In some respects my brother thirteen and I-- twins-- are on reverse complementary trajectories. Formerly fit in my 30s and 40s, I occasionally teased him about some weight that he had put on in those same years. I came to regret it when the shoe was on the other foot. He chided me for voting for Nader and not for Gore in 2000; in 2016, we had some words over my tepid attitude toward Jill Stein and okayness with voting for Hillary. He frequently introduced me to exotic entertainment like Spongebob Squarepants, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show and Colbert Report. I lived most of my adult life somehow without ever subscribing to a cable service. I'd take him up on some of his recommendations with rentals from Blockbuster. He had to practically twist my arm to get me to try Netflix. Netflix is where I got addicted to Mad Men at the end of Season 4. By the start of season 5, I took advantage of an upgrade to my internet service by adding cable so I could watch it in real time. When I proudly announced my life change to my brother, he informed me that I was bucking a trend away from cable; he had coincidentally just dropped his cable provider to go totally a la carte with his entertainment.
I experienced Mad Men as something like a dream, as though someone had made a visual representation of my 1960s childhood fantasy of what adulthood was like as I leafed through oversized issues of Look and Life magazine losing myself in the cartoon glamour of the ads. Furthermore, it captured some of the gothic drama of suburbia that I absorbed by osmosis of a working class version of it. It read like a thick juicy Pocket Book edition of Mailer, Cheever or Roth. I was curious whether it would evoke similar feelings in my brother. I made a pitch. I could not interest him. By this point, he and tv had mutually turned each other off.
To watch or not to watch became a periodic topic of conversation for us. Not just about Mad Men but about television in general. His view was that tv which should be a public commodity was in our culture a cheap manipulative stolen medium that was designed to hypnotize the masses in order to line the pockets of motherfuckers and to cheapen everything it touched. Mine was that while this was no doubt true, given the ubiquity of it and the oceans of time that had to be filled with programming some of which had to be produced by creative, intelligent, hopefully occasionally subversive people, some it was bound to actually be worth a watch every now and then. After a while I could hear myself dog paddling to justify my complicity in the theft of the commons by broadcasting leeches. After all, TV is really the IV, the delivery system of the opiate that keeps most of us distracted from alternate possibilities, acquiescent about the lives our lords and masters prefer us to lead, drained of passion that isn't directed toward some desired object of consumption: a car, a detergent, a celebrity, a politician.
I overheard Matt Christman recently talking about appointment tv as a poor but essential substitute for literature in this hypoliterate age. The bottom line in publishing and the monopolization of bookselling has perhaps priced out risky, challenging books, and ensured a tiny fractured audience for those that still get produced. Yet people still want what we once got but no longer get from literature, and appointment tv has become the delivery system for it. This could explain why so much tv is artistically and aesthetically aspirational by design. While the model for the production of television is prohibitive to the possibility of true art actually coming out of it, it's better than a kick in the head. In my experience there has been a proliferation over the past 20 years or so of television that dazzles the eyeballs, manipulates the heart rate, provokes the sensibilities and then evaporates within seconds of turning off the appliance that conveyed it to you.
In the spirit of this, I humbly urge you, since I know it's pointless to urge my brother thirteen, to please avail yourself of the entertainment services of the Netflix television series, Love starring Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust, Produced by Judd Apatow and created by Apatow, Rust and his wife Lesley Arfin. I was skeptical going in, but I think I saw a charming interview with Rust somewhere at the start of season 2 and it inspired me to give it a try. We all know that it being appointment tv it is incapable of succeeding at being literature, but I confess that it does things to my brain as I'm watching it that feel very much like nourishment. It is a comedy, a hilarious comedy presented by very talented comedians, by a producer who has been very successful at capturing a young, male audience for bursts of non-threatening, non-challenging fun. And it is fun. But maybe the writing is above average. Maybe the chemistry of the cast is exceptional. Maybe the aspirations are aimed at the viewer's head as well as at the groin. For whatever reason this show is rich in nougats that feel almost nutritional in value. Netflix, don't just thank me, pay me.
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