A colleague of mine has called this era a Golden Age of Prestige Television, as he bragged about not exactly hating being sent to sit at home for an entire year-plus. The evidence may be there. I've heard that since film studios have shifted away from grown-up mid-tier budgeted fare into the factory-for-tent-pole superhero fare, the filmmakers being left out have found home on television.
The foundation for this current era would be the quartet of prestige television dramas: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men.
I'm uniformed about much of what my colleague was talking about. I have taken the time to watch a few things that were recommended to me, some of which I couldn't get enough of (Chernobyl) and some I couldn't finish (Tiger King).
Today, really, what I wanted to do was to say a few things about genre, about ladies that are the unquestioned stars of their programs, and talk about certain realities that are either implied by specific shows, or how those shows imply certain realities.
I named this whole endeavor after an idea the producers of some of these projects had: their idea for a movie turned out to be unwieldy, so they decided to go the way of prestige miniseries.
I'm pretty much doing this in the order Corrie and I watched them, starting with the Kaley Cuoco-produced and starring vehicle, The Flight Attendant:
^^Hey, it's that chick from the Nerd Sitcom!^^
I thought I'd start with mentioning from where these starlets are recognizable. AND, I generally call The Big Bang Theory the "Nerd Sitcom," because every character is a mostly painful stereotype and is written very specifically for guys like me: loads of scientific and mathematical references (yay) but lacking the depth of The Simpsons (boo). It's a strange juxtaposition.
Anyway, the show was on for quite the run, something that makes the future generations of its stars all rather relaxed. Also, it allows them to be choosy when it comes to how they spend their time and artistic capital.
From the episodes I saw of the Nerd Sitcom, I thought that Kaley Cuoco, the hot girls surrounded by the eponymous nerds, wasn't miscast as much as not used enough, or, rather, she seemed more talented than was maybe needed for such material.
Now, afforded the time to run her own production company, and having said company purchase the rights to the book of the same name, she gave herself the opportunity.
Now...the show...not to spoil anything, but Kaley Cuoco's character, Cassie, is a flight attendant with a vodka-chugging problem, who wakes up in Bangkok next to the corpse of one of her first class fliers. She finds herself in the middle of a spiral of intrigue and mistaken identity, or mistaken actions and motives, and, despite herself and the afore-mentioned vodka-chugging issue, she unravels the mystery. There are shades of Hitchcock here.
What I think I liked most about it is that it portrays a highly functioning drunk actually having some success, instead of the judgey, hand-wringing that can accompany such a plot device. It's not on the level of Hunter Thompson, and her childhood certainly comes into the purview of trying to solve the mystery, but...dang, don't we all know a vodka-swilling girl?
Haven't we all marveled at their ability to hold off the obvious train-wreck for way longer than was to be expected? I like that this character was given the starring role in a deep and violent mystery that they should have no business solving, and yet solve it they do. Shades of Jeff Lebowski here.
Also based on a book:
^^Hey, it's that chick from...er...The Witch!^^
Based on Walter Tevis's book of the same name, this miniseries is excellent. It's got the makings of a sports drama, while being hornier than a sports movie starring men would ever be.
It follows the book pretty well, and the book followed the writer's journey through an orphanage and into Louisville, Kentucky proper, substituting the gender and game (chess instead of pool). Walter Tevis wrote The Hustler and its sequel, The Color of Money, about his own experiences in Louisville pool halls.
In this series Beth Harmon is a lady chess player who turns out to be world class, and who also struggles with substance abuse and dependence.
If tense sports dramas are your jam, or watching someone unashamedly excellent at something kick ass all over, and then try to self-sabotage, and then redeem themselves spectacularly, this will be your jam.
The next show we just finished, and is, maybe surprisingly, not based on a book:
^^Hey, it's that lady from Titanic!^^
Where The Wire is about an idea, the failure of institutions in American cities---and specifically in Baltimore---in the first few years after the turn of the millennium, Mare of Easttown is also a show about an idea, only a different one.
If we look at America in a 'Big City,' The Wire's five season is our rubric.
If we want to see America in a 'Small Town' in the second decade after the turn of the millennium, Mare of Easttown is it.
This show is about what happens in Small Towns across America: there's fuck-all to do, so crime and drug abuse is up. There's death and---oddly juxtaposed---babies, all around. Almost all characters in their mid forties are grandparents and almost all know someone who'd either died of overdose or in the midst of an opioid habit.
This is what the opioid epidemic looks like, but also, this is what Small Town looks like: dwindling opportunities and too much time. I'm hoping that not every town is as wracked by tragedy as this one.
Sure, there's a murder that's occurred and the corpse is shown to us viewers at the end of the first episode. But there is already so much tragedy that's unpacked in the preceding fifty-eight minutes that we can only marvel at what these characters are dealing with.
"It's like real life," Corrie kept saying as each scenario deepened and shades of stories I've heard while visiting Oklahoma City kept in my brain. Imagine dealing with: (1) fighting cancer, trying to raise a grandson, staying hopeful that a daughter missing for a year whose opioid dependence pushed her to prostitution will be found alive; or (2) the death by suicide of a father, the death by suicide of a son, the dissolution of a marriage, the custody battle for a grandson with the former-junkie ex of the dead son, while both the dead son and the grandson share specific ticks that could be Tourette's; or (3) a drug dependent sibling that regularly robs you, but they also live with you because where else can they go, until they fall out permanently.
Among those three scenarios are Mare herself, but what you won't find there is probably the most tragic scenario of the entire show. But I won't spoil it.
Maybe I spoiled the entire show, seeing as how it's one of the saddest and realest shows around. Everyone's connected and everyone's been touched by tragedy.
Small Town America in 2020, the show is saying. It's an alternate 2020 America, let's say. I do like that the healthiest relationship choices are made by the gay daughter.
There certainly are miscues that Corrie and I found, or felt like: "That character would never act like that in that circumstance." But overall, the message is effectively delivered.
**
This isn't exactly what I wanted to write about these, but I felt they had some connections, even if I never mentioned them. I think I may have liked The Queen's Gambit most, but Flight Attendant was better than I was expecting. Mare of Easttown, having just finished it, is much closer to the forefront of my imagination, and seems interested in being connected in some way to the idea that it's trying to do something similar to The Wire, that is, it feels like it's trying to be real and say something about a non-pandemic world. It's more ambitious, maybe, in the scope of the tragedy.
Mining the margins for tragedy in any society is easy work, and America is certainly not immune. I guess the real question is: how deep into the mainstream does this tragic margin run?
So...
- Remember that drunk chick who made you shiver while she pounded vodka? Turns out she can get shit done! Sometimes!
- Don't you like watching a badass figure out they are a badass and then go be badass? Maybe have a little hiccup amidst the badassery?
- Mysteries and tragedy: Small Town America today...
