2019 Pleasures
by Rachel Swirsky
In the Trump era, I do less reading than I did in the eras before. Instead, I have been feeding my narrative addictions with some wonderful television shows. TV is getting to the point where I can apply the same critical faculties to it that I do to fiction.
For
instance, The Good Place is a comedy about philosophy and the afterlife
that you've probably heard of before. Eleanor Shellstrop wakes up in
the not-heaven but-basically-heaven afterlife--but she's not supposed to
be there. The show's sophisticated engagement with the discourse of
academic philosophy is the only thing like it I've seen on TV.
Russian
Doll is the most sophisticated single-arc season of television I've
ever seen. It follows the story of a woman who dies over and over again,
only to begin again at her birthday party in the kind of situation we
tend to associate in the US with the movie Groundhog Day. While the
show is left open to continue after the first season, if it ends where
it is right now, it will still be a satisfying narrative. Great
characterization and conceptual development.
Bojack
Horseman, while using a superficially light-hearted cartoon format, is
experimenting with form and structure in a more sophisticated way than
anyone else. Episodes wind together with strange flashbacks and
metafictional intrusions, using techniques from literature and from the
stage in a disjunctive narrative in which never lets the viewer settle
into an easy view of the world.
Two of these
are Netflix original series, and I don't think that's coincidental. The
original content flourishing on Prime and Netflix has been able to get
weird and smart and interesting fast, without having to deal with the
rigorous network requirements for broad popularity. I'm excited to keep
watching where TV goes next, even while the rest of the world seems to
keep exploding.
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