Criticism, the art of having something to say about something trying to say something, is hard. Few can do it well (and trust me, I try all the time and usually fail). Among that small group is the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, whose recently published book I Like to Watch, is a mostly enjoyable, if a bit uneven collection of her essays about television.
Watch readers will be dazzled (and dizzied) by the sheer volume of television Nussbaum consumes and her uncanny ability to divine greater meaning from these programs. There is a strong thread connecting programs like black-ish, Orange is the New Black, and even warhorses like Sex and the City with the broader societal and cultural trends Nussbaum wants to explore. Feminism, race, Trump, and the #MeToo movement are never far from Nussbaum’s gaze and understandably so. Television is often the mirror reflecting where we are in a cultural moment. The book spends a lot of time considering the role of women in the industry, be it as show runners (a lengthy profile of Orange creator Jenji Kohan is tangy with her idiosyncrasies), comic leads (Nussbaum’s discussion of Inside Amy Schumer may be the book’s strongest chapter, her largely sympathetic review of Girls circa Season Two did not hold up as well), or in relation to their struggle to succeed (a remembrance of Joan Rivers is bittersweet - the late comic was both an unquestioned trailblazer and an unabashed critic of how women looked).
To be sure, a collection of backward-looking essays also serves as a reminder that popular culture is often fleeting. True Detective burst like a supernova, sprouting a thousand thought pieces, but the effect was short-lived. Nussbaum includes a piece she wrote six episodes into that first season bemoaning the paint-by-numbers female characters and dissing its two-in-the-morning dorm room philosophical meditations - both of which were entirely justified at the time, but I had to dig through Wikipedia to refresh my memory of the show to even connect what I was reading with what I saw several years ago (do not even get me started on her late-in-the-book rehash of the Lost series finale).
It is left to the long gaze of history to sift the wheat from the chaff. Nussbaum’s essay on All in the Family highlights the relevance of this now nearly fifty-year-old story of a bigoted middle-aged white man from Queens because the current occupant of the White House shares that cultural DNA, albeit in a slicker artifice. The jury is still out on modern programming. Jessica Jones or Jane the Virgin may be considered minor masterpieces twenty years from now or simply lost to history. More broadly, the lines separating “television” from “movies” are increasingly blurred. The uneven final season of Game of Thrones could be viewed less like six stand alone episodes than one nearly seven hour movie. By the same token, the four Avengers movies could have easily been diced into thirteen episode binge-worthy Netflix seasons. Do the designations even matter anymore? Nussbaum does not say because little of what is collected in Watch was written within the past year.
There are some curious omissions from Watch as well. For a book that clocks in at nearly 350 pages, Nussbaum has a tendency to nibble around the edges. In a media landscape so vast, that is understandable. Your tastes are not my tastes are not a critic’s tastes, and when “television” now includes everything from shows that start online and cross-over to pay cable (High Maintenance) to traditional network procedurals (The Good Wife), it is not surprising that these shows and others included in Watch are a bit obscure (I’m looking at you Hannibal, Enlightened, and The Middle).
Instead, I would have liked more focus on shows whose influence is manifest, but the most we get on Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Veep, and yes, Thrones, are passing references in discussions of other programs not worthy of these Mount Rushmore of Modern Television inductees. By the same token, aside from a few pages on The Vanderpump Rules, Watch has nothing to offer about reality television. Now I understand reality shows are mostly empty fluff, but their invasion of the cultural landscape cannot be ignored. For a book marketed as “arguing my way through the TV revolution,” failing to discuss a Survivor or The Real World is like ignoring Lexington and Concord from a discussion of our actual revolution.
My other critique is one I lob often - the need for better editorial decisions. Nussbaum’s TV columns are like intellectual potato chips, addictive little nuggets of writing that leave you wanting more, but the flow of the book forces readers to toggle between these bite-size gems and longer form essays that screw up the book’s pacing. Nussbaum’s tent pole chapter Confessions of the Human Shield is a brilliant, totally absorbing, but nearly fifty-page discussion of #MeToo, her conflicted views on Woody Allen, and a broader meditation on the decades-long pass “men behaving badly” received in show business. The quality of the chapter is such I wanted it to be its own standalone work, but having cruised through the first 100 pages in seven-to-ten page chunks, the tonal shift was jarring. The effect repeated to a lesser degree at other points, where a lengthy profile slowed the book’s momentum (the final chapter, a solid thirty-five pages on Ryan Murphy, was interesting, but felt like a tag on to meet a page quota).
But who am I to complain? The quality of Nussbaum’s writing is apparent throughout, her insights are many, and the value of this book, obvious.
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