“Uncomfortable Television” by Hunter Hargraves, 2023
This is a turgid, jargon-filled academic work on how
neo-liberal television after 2000 is acculturating people to a declining and more brutal
society. At least that is my take. The writing style in the book puts one off, and yes, the first quote is from Foucault. If
anyone ever teaches academics and lawyers how to write – and that is probably
impossible – they should take hints from David Foster Wallace and George
Orwell. That is not happening here, as
Hargraves is a professor of Cinema and Television Arts at UC Fullerton. Clearly, he’s not trying to be a public
intellectual.
“I regard
academic English not as a dialectal variant of Standard Written English, but as
a gross debasement.,,” - David Foster Wallace, Authority and American
Usage.
Academic English is “a mixture of vagueness and sheer
incompetence” in which “it is common
to come across long passages which are almost completely devoid of meaning.”
- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
Wallace again: “…the obscurity and pretension of Academic
English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical
balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the
writer’s own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity
leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an
Intellectual that his English is deformed … by opaque abstraction” - Wallace,
Authority and American Usage.
That said, let’s get to the heart of the matter, if we
can. You see, the ‘heart’ is so elusive
it might not even be there, as the style is so elliptical and murky its hard to decipher. Hargraves uses specific examples of comedy, reality
TV, fan remixes, detective series and ‘woke’ television after 2000 to make his
points. His introduction dwells on Louis
CK, seeming surprised that a series centered around an obnoxious male comic
might be problematic. Anyone who has
watched enough comedy acts or shows basically knows when to turn them off, as
the tight, drunken world of intimate and adult comedy clubs has been
mainstreamed onto Netflix. A Marxist might put it this way, that the
commodification of ‘transgressive’ jokes is fake dissent, or as Orwell put it, just
an exciting “escape into wickedness.”
Some of these comics are cheap and lazy
‘boat-rockers,’ if not outright reactionaries.
Some are not. It’s the difference
between liberal 1st Amendment absolutism and actual liberation.
‘Discomfort’ in Hargraves analysis is the feeling that
something is not quite right with the images, plot, characters, language or point of a
TV show. He thinks this is a symptom of
“the television industry that late
capitalism depends on in order to maintain its ideological hegemony.” This means depicting ‘unlikeable protagonists, profanity, graphic
violence, explicit sex and abuse of cultural minorities, women and children.’ Drug dealers, assassins, hit men, Mafia and
serial killers are prominent. Or “cringeworthy interactions between
co-workers, friends and potential romantic partners” and “irritating or mentally unstable”
characters. No shit. It is actually hard to find normal, grounded people in movies or on TV.
Hargraves does not discuss class, seemingly oblivious to
the sea of class references found on television. The military, CIA or FBI are also invisible in
his analysis. He seems to think that ‘woke’ TV will somehow be liberating. His comedy section focuses on Lena Dunham’s Girls. The reality TV section is on the
recovery series Intervention. The fan ‘remix’ is an adultified, lumpen
version of Jem & the Holograms. The cop series covered are The Wire, CSI and Law & Order. The ‘woke’ TV section is about 30 Rock and Atlanta. His selections seem mostly frothy. He omits the biggest streaming blockbuster of all, Game of Thrones. Since I’ve not watched most of this, I’ll focus on
the detective series section and his conclusion.
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| In the 'Lab' at CSI Las Vegas |
The Cop
Shows
If it’s not obvious by now, CSI and Law & Order SVU are both very pro-police procedurals.
They are the heroes and techie geniuses
in ‘our’ fight against crime, with the viewer getting the serial satisfaction
of nailing the bad guy, an actual rarity. Dick Wolf, the producer of L&O: SVU, is openly pro-cop and
close to the NYPD. Anthony Zuicker, who
created the CSIs, promoted
surveillance, almost laughably-accurate tech science gimmicks and lax civil
rights.
The
Wire
first focused on an efficient police surveillance unit dealing with black ghetto
crime and violence in Baltimore, though surrounded by corrupt or incompetent
cops and brass. In additional seasons it
extended to corrupt politicians, schools, unions and newspapers, so it’s not a
typical take, but it still carried over the eternal ghetto theme in each
season. The showrunner David Simon – a semi-Marxist – is still semi. This is why he had to make the great Treme series set in New Orleans as a mea
culpa. Hargraves finally makes the point about the show’s focus on black crime, along with another obvious
point about the violence in the show. Is
the violence real or imagined is a question he does not address. Nor does he mention class in regards to The Wire.
What else does Hargraves have to say? Well, he thinks it’s all about ‘white guilt.’ At least that is his chapter title but I could not find it in the text. Watching cops abuse process and suspects, or omnipresent
swat team raids is not ‘uncomfortable’ television? This is unmentioned. He contends that the ‘high-quality’ series
loved by critics like Breaking Bad, The
Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire and Deadwood
are all full of conflicted male anti-heroes. Yet not everyone in the Wire police unit are ‘anti-heroes.’ I’ve seen Deadwood and there are some – like Swearengen
– who ‘might’ be - and there are others – like Seth Bullock and Sol Star – who are
not. Swearengen is no kind of ‘hero,’ he’s
an interesting shit, one of those unlikable
protagonists. Anti-hero seems to be
an outdated way of phrasing it.
Hargraves whines about how these series are called ‘quality’
without explaining why they are not the same as CSI/L&O SVU, which he says is ‘middle-brow.’ Perhaps it’s the money invested and the audience aimed at?! Instead he claims they are ‘intermedial’ and ‘televisual.’ So? This is in line with the frequent resort to a ‘lit
review’ of other academics opinions that overly clutter the book like its a Ph.D thesis.
In CSI, the
episode he cites about a “Las Vegas real estate magnate’ being murdered misses
the fact that the man’s infantile perversities – and they are gross – blackens
the image of the rich. Again, missing
class. In L&O, he pokes at the alleged feminism of the series and
actually quotes people who buy the fact that the male cop Stabler is some kind
of feminist hero. Stabler is a disturbed
thug playing the ‘protector’ role for his ever-in-danger and stupid teenage
daughter, another trope. This shows’
focus on sex crimes makes it one of the more lurid, which is uncomfortable.
After all, how many dead female bodies do we see, not just here, but constantly? Or imprisoned or kidnapped girls? Talk about getting us used to crumbling, late capitalism in the U.S.! At least
Olivia Benson / Mariska Hargitay has played a real role in getting incompetent
and sexist police departments to actually investigate rape with their unused rape kits.
Another side of these two shows which he ignores is that the ‘ripped from the headlines’ style used which is frequently focused on rich or powerful people committing crimes. Hargraves misses that, as he’s an identity academic under all the verbiage, abstractions and bow-ties.
 |
| The Wire |
Solutions?
The change from ‘family friendly’ TV to uncomfortable ‘realistic’
TV after 2000 is Hargraves’ theme. This
corresponds to the technical changes from 4 TV networks to a sprawling geography
of hundreds of media outlets. That
parallels a corresponding decay in U.S. capitalism, which is reflected in the culture
industry, normalized by it as ‘just
the way things are.’ Hargraves thinks
that the new media landscape has also allowed ‘cultural minorities’ to gain access for ‘woke TV’ - which is also ‘uncomfortable.’ His understanding of who
are involved in this opening are color castes, women, queer folks and disabled people, but
it will only go to the ‘awareness’ level and not that of actual action. He knows these efforts can be and are commodified
and co-opted by media.
Hargraves points to a ridiculous glut of content and uses 30 Rock and Atlanta for his point about woke TV – shows I have not watched –
while ignoring the profusion of muck-raking documentaries. He does note the handmaid cloaks in The Handmaid’s Tale were used in
protests against Bible thumpers and Trump’s sexism, just as the hand signal in
the Hunger Games was used in Thai
protests against the dictatorship there. Both to no avail.
This book is for the TV academic or TV geeks. But it’s all weak tea for anyone else. No
mention of 6 capitalist combines owning nearly all the media in the U.S. No
mention of socialization of these sources.
No discussion of public television or collaborative efforts by workers
in media – many of whom are currently on strike. Seemingly ‘late capitalism’ still has things in the bag.
P.S. - I've been told by current college students that it is common for cultural studies writing to be incomprehensible and bloated. Here are the so-called top 100 series: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The
Wire,” “Deadwood,” “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows,” “Bad Cops, Bad
Cops – What Ya Gonna Do,” “Trapped and Detective Series in General,” “Handmaid’s
Tale," "Treme" or the word ‘streaming.’
The Kultur Kommissar
August 29, 2023
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