scene where an imprisoned terrorist chewed through her own wrist to escape — this one was morally and artistically bankrupt.
“One of the worst things I’ve ever seen on television,” said the Onion’s AV Club.
“Making Liv an outright murderer? Come on,” wrote a commenter on Vulture. “Although knowing this show, in about three episodes it will be as if this never happened.”
Today, the Golden Age is in the throes of an arms race, with show runners attempting to out-shock their audiences week to week, churning out melodrama without consequence.
Last week, on HBO’s “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s Hannah, teaching at a junior high school, responded to her principal’s warnings about unprofessional behavior by exposing her vagina — to him and the audience. Outlandishly, it saved her job.
On “Mr. Robot,” a highly acclaimed USA program, one character strangles another to death during a rooftop tryst, for no discernible reason. His pregnant wife then stabs herself in the uterus, with a fondue fork, to induce labor when the cops arrive.
The sophisticated spy thriller “The Americans” features a plotline about a grown man seducing a 15-year-old girl. Carrie Mathison, antiheroine of “Homeland,” fell in love with a terrorist, had his baby, then tried to kill the infant. She kept custody and continued, of course, to work with the US government.
On the most recent season of “House of Cards,” first lady Claire Underwood — whom we’re meant to find more sympathetic than her amoral, homicidal husband, Frank — kills her mother, via lethal injection, during an election cycle for voter sympathy.
There is no camp here; the scene is played straight, somber, all amber hues and meaningful looks. We are meant to infer guilt and regret, as if that makes everything OK.
In a post-“Sopranos” landscape, moral transgression automatically signifies high art. Infanticide, incest, pedophilia, matricide, torture, rape, castration, cannibalism, mass murder — all are now commonly employed tropes meant to signify quality.
“It’s almost hard to fathom how far we’ve come in such a short time,” says Brett Martin, author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.” Martin agrees that “The Sopranos,” which premiered on HBO in 1999, is responsible for the programming we see today. Before Tony Soprano, American TV audiences had never been so consistently exposed to a charming psychopath, one who so nimbly evoked fear, revulsion, sympathy, affection, horror.
“The degree to which ‘The Sopranos’ and its kind were a shock is incredible,” Martin says. “We’re still in the grips of that.”
“The Sopranos” spawned a hunger for antiheroes: “The Shield,” “Damages,” “Dexter,” “Rescue Me,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “Sons of Anarchy,” “The Walking Dead,” “Homeland,” “House of Cards,” “The Americans,” “Girls,” “unREAL,” “Mr. Robot,” and, of course, “Game of Thrones” — these are just some of its direct descendants.
Each of these shows is peopled with characters that range from sinister to sociopathic. Anyone remotely sympathetic in these worlds is always the stooge, the too-trusting idiot who elicits contempt from the audience.
In November, The Atlantic ran a bracket “to find the most terrible person on television.” There were 32 contestants, ranging from cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter to the 20-something narcissists of HBO’s “Girls.”
Winner of that bracket, by the way: Ramsay Bolton of “Game of Thrones,” who, as one editor wrote, “has spent the majority of his screen time torturing people, feeding women to dogs, and sexually assaulting the teenaged Sansa Stark on the night of their (forced) marriage. He does almost all of this with an impish grin on his face.”
Until last season, “Game of Thrones,” with its literary pedigree and HBO halo, was unassailable: There was no level of degeneracy or debasement the audience wouldn’t stomach. This was the highest art that premium cable had to offer.
Then came two scenes that were not in the books: first, the rape of Sansa Stark, which caused thousands of fans, including a member of Congress, to erupt on Twitter.
“OK, I’m done with ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” tweeted Sen. Claire McCaskill. “Gratuitous rape scene disgusting and unacceptable.”
Then came the burning of a child, alive, at the stake, by her own father.
“A little girl burned alive? Seriously? I honestly didn’t think they’d go there,” tweeted another viewer.
“Game of Thrones: the show that made dragons, rape, and child prostitution fashionable,” wrote another. “You go, HBO.”
‘At a certain point, as always happens in Hollywood or culture in general, a set of superficial things come to stand in for quality: sex, violence, moral complication.’
- Brett Martin, author of 'Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution'
Last December, “GoT” director Jeremy Podeswa, who directed the rape scene, said the show’s creators “were responsive to the discussion, and there were a couple of things changed as a result.”
Podeswa himself said that he found value in the audience challenging the “use of violence as a narrative tool . . . and the questionable nature of that.”
Other show runners are questioning their own motivations. Joe Weisberg, creator of FX’s critically acclaimed “The Americans,” recently said he and the show’s writers grapple with what’s true to the characters.
“It may be that our sense of bad is changing,” he told critic Alan Sepinwall. “When they poisoned that kid, we couldn’t believe we were having those guys do that. We have become somewhat inured ourselves, so maybe we have to up the ante for us to feel it ourselves. We have to have them kill an old lady with her own pills to make it feel so bad.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it takes so much to shock us now. Like any art form, television is as much a reflection of the culture as a mover.
Look at the election cycle: Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner, is the first presidential nominee to come out of reality TV. Boasting about his penis size — totally in character.
The revival of the wholesome 1970s game show “Family Feud,” hosted by Steve Harvey, has recently been criticized for sexually explicit Q&As.
In two clips posted last September, Harvey asked a contestant to recall “the last thing you stuck your finger in.”
“My wife.”
“My favorite answer of all time,” Harvey said.
“Name the first part of a woman you touch to get her in the mood,” Harvey asked another panel.
“Um, that would be the lower part of the vagina,” said one contestant, whom Harvey high-fived.
According to a survey released last week by Ipsos Public Affairs, 78 percent of Americans said they often heard people cursing in public, up 35 percent from 10 years ago. It underscores the popularity of Trump, who mouthed the word “f—ing” at a rally in New Hampshire and called Ted Cruz a “p—y.”
“It marks a huge shift in how we view politicians,” Ipsos senior research manager Kaitlyn McAuliffe said, “and what can work in a presidential campaign.”
Daniel Fienberg, television critic for the Hollywood Reporter, sees the connective tissue between pop culture and the presidential election cycle.
“I think it’s clear that we look at society and clearly don’t think it’s all white hats,” he says. “Presidential candidates used to be people you could look up to. Guess what? There are more antiheroes there, too.”
With few exceptions, there are scant, meaningful explorations of good and evil, action and consequence, to be found in our so-called Golden Age.
It’s worth remembering that David Chase, who created Tony Soprano, very artfully walked his audience up through the final season, in which he unmasked his antihero as an irredeemable psychopath. In doing so, he forced his audience to confront why we continued to overlook and excuse Tony’s most reprehensible actions, and what that says about our own susceptibilities to power, charm, wealth and fame.
“Breaking Bad” show runner Vince Gilligan did a similar thing, making clear that his was a moral universe, and Walter White, no matter his or the audience’s justifications, had to be punished. He also admitted that he, too, once felt affection for his protagonist, but could no longer deny the evil Walter had done.
“I’ve lost sympathy for Walter White, personally,” he said in 2013, right before the final season aired. “My perceptions have changed . . . I didn’t think that was going to happen.”
Even then, Gilligan didn’t understand the unquenchable thirst for antiheroes. “Our viewing tastes are cyclical,” he told Vulture. “Five years from now, [people] might be asking, ‘You remember when everybody used to like antiheroes? People like the guy in the white hat again. How did that happen? What’s changed in America?’”
If the recent reactions to “GoT’ and “Scandal” are an indication, there may be a backlash against bad behavior — or at least bad storytelling.
“At a certain point, as always happens in Hollywood or culture in general, a set of superficial things come to stand in for quality: sex, violence, moral complication,” says Martin. “When done well, it’s the highest form of art. If it’s done poorly, and if that’s all you’ve got — the idea that quality is tied to immorality — you enter the realm of the absurd.”