"Taste Hierarchies Like These Stink"

The show understands that people, especially teenagers, have their worldviews built, in large part, through stories other people tell them about themselves. Whether those are stories they encounter on TV or in movies or in rap lyrics, or whether those are stories they hear from their teachers or their family elders or the federal government — the s... See more

When we’re attentive to these series, to their form, their narrative structure, their genre, their history, their cultural context, the dynamics of their production, they reveal themselves to us. (This is, of course, what television studies, as an academic discipline, has always done.) It means we can see concretely what’s unique about a given show... See more

innovations in genre, not inventions of form. These hour-long, prime-time serials owe their existence to all sorts of forebears, but their greatest formal debt is often to the lowly soap. Its plotting, its melodrama, its feel for viewer engagement, its sense of time.

Decades of propaganda about television being bad for you in the twentieth century created this anxiety, but the promotional machine around those early twenty-first-century shows made it chronic: the bizarre need for artists to disavow the medium they work in, and for viewers to disavow the thing they enjoy.

The age of prestige TV has buried that influence deep. The blanket denial of the televisuality of these television shows has turned this ancestor into a shameful secret. So much so that, often, when a prestige TV series is perceived as too much, too excessive, (too female), (too queer), it’s criticized for being too soapy.

On a week like this, I find myself oscillating between two strategies: staring directly at the crisis, and seeking temporary and necessary reprieve from it.

Jeremy O. Harris, who’s a producer on HBO’s Euphoria, tweeted that the show was made for people “with an intellect for CINEMA not the impatience of TELEVISION.”

“TV has never transcended the soap opera or the sitcom, and every ‘great’ TV show is just polishing up one or the other.” This isn’t a particularly controversial point, but it’s one that often gets covered over in prestige papier mache. The Sopranos isn’t a soap, it’s a ten-hour movie. The Wire isn’t a soap, it’s a Dickens novel. There’s got to be ... See more

Criticism, to me, is ultimately a practice of paying attention.