In the late nineties American television began to accept realism. Gone were the mansions, cocktail hours, private helicopters and family-owned sheriffs that had littered the sagas of Dallas and Dynasty. Grit made its seedy way onto the small screen in the same way that it made its imprint in eighties Scorsese movies. Main characters would carry on their backs the brunt of repercussions of a potentially destructive foreign policy (The West Wing), or find themselves responsible for turning human matter into mangled flesh (The Sopranos and The Wire). Alternately they treated mangled flesh to stop it from expiring (ER), or, should the victim suffer no such luck, hover by their dead bodies whilst they munched on their ham sandwiches (the Law and Order franchise). That was if their daily tasks did not include its grooming and embalming (Six Feet Under).
This kind of television overturned the artificial glamour which the public had been weaned on for too many years. Through means of some mysterious paradox, this was the funniest time in television’s history.
In the dozen years between the mid-nineties and late 2000’s, an era now known as the modern ‘golden age’, no law decreed that characters would have to be completely clueless to be humorous. Even the average network sitcom – a genre now riddled with characters so unbelievable in their idiocy that any ‘real’ version of them remains totally alien to most human beings – had people to whose living functions we could actually relate. But what was ‘golden’ when it came to golden drama was the sleek unbroken way in which it could poke fun at its own plots and protagonists. This wasn’t rooted in a lazily staged moment where a character trips up on a dead body before later misplacing it. The funny moments wove patches of guesswork, endeared to us the major players, or relieved a moment heavy with dramatic tension of its burden. They had the buttons for igniting lightness.
Characters in these beloved series were in full recognition of the risks they took, the brevity of their existence and the countless childhood tragedies they or their friend or wives or husbands had endured. Yet they traipsed round their lives with all the casualness, self-mockery and sometimes nonchalance to which we would attribute long-shore fishermen described in Arthur Miller plays. It was the job, and that was life. There would still be a home at the end of the day. Or the night. Or seventy-two hours if it was that kind of shift.
Infallibility was absent; flaws were not. Tony Soprano, for instance, once left two ‘made men’ of his Mafia dynasty, Paulie and Christopher, in charge of killing and disposing of the body of a Russian mobster. The act itself falls short of triggering a laugh. What is funny is the outcome that this gruelling cruelty has when aforementioned Paulie and Christopher are not only uncertain about the Russian’s existential status, but lose him (either as an active human being or as a corpse), in the midst of the snow-laden Pine Barrens, a huge woods in New Jersey. That, however, is not Paulie’s major concern. In the process, he has lost his shoe. Outraged, Tony screams down the phone at him, in some crooked attempt at cryptic language: “Is the ‘package’ still alive?!” His fifteen-year-old son, Anthony Junior, sits on the couch nonchalantly eating ice-cream. He watches. He says nothing. The paradox between the horrifying subject that’s at hand, Tony’s ‘inventive’ way of questioning, and his son’s habitualness to such a situation recalls the Theatre of the Absurd. It is the spark that pierced the dark.
In ER, a hospital drama where patients die daily from an inoperable stage five cancer, a gunshot wound or horrible bad luck, one never gets the feeling there’s a messy clutter of untarnishable blackness. Intern John Carter gleefully listens to The Ride of the Valkyries as he joyously performs an appendectomy on Dr. Benton, a resident and Carter’s dictatorial teacher. The nurses, whose daily tasks include directing screaming patients to the Psych unit and intubating suicidal cases, chat briskly with the simple attitude of shopkeepers or office workers who have never seen a corpse. A typical conversation has one nurse request leave for a honeymoon, insisting that “You don’t get married every day,” only for her colleague to respond with a correction: “No, in your case, only every year.” To this the first nurse then replies: “Yeah – but I worked extra hard for this one.”
It’s not only the killers and the doctors at their victims’ helm who brand a sticky daily situation with a stamp of light trivialisation. Police procedurals such as Law and Order, back in the days when Times Square was not clustered with the flashing images from multimedia presentations, tended to discuss a body slashed, mangled or maimed as easily as they might do a daytime soap opera. When one detective, fresh from the sighting of the body of a murdered councilman, finds out that there’s a rumour that his partner hasn’t told him yet, he retorts in his indignation: “Well, Max. This really freezes my cookies.”
It could be interpreted as either disturbing or funny. But by all measures – it was realistic. One would hope that real detectives don’t spend all day frowning and issuing speech in flat tones of an empty hopelessness the way their representatives in Law and Order: SVU, Person of Interest, NCIS and other shows do. After all, unlike most citizens they have pursued this lifestyle as a full-time job. There’s a time in the day when they have to go out and get lunch; another when they have to go and buy their kids some socks. If they were genuinely traumatised by every corpse they witnessed being gnawed at by a swarm of flies, they would be spending half their salaries on therapy.
The trend in television was not just offsetting the extreme dark with a small dosage of comedy. The West Wing, a series which featured no glimpse of an expired matter, relied on its characters mess-ups to render them loveable. In the current climate of political dramas such as Scandal and House of Cards, every plot line rests on an epic scale. It’s do or die, or save a life or kill, or some advent of a dramatic leitmotif on strings which signifies an eerie omen. The West Wing was unique in telling viewers that White House policies, which sometimes end up on the front page of The New York Times, could be cemented when two aides sit down for a Jack Daniels. They could be sparked by a whirlwind of meaningless banter spiced with a subtle flirtation. Or they could happen by accident. When Josh Lyman accidentally tells the White House Press Corps there’s a ‘secret plan to fight inflation’ intending it as nothing but a superficial joke, it is perceived as policy. Sometimes even the gravest mishaps are the funniest ones.
Desperate Housewives, which ran eight seasons largely on the fuel of its narration of a young wife who committed suicide, had the facility to splinter gloom. A mother’s insistence that the big bad wolf who ate the grandma of Red Riding Hood had simply ‘suffered a bad childhood and deserved forgiveness’ lightened-up an episode laden with tension. Even one of HBO’s most miserable endeavours, 2008’s In Treatment, consisting wholly of traumatic psychotherapeutic sessions, made viewers laugh when the psychiatrist saw his own shrink. Responding to the doctor’s grievances about the wife who left him, little familiarity with his own daughter, and broken communication with his son, Dianne Wiest’s character remarked: “Well, at least you didn’t have a dog; or else you would have screwed that up.”
The years passed by. Cable and broadcast networks sought a continuation of the golden age and picked on what made most hits differ from a typical Hollywood blockbuster; what had ensured that train passengers and people waiting at the bus-stop talked much more about them than they did about the latest ‘epic’ movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Their answer? Darkness.
In the medium of TV, the commonly used adjective ‘dark’ often purports to translate into one message: ‘He is deep’. Tony Soprano killed people for a living, then didn’t feel too good about it. He was complex, he was complicated, and he spent one hour a week at a psychiatrist’s office. Networks picked on up this theme: if a character was part-time evil or ambiguous, if something in them was the crux of something dangerous or irremediable – as with Don Draper and more recently with Walter White – it gathered reams of watchers and the viewing figures mounted. Producers hunted for their own piece of the hype and snapped it up. It’s possible they went too far.
Whilst television quality reached new artistic heights, Hollywood spent those years sticking to showing viewers more about computers and the different moulds that make one virtual figure jump and fly than something recognisable or neighbourly. The room left for the actual human beings, unsimulated dialogue, two people brushing past each other as they walk down through a corridor, has mostly muted its main characters into sharp wooden figurines who wear a frown most gallantly and transport in their oratory only the gravest, allegedly most life-changing, supposedly ‘meaningful’ speech.
Has Hollywood now hijacked television? Looking around the drama series both on cable and network channels, the staples that we know so well from modern cinema – layer upon layer of flash imagery, eyebrows narrowed to signify impending disaster, not to mention the quickest strokes of bowing on the strings – has swallowed up this genre that we’ve come to call ‘elite’.
If television’s current need for darkness shaped only the moral values of its major characters, then its creative side and structure would remain unhurt. But this compulsion for TV to have a ‘dark side’ has begun to tamper with the stitches of its fabric. It’s mandated that seriousness preside over each drama, that protagonists be so irreparably damaged that they unlearn animation in the eyes, and that all inner darkness be externalised. The flexible and malleable fabric of lightness has been stuffed behind a locked door. Modern hype-spurring hits, such as True Detective, House of Cards, and within broadcast television, NBC’s The Blacklist, are not privy to human beings who have capacity for laughing at themselves. Their storylines are hardly sterile to these humoristic touches; we have learnt in TV’s recent history that very few are. Perhaps for flash effect, perhaps for seediness, perhaps to construct a barometer of ‘grit’ – ‘lightness’ is something they forego.
So popular is this component ‘darkness’ that it spreads not only to the script, but even more so to aesthetics. True Detective is its crowning example. A series about two detectives searching for a serial killer over the course of seventeen years is not inviting humour along for the ride. Neither its themes nor plot is to be held responsible. A great deal of screen time is devoted to shots which in no way supplant the viewers with a story thread or leave behind red herrings. Long shots of wide expanses of the Louisiana desert consume the series’ minutes in a manner that’s unduly. As though extensive close-ups of a corpse are insufficient, in the corpse’s background can be seen a dark grey, clouded sky. The camera shifts its focus from the bound and litigated corpse to the grey sky, then to the corpse and back again; it’s tiring on the viewer’s eyes. But more importantly, it misses out on any chance to spell outsomething, acting only as a keener emphasis on knowledge that we have. Even the phrase “You gotta come to dinner” is delivered like a dark presage. As though a tortured, murdered prostitute and the fact that one of the detectives had his daughter killed isn’t enough, it has to be conveyed to us: “Look, viewers – the material is dark.”
Sometimes a show can go beyond all reasonable lengths to toot the sound of its own horn. The breakout broadcast drama of last season, NBC’s The Blacklist, is a beaming example. It follows James Spader as ‘Red’ Reddington, an FBI assistant who himself is guilty of, shall we say, more than a hundred crimes.
Typical plots include death threats, the odd bomb, hijacking, kidnapping, hostage, murder-suicide, and the main character Elizabeth Keen’s arduous attempt to find out how she and ‘Red’ have a connection. These events can rival the series’ own gaudiness, but nonetheless don’t quite win out. The camera lens flicks from one face, one location or one object to another; desiring first and foremost to inform us of impending danger. We see half-faces, then a quarter of a face, then three-quarter faces – all of them freeze shots like photos. Although having the luxury of being entirely filmed in New York City, the colour palette is, as though by some formal decree, restricted to a dismal murky grey and brown. The interiors, mostly situated in Keen’s home or FBI headquarters, resemble army barracks or the inside of a prison cell. This isn’t helped by the delivery of lines from secondary characters; thrown off in the frozen declamatory nature of a student group preparing for the read-through of their summer play.
Although Breaking Bad made ample use of humour, not even grazing this cliché, other more recent cable dramas stick to the ‘look at us: we’re serious’ trope. This is one of the reasons why last year’s debut The Americans fell short of millions among viewers. Not only is it ill-informed about its subject – a pair of Soviet spies posing as US travel agents in the midst of Cold War Washington – it boasts too much of the high stakes involved. We understand that its protagonists risk being martyrs for their country. We understand their children, ignorant of who they really are, may also die. It seems that this alone is not enough. Relying on some slow strokes of the strings in film music to tell us of impending action, The Americans is built on a somnolent tone which, paradoxically to all intents and purposes, transports its viewers into a calm lull. So frequently are we expected to anticipate something horrific – such as being led falsely to believe that its main character, clad in black leather gloves, would kill a priest for taking a donation from his teenage daughter – that the show no longer toots its horn; the horn has ceased to function.
One could argue that this immersion of serialised drama into a bleak solidity, either aesthetically or plot-wise, is limited to series which lack critical acclaim or Emmy nominations. But even when it comes to Homeland, meticulously acted, polished with the finest sense of art direction, the drama seems to be so irrevocably plunged into gloom that there is nothing left which can be funny. Understandably one can’t expect self-mockery from anti-hero Nicholas Brody; a US marine who has spent six years in torture in the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists. Nor can we anticipate much easiness from Carrie Mathison; the female lead and an unstable, bipolar CIA Case Officer. But Homeland went all out to tell us that not even something banal or routine, nothing with semblance to the average life could ever happen on this show. Brody’s wife Jessica is endlessly depressed – and not because her husband has been brainwashed by Iraqi terrorists and missed out on his children’s lives. She hates lacking the time for trysts with her ex-lover. Her daughter Dana is a disturbed rebel whose idea of frivolity involves making her boyfriend drive them recklessly through traffic and red lights. The ‘act of daring’ ends when they collide with an old lady, ending her life. For a series with a prisoner of war, Islamic fundamentalists and a mostly ruthless band of undercover CIA agents at its centre, the surrounding melodrama is unnecessaary.
Perhaps it’s grounded in the need of television to ingratiate itself with Hollywood movie producers, becoming a copycat in its usage of flash imagery, collectives of flashbacks, or the brand of ‘dark acting’ that customarily imposes incessant frowning, ‘concerned’ looks and a stoicism unseen since its origins in Hellenistic Greece. Or maybe network television wants to originate its own brand of ‘dark characters’, disciplining and carrying their series so much into a murky colour palette that its leads appear infallible and if perchance they err, it is an unimaginable tragedy.
Wherever the reasons begin, ‘lightness’ is not a word one could associate with television drama nowadays. Both its textual and visual fabrics lack the humour, habits and the regular routine most Westerners experience in their daily lives. It lacks moments relatable. In its own thirst for seriousness, it has become a brand of anti-theatre; skipping the opportunity for spontaneity, easy mistakes that plague all human beings, the odd mispronunciation or a miscommunication that either makes our day or makes us blameworthy. Reality has gradually been suctioned out. And there’s no longer anyone to laugh about it.
