The Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic, Emily Nussbaum, went from graduate student to TV superfan after watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Since then, Nussbaum’s criticism rejects the idea that there is a hierarchy that elevates certain types of TV (dramatic, gritty, violent) over another (joyful, funny, stylized). She embraces the idea that there are many types of beauty, complexity and nuance in a variety of artistic visions and voices. Her collection of essays, I Like to Watch, celebrates television for what it is, even as the way we consume it changes constantly. Emily Nussbaum has written for The New Yorker since 2011. She is the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism and the 2014 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Previously, she was the TV critic and editor of the Culture Pages for New York magazine, where she created the Approval Matrix, the playful cultural charticle that closes each issue. Nussbaum has written for The New York Times, Slate and Lingua Franca. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Clive Thompson, and their two children. Rachel Giese is an award-winning journalist and the editorial director of Xtra, the world’s oldest LGBTQ2 media organization. Her book, Boys: What it Means to Become a Man, was named one of the Globe and Mail’s 100 favourite books of 2018. For years, her weekly column on politics, pop culture and feminism appeared in Chatelaine, where she was the editor-at-large. She is also a regular contributor to CBC Radio and the Globe and Mail. Giese has taught journalism at Ryerson University, and U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs. She lives in Toronto with her wife and son.
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Book by Emily Nussbaum
I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution
Books by Rachel Giese
Boys: What it Means to Become a Man
Books on TV mentioned in I Like To Watch
I’ll Be There for You: The One About Friends by Kelsey Miller
Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell
I Think I’m Outta Here: A Memoir of All My Families by Carroll O’Connor
The Sopranos Sessions by Matt Zoller Seitz
Other Seminal Books on TV
TV (the book) by Alan Sepinwall
The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli
Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes by Saul Austerlitz
Other Related Materials
I Love Top Ten Lists (article from The New Yorker)
Critic Emily Nussbaum on the charms of modern television-watching (article from Vox)
Critic Emily Nussbaum Weighs In on Best TV shows of the Decade (clip from NPR)
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations features curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches. Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. Marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by The Worst Pop Band Ever.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations
Emily Nussbaum: I Like to Watch
[OPENING MUSIC]
Gregory McCormick: Welcome to Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations, our regular Toronto Public Library podcast series featuring curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
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[music/clapping]
Rachel Giese (RG): I have a lot of imaginary conversations with Emily Nussbaum when I'm watching TV. Her vivid, incisive writing on television has shaped how I think and consume television. When I'm diving into a new show, I can't wait to read Emily's take. Her curiosity and engagement has deepened my pleasure and heightened my own expectations for the medium. She has made me rethink "Sex and the City" and introduced me to "High Maintenance", and my God, this woman can write perfect sentences. I am far from alone in my admiration. Her writing on TV and culture for The New Yorker and elsewhere has won her a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award, and her recent book, "I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution" is absolutely terrific. A collection of past essays and greatest hits, alongside some wonderful challenging new observations about being a critic in the age of Me Too. So, please help me once again welcome Emily Nussbaum to the Toronto Public Library.
[applause]
RG: So, before we dive into the book, I wanna ask you the thing that I feel like you get asked at every dinner party, which is, what are you watching right now and what are you obsessed with? Can we talk about the season finale of Succession?
Emily Nussbaum (EN): Yes, yes.
RG: [chuckle] Okay.
EN: I literally wrote down some shows, 'cause people often asked this and then I forget stuff. I'm sure I forgot stuff anyway. But the shows recently, and we should definitely talk about "Succession", I don't know whether people have seen "Los Espookys", this very funny show on HBO that I love? I just started watching the "Watchmen", which is about to come out and it seems very interesting. "South Side" and "Sherman's Showcase" are two shows that I love. "Sherman's Showcase" is this fantastic sly parody of shows like "Soul Train" and things like that. I could not stop laughing at it. The new season of "BoJack Horseman", which I really think is the show as a whole has been honestly the best TV commentary on the Me Too movement in a lot of ways, in a very surprising way, where they wrote into it. The new season of "Big Mouth", "Our Boys", which is this wonderful HBO show. I feel like I should rip off. Those are things that I'm thinking about right now, but what are you watching?
RG: Well, "Succession" is obsessing me. And I had a friend who tweeted recently that all she wants to do right now is watch "Succession" and then listen to podcasts about 'Succession", and I totally felt that. I just watched 'Unbelievable."
EN: Oh, I forgot to mention "Unbelievable."
RG: Yeah, yeah, which I thought was incredibly smart and moving. So, that's sort of what's been occupying my brain right now.
EN:I don't know if you guys have seen "Unbelievable", but it's a fascinating show. It's really a smart show about this enraging situation in which a young woman was raped and then was actually sued for having lied about being raped, even though she was telling the truth. And it's about the work of these two female policemen to find the guy. In certain ways, it seems like a conventional police story, but it so inverts and flips the ways in which sexual violence has shown and talked about on TV, it's incredibly moving. I think a lot of people have trouble watching it, though, because the first two episodes of... Especially, the first episode of seeing people call her a liar are so hard to watch.
RG: Yeah. And I wanna get to that in a bit further into our discussion, so I wanna hang on to that for a minute, 'cause I think that leads into the centrepiece essay in your book, writing about Harvey Weinstein, which I think that case, that story just broke as you were sitting down to work on this book. But before we get there, I wanna step back to your origin story.
EN: Okay. [laughter]
RG: And which in many ways is you falling in love with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and its impact on how that show really shaped you as a television critic and really shaped how you thought about television. So, can you talk a bit about...
EN: I love referring to it as an origin story because I think it makes me and other television critics throughout these stories sound accurately like super villains. Hit by a radioactive television show.
RG: I was gonna say hero, I was gonna say this is your hero story.
EN: No, no. I think of it as a kind of, like a cheerful super villain. But I was a graduate student in Literature in 1997 and I watched this one episode of "Buffy", which I personally think is a great episode, but it's usually not a very claimed episode. The first season episode "The Pack", for "Buffy" fans. And it honestly had a perverse, transformative, catalytic... It sort of terraformed my whole brain. It was just a strange thing where I became a fan of the show in a very powerful way. I don't think of myself normally as a fan, I'm a critic, but this transformation into a super fan is what made me interested in TV. And this was around the same time that "The Sopranos" had come out and I loved "The Sopranos" and I was also a tremendous fan of "The Sopranos", but I was frustrated by the different ways that people talked about these shows. One of which was treated as this great work of art specifically because it transcended TV and was not like TV, it was more like a book, it was more like a movie. And the other one, which got good reviews but was treated as something that was more of a guilty pleasure, that was specifically like a teenage girl show.
EN: So basically, I walked all over New York having arguments about this with people, until I figured out how to make it into my job, so that's part of what I talk about at the beginning of the book and it sort of sets the stage. But honestly, since then TV has changed so much, so radically, technologically, aesthetically, that at this point, I'm just swimming against the waves trying to figure out my perspective.
RG: But that moment of "Buffy" and "The Sopranos", there was sort of this wonderful confluence of a moment of expansion of channels, of HBO. It's not TV, it's HBO, with this idea of prestige television. And it was also, which I think is very much tied to your early "Buffy" experience, to the rise of internet commentary about television.
EN: Absolutely.
RG: I don't know if folks remember Television Without Pity, which really was... Yeah, it was really the starting place for so many wonderful people who've gone on to write, to create new websites, to be great culture critics. And so, there was also this moment when suddenly audiences could begin to talk back to TV and TV creators. So, I'm wondering if you could talk about also that aspect of coming of age of a critic or entering into your role as a critic at a time when the line between creators and audiences change, that power dynamic shifted.
EN: I think this is a crucial aspect of talking about television. Television is an art form, but television is also a technology and the changes in the technology change what TV can do and how it's perceived. But the fact that there was a radical leap forward and what TV did at the same time as the internet was essentially invented is not a coincidence. I was on Television Without Pity long before I was writing official TV criticism, and one key to it was that it was anonymous. [chuckle] It was just a crazy message board in the way that people are often denouncing, but was to me, really beautiful and passionate. There were these boards where day after day after day, people would continually talk about TV. And one thing about TV, it's a medium obviously, is it's episodic, and historically, it took place over time. So, essentially people could just keep talking about "Felicity" for years.
[laughter]
RG: They're still talking about "Felicity".
EN: And they're still talking about it. And Television Without Pity, unfortunately, sort of turned into a zombie and then went under, as happened with message boards. But the thing is, I feel like the unique thing about TV, and part of what I'm doing in this book is actually doing two things. One of them is trying to celebrate television as television and detaching it from the status anxiety of the past and what began as this constant comparison to other art forms, to say, "It's so good, it's not really TV." And also, to talk about the specific qualities of TV that are worth taking seriously and analyzing. And one of them is actually this loop with the audience, the fact that TV, especially the kind of TV that gives me a season after season, gets made in a loop with audience response. Anyway, the rise of the internet enabled certain things on TV that weren't possible before, like puzzle shows like "Lost", that you had to have people mob solve. Or, frankly, slow or... I'm sorry, what?
[exchange with audience member]
[laughter]
EN: Okay. I was like, "Oh my God, somebody from 'Lost'." No. Or shows that were dense and slow and complex that you actually needed audiences to be able to talk to one another about in a different way. I have this line in the book where I say, "I could probably write a whole essay about the value of the pause button."
[chuckle]
EN: Because TV, when I was growing up, just poured into your living room, it just extruded and then it dissolved and it went away. But then, once TV was a text that you could save and share and rewind and fast forward, people could treat it the way that they treat it online, which is with Talmudic intensity.
[chuckle]
EN: And hate and love and all kinds of things. So yeah, I think that... I'm often asked as a TV critic for a fancy schmancy magazine, do I find something threatening or unpleasant about all of the people recapping and talking on Twitter? Not only am I one of them, but I actually feel like it's all part of the same conversation. There's different languages that you can talk about in TV, but I have learned some of the most powerful things about TV from my access to the global audience online, because it renders the conversation about TV into something that's not just you talking with your friends, but this really big roar. Which is what's happening with "Succession" actually, it's interesting to see.
RG: Yeah, yeah, 'cause I think that the first season was somewhat of a... It was a bit of a sleeper, people was... And then, the rabidity of the fandom that came out with the second season, and again, almost like the puzzle kind of approach to, "When did Kendall make the choice to save his family?" [chuckle]
EN: It was interesting to see... I don't know if you... Spoilers. [chuckle]
RG: Sorry. [chuckle]
EN: But too late, tough, it already aired.
RG: If you haven't watched it already, you don't deserve to have that not spoiled. [chuckle]
EN: It's interesting, when I reviewed the first season of the show, one of the main things I talked about in my review... 'Cause I love that show, but I also felt like the show is bearable in its subject matter, partially because it is a very game-like show. The people on the show are constantly talking, they're detached and talking about the meanness of their family. It's about this Murdoch-like family, for anyone who hasn't seen it, this mean, dark comedy about this rich media-owning company. But yeah, that twist at the end where suddenly people are talking about it as though it's a puzzle rather than a story was intriguing to me, and it's a very TV thing. I had mixed feelings about it, actually,'cause I was like, "If it's gonna turn into a twist, if everything is gonna be about a twist, I don't think that's quite the show that I was interested in watching." But on the other hand, it does create great conversation, so...
RG: Well, and then, if there are these various evolutions in the relationship between television, technology, and audience, the first wave is the ability for audiences to talk back as a show is unfolding, then, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black", which were the shows, the first ones to be released, a full season released all in one go, which then made it difficult for then-audiences to be engaging with something that is ongoing.
EN: And honestly, it was both a help and a hindrance to creators, because they no longer had access to how people were responding to things midway through the season, which is always a tricky thing for TV. One of the things I love about TV is that sometimes both good and bad things come out of just the pragmatic part of it, like the ratings go up or down, or they get pressures from the network, the audience reacts against a particular character and then that character gets written off the show. And yeah, when Netflix came out and suddenly the whole thing was just a set of episodes just released all at once, and then everyone binge-watching them and nobody knowing when to talk about them.
RG: Right.
[chuckle]
EN: It was confusing. It's weird, 'cause that happened just a few years ago, but I feel like I'm still adjusting to it. Because one of the things that I write about a lot in the book, and that was true, actually, with both "Buffy" and "The Sopranos" and other shows is, to me, the power of the fact that shows change because of the way audiences react to them, and when they're made over years, the people making the shows themselves change. And so, for instance, I feel like the brilliance of "The Sopranos" is partially because the creator was so annoyed by the audience worshipping Tony Soprano and treating the show as though it was some sort of theme park of mafia realness, that halfway through the show, he started punching back at the audience and making it tougher to get turned on, titillated, and to enjoy the violence. I think that made the show... One of the things that made it most brilliant is that, and that is because it took place over time. What would have happened if "The Sopranos" came out all at once? I think it would be a different show. But with "Orange is the New Black", I felt like that show changed in between seasons in the way that shows used to change in between episodes.
EN: It's a strikingly different show in the fourth season. I still feel like you feel the show responding to the audience, and also to politics, to the culture. And so, I still feel like that's very much part of it, but I myself am... I love streaming TV, but I worry a little bit about what it does to the medium.
RG: Yeah, yeah. One of the things that has also evolved and I think has been central to the questions you first begin to ask yourself when you were looking at the reception of a show like "Sopranos" being seen as prestige television versus "Buffy", which is seen as a girl show or a genre show and doesn't get the same kind of respect, is that the storytelling craft is not valued in the same way. And you say this prompted you to ask questions. What kind of person gets to be a genius and whose story is counted and universal? Certainly, that's been a lot of our conversations in the last little while about representation in television, which you have... Following your work, you've tracked. And we can see, very quickly, the small rise in show runners and producers who are women and people of colour, whether it's Shonda Rhimes, or Issa Rae, or Mindy Kaling, or Robin Thede, and a casting of ensemble cast that's more diverse like "The Good Place" or "Brooklyn 99." So, even in very sitcommy shows, there's a different thought. Do you think that this shift is a permanent one? Do you think this is permanent shift in how people think about television and who gets to tell stories and who gets to be the genius?
EN: I'm of two minds. First of all, because I just sit in my New York writing my reviews, I always feel a little doubtful of my judgments of what's actually going on in the industry. And I will say, my perception from writing has been, especially the last five years, have just been a true explosion of representation. And the really great thing has been, there's so much of it, that we've been spared the problem of there being one special person from any marginalized group creating a show with all the pressure on them to create good role models and for it to be a healthy show. Once you have a variety, then you get interesting stories. So, to me, it has really been a good period, especially for women creating TV, for people of color, and then, the last few years... It's weird, when "Transparent", "Orange is the New Black", "Girls" and "Scandal" came out, those shows were all put under a specific kind of pressure that doesn't exist in the same way anymore, because people have the advantage of so much variety. The big breakthrough year for me was when "Black-ish", the Shonda Rhimes shows, and "American Crime" were all on ABC. Because I was like, "This is really a big deal." There's three African-American show runners, they're making completely different kinds of shows. So, nobody is going to look at them and just be like, "That's the Black show runner."
EN: So anyway, that's great. But whenever I go to Hollywood, people don't act like things are a utopia, especially when you talk to women in Hollywood. I was just out in LA and I was really struck by the contrast between my utopian excitement [chuckle] about the wide variety of voices and people's lived experience of being in meetings. So, is it permanent? It feels that way to me because of the expansion of TV, the hugeness of it pretty much guarantees that there are small slots where niche audiences can watch things, so whoever's producing those shows can take greater risks. So I feel like that makes it more likely that this will be an ongoing thing, but I have to say that's not what TV history shows because TV history is the history of there being waves of representation that then recede.
EN: That happened in the 70s. It's happened several different times. And each time people who were in communities that were excluded from storytelling got excited and were like, "Here it comes", and then it went away, and that's kind of what I thought was gonna happen at first but I wonder whether the technological changes make it something more permanent. And certainly the greater power of show runners from these communities. It's interesting, the show contains profiles of Jenji Kohan, Kenya Barris and Ryan Murphy. And when I wrote this profiles only Jenji was at Netflix and then Ryan Murphy made this monster deal [chuckle] while, I was working on the thing. And now Kenya Barris is also there. The rise of these kinds of normal Leo like powerful super show writers who have devoted their power to getting more voices out there probably will also have an influence.
RG: Yeah, on the issue of representation. One of my favorite essays of yours, and I know one that is really significant, and meaningful to you is the one you wrote on Sex and the City. And it really, I think that is one of the most... Your most popular talked about... You've received the most attention for that piece. And it's interesting, I think again, in this moment of representation to think back on a show like that, which again was a show that I think was written off as fluff, because it was a show created by a gay man about women. But you make a really strong case for it... And I wanted to talk about what... What you wrote about and why you think that struck such a chord.
EN: Well, I write this in... When I put that in the book, there's a little intro that points out that I was very nervous when the piece came out. I actually remember spending the weekend being extremely anxious because, in general, when you wrote about sex and the city, historically there was a lot of hostility, you tended to get trolled and then the piece was wonderfully well received, and I had this realization that all you have to do is wait 15 years after a show is ending. Then you're relieve with any of this pain. But I used to argue about that show quite a lot while it was on the air. I wouldn't say that it was treated as fluff, I feel like it was treated as a very important but also it was a punching bag, but it was also a very popular show.
RG: The water cooler show.
EN: It was a water cooler show that people talked about, and that was like the jumping off piece for a million thing pieces, but the actresses on it, were also the source of a lot of hostility and there were these running jokes about them, it was all those things that once it's more in the aftermath of the movies that it kind of was treated as an embarrassing taste. And that's part of... I don't always write pieces with a goal, but I'm literally "I'm going to reclaim the reputation of Sex in the City. Here's what I'll do on the page." So I actually think that helps the piece because the voice of it is very much vaudeville manifesto, [laughter] which everybody has. Everybody shapes their voice as a writer, and there are... I'm proud of the piece because I feel like it's not just that I try to make an argument for the show and the show's importance, and the show's aesthetic ambition, which is part of what I'm talking about there's... I felt like in a somewhat sexist way, it had been written off as "It's a fluffy sitcom about sex" and I was like, "Actually the ways in which the show is upsetting are connected to the ways in which it's interesting and powerful," but also the piece is written to seduce and talk people into something that I felt like they had become averse to.
EN: But the ironic thing is that I feel like the effect of that piece was not what I expected, 'cause I think there are a lot of especially women who love Sex and the City, and felt uncomfortable about their love for it, and every time they talked about it, had to say in the way that people sometimes say about other shows, too, like the source of this book with somebody saying to me... "Oh, I just watched guilty pleasures like Jane the Virgin", and then I got mad and giving the whole speech, about How great Jane the Virgin is. Never saw them again. But actually I got a million letters from women who love Sex and the City, and were like, "Thank you because you give me ammunition". Actually, I think it ended up being instead of something that went out into the world, to talk people into something, went out in the world as kind of a support group for people who already loved it. I still think the show is really fascinating and worth talking about, but I know a lot of people find it very dated and I like to talk to those people.
RG: Yeah. Well, I think that it's interesting. I...years ago after the show had come out, I think Candice Bushnell had just written a book or something. And I interviewed her and I asked her about the relationship between her original...
EN: Conception.
RG: The conception of it and how actually greedy, and dark the New York she was writing about. This was New York of the pre-boom, 80s when things were pretty greedy, and there was a lot of tension between what would be the kind of Wall Street yuppies rising and the creative class beginning to be shuffled to the side because of gentrification. And I actually think that darkness did exist in the show. If you look for it, it was there, the kind of tension in that.
EN: They were both there... It's really interesting in the way that I'm fascinated by the nature of TV, being the nature of collaboration and that's not true with every show. There are more shows that are made kind of as one person, or two person sings but Sex and the City was created by Candice Bushnell writing a very... As you say, a very dark border line nihilistic kind of column that was a memoir column about her own sexual adventures transformed into an imaginary character and then that characters came and poured into the body of Sara Jessica Parker who brings her own charisma, and sense of humour and then Michael Patrick King wrote for her, with a staff, all of single women who used their own experiences. So you can't... Where did that character come from? Like that character is a combination of the function of all sorts of things.
EN: And then many people found her both a role model and a warning, and people were very unnerved by the character of Carrie Bradshaw. And part of what I read about it is this arguable, but I think worth arguing [chuckle] point that Carrie Bradshaw is essentially a sort of a female anti-hero. In that she's designed not to make female audiences go, "Oh, she's so great. Me Too, Me Too. Like here's our plucky little heroine", but to actually feel very nervous because she expresses all of these hideous feminine terrors of being needy, and sort of too much, and I feel both protective of her, and I remember when I first watched the show being very unnerved and put off by her. I think that's why she's a powerful character. But when you think about that collaboration, it's true and I think that that little strain of anxiety that comes from the original material, can't be separated.
RG: Well, and I think you... 'cause you also... I mean that idea too, of the female anti-hero. That laid the groundwork for another show that actually I just got into recently, which I know you love, which was Enlightened, which starred Laura Dern, which again, is a messy screwed up female protagonist who is unlikable in many ways, is troubling, makes terrible choices and I think it's almost like audiences in some ways needed to be educated to receive a female anti-hero.
EN: You know it's funny. I have this theory about a lot of interesting and original television shows that there are 1-ep, 2-ep, and 3-ep shows and that the best shows really require you to watch at least three episodes. I'm not somebody who says "You need to watch six" I think it's mean. There's a lot of TV.
[chuckle]
EN: Not everybody likes everything. But there are shows that are strange and they need to teach you to watch them and Enlightened is definitely one of those. And for anybody who hasn't watched it, Enlightened is this brilliant show that probably initially when you watch it feels like cringe-comedy and it very much is a kind of mirrored to Curb Your Enthusiasm and it's also probably... There's a lot of these complicated anxious mockumentaries that all proceed from the British "The Office" and this is one of them. But that character who is an LA New Aged-oriented Do-Gooder, who drives everyone crazy and is, herself, a little crazy, but is kind of the nature of a whistle-blower. Which is essentially what that shows about is about the crazy making whistle-blower, who can push back against the world. I mean, it's a great show and it completely holds up and it makes me cry so hard given that it's some sort of comedy. It's a brilliant and unusual show.
EN: And actually I didn't write this piece for the book. I was going to, but then I got waylaid. [chuckle] But I had this whole theory of this modern female type of character that I once talked about on Twitter and a bunch of people chimed in in that Twitter brainstorm way. And I was like, "What is this character of the sort of eager beaver, female do-gooder, who makes everybody a little bit nervous and is a little off-putting in that way?" And we ended up calling her the hummingbird. Because of this kind of high strung... And I ended up... I might someday write a piece about this, But tracing it back to Diane Chambers on Cheers and through a little bit Leslie Knope. A little bit... There's a couple of characters I think you could probably think of a few that are out there. I felt like this was an interesting modern type of TV characters and Amie Angelica on Enlightened is probably the high point of that. And I think that sometimes audiences have a hard time dealing with someone like that because of their desire for female characters to be good role models to women. Which I find a boring idea. [chuckle]
RG: Off the top, we were talking about “Unbelievable” and before we get into the centre piece that say about Me Too, I wanted to talk about an issue that comes up in a number of your pieces, which is how sexual assault and sexual violence have been tackled on television. You've written about Kimmy Schmidt. You've written about Law and Order SVU. About Jessica Jones. And all the ways in which we have female protagonist addressing sexual trauma or sexual assault. And I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about what you like that you've seen, what you think is interesting and even if you wanna bring in a bit of “Unbelievable” into it.
EN: Well, I did find... I mean I'm very interested in the portrayal of this stuff on TV, and I sometimes I'm in opposition with people who really feel, "don't show this on TV", it re-traumatizes people, it can be... And it's undeniably true that there are bad portrayals of sexual violence on TV. Part of my general feeling is that if there are more women on TV and if there are more women's stories being told on TV, sexual violence is going to be part of the... It's the part of the drama of women's lives. And when you tell stories, you talk about dramatic elements of their lives. This is gonna be a part of it, it can be done poorly and it can be done well. And I have this piece on SVU which is right in the wheelhouse of the kind of show that I think people sometimes like sometimes people think of as junky and sometimes people think of as exploitative.
EN: And I mean it is. I mean part of what I write about in that piece is that the junkie-ness of the show is what makes it watchable and the audience for that show is largely female. Female audiences are interested in the reflection of these experiences, by the way, obviously it's not just women because there's a lot of stuff about sexual violence against men on TV. It's hard to summarize this subject, but it definitely came up enough that I have a section of the book called... It's not in praise of sexual violence but it's in praise of sex and violence 'cause I'm interested in the nature of how graphic stuff is shown on TV. Kimmy Schmidt was fascinating to me, because obviously that's not explicitly a show about a rape victim, but it is totally a show about trauma and it's coded as a funny colorful sitcom and...
EN: To me it's not a perfect show but that's a powerful experiment. It's a way of using... Instead of using melodrama or using a police show to talk about it. It was a way of centering the story around the experience of the survivor and that's, to me, been the big breakthrough in a lot of ways in the last 10 years of television is that there has been this multi-layered portrait of women that has included, sometimes on shows that have nothing specifically to do with this, back stories that have to do with sexual violence. Anyway, I'm having trouble talking about this because I realized it's one of those things where it's hard to talk about. Reality TV is so many different things.
RG: Sure.
EN: Sexual violence is so many different things. It's just one of those things where I feel like some of the most major breakthroughs on television have had to do with shows that had this at their centre. I don't know if that will remain true but unbelievable to me was a change because they really went out of their way not to film the actual scenes that have to do with the rapes in ways that played into... Aside from moral questions, just cliched visual storytelling. They really tried to avoid that. But a part of those was just an amazing performance by... Who was the actress who played the role?
RG: Oh, gosh.
EN: What's her name?
AUDIENCE: Dever.
EN: Yeah, Kaitlyn Dever.
RG: Kaitlyn Dever.
EN: And she was on something else?
RG: She was in Booksmart.
EN: She was in Booksmart if anybody's seen Booksmart. What a great year for her. It's an incredible role but the difficulty is you're forced to go so deeply into her experience of having to tell this terrible story over and over again and be disbelieved and seeing the ways in which her behaviour kind of contributed to... 'Cause she used to have this difficult life and stuff. I know people who couldn't get to the second episode but that was like, "Keep going." Because the truth is it's not a depressing show in a lot of ways.
RG: No.
EN: It's a stirring show that takes seriously, experiences that are often left to the side. So, I think that's a valuable thing.
RG: And I think that show also landed at a moment when I think there was all kinds of questions about who was a plausible victim, who was a credible victim. How do we tell stories about our pain? And before we open it up to the Q&A I do want to get to this essay.
EN: Right. The essay, sorry. Speaking of trauma. [chuckle]
RG: Speaking of trauma. So, there's a remarkable essay that comes from midway through the book entitled "Confessions of the Human Shield" which addresses the Me Too movement in the weeks following the Harvey Weinstein revelations and your own grappling with men who do terrible things and how do we deal with this art that's created by men who have done terrible things. And you open it by talking about your own love of the work of Woody Allen. And I wonder if we could just start there and talk about that.
EN: Yeah, I mean... Well, I can talk about that. I do wanna say this is a piece that I wrote because my book leave was in December of 2017, so I thought I was gonna write three or four other shorter essays and instead I wrote this piece that is not meant to solve anybody's problem about separating the years from the art but is a much more personal piece than I usually write. And the reason I started with Woody Allen is that he was a massive influence on me as a child. I feel like it would be completely dishonest to act as though his sensibility, his sense of humour, who he was, was not a base code for mine. It very much is.
EN: And I think that this is part of the difficulty in talking about these subjects, is that there are certain artists in certain art that shapes who you are and you can't separate yourself from it and it would be dishonest to act as though you can. And especially as an art's critic, what I was writing about in this piece was this question about like, "What do I do as these revelations come out?" Because that fall especially it just felt like a volcano opening and I don't think I'm the only woman who went through this thing that a friend of mine called the audit where [chuckle] you're just thinking back on your whole history and not even necessarily about... Sometimes about traumatic events, but sometimes just about like, "Where did my values come from? Where do my ideas about power come from? Where do my ideas about what qualifies as rebellion as..."
RG: Even you talk about your ideas, even about whose opinion of your work do you value.
EN: Right. That is... Yeah, I have this line in it that sometimes people brought up where I was thinking about how there was a level at which I felt like I took for granted sometimes the praise of young women who I expected to and somehow I had overvalued the praises of certain older men because they seem more difficult to impress and I was like, "What does that mean? I mean a lot of it is not actually about... I mean through the piece I trace my responses to Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski whose "Rosemary's Baby" is one of my absolute favorite movies, Louis CK. I'd talk about a lot of different people but one of the things I try to do in the pieces, both talk about my own experiences and also take this work and experiment out loud with what it means to write the kind of criticism that doesn't ignore the work and its connection to the people who created it, doesn't separate them, but actually wrestles with it and takes it seriously. But I also have to say, I try to make the case in it that you cannot just push away the work or act as though it's nothing but a confession or work.
EN: I don't have a solution for this, but for instance I talk about Bill Cosby who I was not actually a big fan of, so I didn't have that problem where you love the artist so much that you have trouble giving up their work. And who is undeniably a serial rapist who not only that but used his job to gain access to his victims. So it poses a very particular ethical question. One of the things I say is, "You cannot delete the Cosby Show from TV history because TV history does not make sense without the Cosby Show. The Cosby Show is what expanded the patriarchal franchise of Father Knows Best to other populations. It's the precursor to Atlanta and Black-ish, it's the mirror to the original Roseanne. And so, I just talk about the fact that somehow you have to talk about the show and I think it's meaningful not for everybody, but for a TV critic to actually watch the show and think about what the show was doing and why the show was so powerful and what Bill Cosby, as a prominent male feminist which is what he was on that show was doing in the culture. It's easy to just dismiss it and wanna push it away, and erase it, but I don't think that's valuable. So part of what the piece does is experiment with and try to make the case for actually wrestling with this material that seems very radio-active right now.
RG: Well, and also, I mean, to the point you made earlier is how collaborative television is. So the Cosby Show, isn't...
EN: Isn't about one person.
RG: Yeah, he'n not the sole author of that show. There are other people who made careers, who contribute. Again, I think there's this idea that you can single... It's actually not possible to separate the artists from the art because the art is not the sole property of the artist.
EN: Also the essay's kind of a mourning piece, for me, because I really am struggling, certainly when I was writing it, I feel a little detached from it now 'cause I wrote it, it was published in a book and now people read it. They can have their own opinions. But it's a somewhat emotional piece because I was really trying to think out loud. And so, sometimes as I've been touring with the book people say, "So what's the solution?" like can you separate the artist from the art? And I'm like, "5.2" it's not like that. And also, I do think being an art critic is just a different thing. It's different than being a consumer or having an argument about what you do with somebody's art that now disgusts you.
RG: And the last thing I wanna ask you, just as this has gone forward, Ronan Farrow, your colleague... His book has just come out or more is just about to come out and he talks about his reporting of the Weinstein case, but also about Matt Lauer and also looks at not just these men, but the kind of impenetrable wall of people that allow these guys to continue to behave the way they behave, that the power structure itself. And how enmeshed, entangled that is the impossibility of it. And I'm wondering just your reflection two years after you wrote that essay with what has come to pass over the past two years in our conversations about... in the Me Too movement and with these new stories coming out. Do you have... I'm not asking for any answers or solutions, but new reflections on... Or things that you're now grappling with.
EN: I don't know that... I love Ronan's book and Ronan is fantastic. And it's weird, 'cause I was in the office right before the piece came out, and I still remember talking with my boss and he was like, "Well, we're about to put out this piece." [chuckle] The only thing I will say... This is just a little bit about Ronan, and not about the two years since, was I truly believed at the time that the stories came out, because I had a very cynical feeling about the whole thing. 'cause often exposes and stories about wrongdoing have come out in the past and then that door has slam shut. So I remember encouraging people who were thinking of talking to reporters. I kind of was like, "Everyone has to do it right now, everyone has to talk about it right now because basically in three months, nobody will be talking about this, there will be an immediate backlash."
EN: And I was wrong. I'm not the only person who thought this by the way, I remember talking to some other colleges of mine, including feminist investigative journalists who just had this feeling of, normally, that's what happens. That's not what has happened. Like it's continuing to be an expanding and changing conversation. I don't know that I have a clear new thought on that. The piece is called "confessions of the human shield". [chuckle] So, I'm clearly concerned with that issue about collusion and the role of the larger machine in that, but I'm excited to see how people react to Ronan's book. We'll see, I don't know that there's a specific thought. The only thing that I have to say is that, that piece felt very raw when I wrote it and I was nervous about it coming out and it was helpful to do the audio book. [chuckle] Because I got to read it out loud.
EN: It was a weird quality. If you ever have a chance to do anything like that, where it was like, "Oh this is very helpful". And uploading it into my brain. And then that made it into more of a finished project. And then I actually felt good about the parts of it that were personal. I just felt more comfortable with them. Because when I was actually trying to put together the book, I was like, "I normally write criticism", so I was like, "Why am I writing a piece that has all of this very emotional material about me thinking about my own personal history?" But I think it was valuable and I feel like it holds together and it's part of a larger conversation and I've been interested in reading... I think it's brought out that from a lot of other writers where people end up contributing personal essays ends up being part of what's going on.
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