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Sunday, March 30, 2008
Beyond Good and Evil?
As the final season of The Wire moved past its midpoint I began reading assertions and arguments that it is one of the three best (dramatic) shows that has even been on TV; The Sopranos and Deadwood are the other two (for example, see this discussion by three TV critics). In point of principle I don’t know about “the best,” but I do know that Deadwood and The Wire (I’ve not seen the last season) are very good. I’ve only seen the first seven episodes of The Sopranos and believe they’re very good. The level of excellence, however, is not what most interests me.
What interests me is that, whatever their differences, all three of these shows elicit our sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law. What’s that about? Is it merely a random circumstance, or does it speak to our historical moment? If the latter, what is it saying?
I don’t have a fine-grained knowledge of just how common such stories have been or, in a large sense, how common they are now. Come stories and lawless frontier stories have been around for a long time. My sense, however, is that they have not always been so sympathetic to the bad guys. Why now? And how long has this been going on?
I note that The Godfather came out in 1972 (was based on a novel that came out in 1969) and produced two sequels. Take that as the beginning this current wave. By 1972 America had been badly divided by the war in Vietnam and by the Civil Rights movement and was about to sail into a period of economic dislocation triggered by the 1973 oil embargo and continuing, through one means or another, to this day. This timing leads to the hypothesis that widespread doubts about legitimate social order led to an “atmosphere” which was receptive to movies (and other fictions) that didn’t depend on the legitimate social order implied by that film. If the legitimate order cannot be counted on to provide just rewards and punishments, then we have to look elsewhere for a moral compass.
That’s my best guess as to why these types of stories have been so popular and so good over the last three decades. Having said that, I need to note that the issue of the moral force of the legitimate order is handled rather differently in these three series, though I don’t pretend to have thought it through. I’m just groping about here.
The Sopranos seems to be the simplest case, at least from the seven episodes I’ve seen. The first scene (beyond the title sequence) in the first episode puts Tony Soprano in the office of Dr. Jennifer Melfi, a psychiatrist. Her job is to help him with his problems, to heal him. That’s our entrée into his world. Whatever Tony Soprano does, good or bad, he has another appointment with Dr. Melfi. He’s just trying to get through his life and she’s helping him.
Where’s the legitimate social order in this story? At this point, only seven episodes in, the justice system – police and courts – seems rather peripheral. But, surely Dr. Melfi belongs to the legit order, as does the priest who hangs out with Tony’s wife. Judging from what I’ve read in the Wikipedia, the priest would seem to be a passing fancy, but Melfi sticks around for all six seasons. Further, at only seven episodes in it does seem that some of Tony’s problems can be laid at the feet of his wacko mother.
The Wire is rather different. As Joseph Kugelmass has pointed out elsewhere in The Valve, it deals with its characters from the outside. Everyone’s trying their best to lead a satisfying life in the terms afforded them by a complicated and contradictory Baltimore. There’s corruption and double-dealing on both sides of the law. Well-meaning people are under pressure to betray and manipulate.
Deadwood is still different. Here we’re in a world that’s beyond the edge of civilization. The first season seems to divide the moral universe between Swearengen and Bullock. The arrival of Cy Tolliver in season two complicates things a bit because now Swearengen has to split the vice business with him but, really, he’d rather not. Meanwhile, Bullock’s wife and son arrive, forcing him to break off his affair with Alma Garret, whom he has impregnated. Things get really interesting, however, when George Hearst arrives in camp. During the third season Bullock and Swearengen manage an alliance so they can stand against Hearst.
Both The Wire and The Sopranos strike me as presenting a world in which different tribes exist in the same territory and interact with one another in the same social system. Each tribe takes its own integrity and interests as the central fact in judging moral issues. The Sopranos invites the viewer to identify with Tony’s tribe – more particularly, with Tony himself – while The Wire doesn’t favor any of the tribes.
Deadwood too presents us with competing tribes. By taking up a stance on the frontier, however, it holds out the prospect of change and even progress. Deadwood’s (the town) future may well be different and better, more coherent. To be sure, George Hearst’s power at the end of season three is very threatening, but who knows what the future will bring? The show itself seems to be halted, its plot unresolved.
What all this means, what it says about our cultural moment, is open to interpretation.
Comments
One advantage that Deadwood has over the other two (I agree superlative) shows, paradoxically in a way, is that it was cancelled after its third series. By luck or judgment the ending of the third series works, I’d say, on pretty much every level ... as a conclusion for the whole, I mean. Had the show been cancelled after series two it would have been a much lesser text. The Sopranos however was sublime for two series, precisely because it was at its heart a show about Tony’s relationship with his mother. Whilst she was still in the story it was unsurpassed telly; once she died, the show dragged itself through a number of contortions about what it was really now about, and being as popular as it was with audiences and advertisers the makers span it out and span it out. Diminishing returns. The Wire is into, what? Five series now? For me Deadwood wins.
I appreciate that this isn’t really what Bill is talking about in this post; but wanted to toss in my ha’pennorth.
In more or less that spirit, let me just note for the record, and with a nod to William Deresiewicz, that I watch these shows and blog about them, not as a concession to teen spirit, but because I like them and consider them to be culturally significant.
Adam, I know there’s been some talk that Milch would finish Deadwood off with two two-hour movies. At this point, however, I don’t think anyone’s holding their breath on that one. The actors are no longer under contract and the sets have been struck. & The Wire has concluded with a 5th season, which I’ve not seen.
In any event, the open-ended nature of these shows is itself interesting. My impression about Deadwood is that Hearst wasn’t intended to be a major figure in the 3rd season. But McRaney did such a smashing job with the character at the end of season two that Milch decided to give him a major role in the third season. OTOH, it seems the Simon had more or less thought through his whole show from the beginning - though I can’t link to wherever I read that. Certainly he’s talked enough about Dickensian plot complexity.
Manga and anime present similar issues.
I’ve found it interesting that so many people reference *Deadwood* without acknowledging that it’s based on a fine novel by Pete Dexter called *Deadwood*. That *The Wire* and *The Sopranos* could also be based on Pete Dexter novels is interesting. Why don’t more people respect Pete Dexter?
I couldn’t be bothered to read all the way through the discussion between the three critics. But how likely is it that the three best dramas on TV ever are really three recently-shown shows? If this was SF being talked about, say, I’d instantly dismiss this kind of thing as part of the fanboy syndrome in which the past beyond the childhood of the fan is devalued and forgotten. Is TV drama really going through such a golden age that all the best shows on TV ever are recent?
I think it’s pretty clear that the triumvirate of very good shows you identify is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of this “sympathy and concern for brutal and violent people, mostly male, operating outside the law.” 24, Heroes, Lost, Dexter, Rome, Buffy and its children… It seems pretty clear that this anxiety about Law and its failures is a clear cultural successor to the previous American zeitgeist: the 1990s conspiratorial paranoia of The X-Files and its clones.
Another thing uniting all three shows is that they all have big sociological ambitions - either to portray a whole society (the Wire and Deadwood) or via satire (Sopranos). They’re not just about their characters.
One thing I loved about Deadwood is the progression of the mining business. It starts with individual little frontier claims, shows their consolidation, and ends with the Hearst combine, and nascent labour troubles (the assassinated Cornish). Alongside that you have the politics as the town bourgeoisie jockeys for position between the states that want to annex it.
FWIW I think the end of Deadwood was terrible, a classic case of commerce cutting a work short before the story was done. The film is never going to happen now as the sets have been dismantled and the cast moved on.
Also, it should be said that Deadwood creators really made an effort on the gender front. Esp. Calamity Jane, Alma, Joanie, and of course Trixie’s rather symbolic confrontation with Hearst.
Do you think so, Mike? The ending of Deadwood, I mean? I’d argue it worked perfectly: which is to say, one of the joys of the show was the rich and subtle manner in which it played against the cliches of the Western: subtle in the sense that it wasn’t a simple inversion of the values of Frontier Heroism (ie ‘contrary to every Western ever made the Wild West was shit and everybody associated with it nasty’), any more than it was a simple re-heroising of those values. Instead it was a wonderfully expressive excavation of and ironic restatement of those tropes: the maverick lawman, the villan, the horse, the barfight or street-brawl, the gold mine and so on, all worked through Deadwood in ways that brilliantly played off against our conventionalised expectations. Since one of the strongest formal or narrative conventions of the Western, or popular cinema/TV more generally, is that everything builds to a climactic gunfight, I personally loved the way series three set that expectation up, moved towards it and at the last moment eucatastrophically simply knight’s-moved in a different direction. I don’t see that the planned two additional feature films would have added much. Though I’d have loved to have seen them.
The only weakness in the third series, I thought, was the introduction of the strolling players: like Chris’s flirtation with Hollywood in the Sopranos, a slightly strained meta-textual reference to the business of making TV shows itself. Naturally for people who work in the media, the processes of the media loom large, and so they want to insert them into their work; but they don’t really fit either Deadwood or Sopranos, I think.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that all three of these are on HBO, either—David Simon has talked about how HBO’s decision to do stuff the networks wouldn’t has opened up an economic slot for really high-quality stuff that doesn’t have to pander to a mass audience. That would help explain the fact that the “best” shows are also very recent, which Rich is right to be skeptical about otherwise.
I would even say that something like the Sopranos or HBO shows more generally have had an uplifting effect on network TV—plus the phenomenon of DVD sales has given networks more of an incentive to push large-scale continuous drama, with some confidence that people will be able to catch up as it gets bigger. (Imagine if Twin Peaks had been on during the age of DVD, or on HBO, for example—my heart breaks that it missed this moment.) It seems at least possible that we’re currently living in a golden age of TV serial drama—and I would argue of TV in general, in terms of variety of programming even on network TV (how long has it been since you had live music, game shows, etc., plus the standby sitcoms and drama, during prime time?).
Another point: not so sure that the specific content of these shows matched up with the historical moment as such. It seems like a more broadly “American” type of theme, reaching back much further than just the Godfather.
Adam (R): I’ll have to take another look at the end to Deadwood. I was disappointed because of the lack of resolution, and that the lack was the result of a series cancellation rather than an artistic decision.
I was going to bring up Twin Peaks and Adam (K) has beaten me to it. The end of Twin Peaks was a great statement by David Lynch against what happened to the show (i.e. its cancellation). Knowing it wasn’t going to be renewed he rewrote the final episode to leave it on the most ridiculously intense cliffhanger conceivable, and almost redeemed it.
I guess the disappointment with Deadwood was that despite the much-trumpeted niche HBO allowed for this kind of show - and I totally agree with Adam K’s point about this - it still cut it off before its artistic time with something of the Twin Peaks effect. The limit of the niche was reached. (Same goes for Carnivale.) The Wire was able to finish where it should have, and the Sopranos… well at least the end was an artistic decision, whatever you think of it.
Adam K: It may be a typically American theme. It depends on what counts as and example of the type. Are, e.g. Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (late 60s) examples? One could say “yes” on the grounds that both focused on characters functioning outside the law; one could say “no” on the grounds that the characters ended up dead and had thus received justice. Even if “yes,” they’re still in roughly the same time-frame I’ve been thinking about.
But, if “yes,” then we may be pushing the boundary of the type to the point where it might just expand into a broadly “American” theme stretching back to e.g. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It would require more extensive analysis than I’m prepared to offer at this point.
Gerry: I’m aware that there are others of the type, though I’ve not seen most of the shows you list. I’ve seen most episodes of Buffy, however, but I’m not sure whether it’s an example of the type. The supernatural save-the-world aspect gives it a very different valence.
Luther Blisset says:
I’ve found it interesting that so many people reference *Deadwood* without acknowledging that it’s based on a fine novel by Pete Dexter called *Deadwood*.
If you poke around the interwebs a little, you will see that the HBO series was not officially based on Dexter’s novel. Dexter reportedly could have sued the producers for borrowing from him, but chose not to spend his time in that way. Or conceivably he doesn’t have a strong case because both were drawing from historical materials. In any event, the relationship between the series and the novel is murky, to say the least.