What does it mean to be a man? No one really knows, but it makes for some damn good television.
In the first decade of the 21st century, a critical consensus formed that we’re currently living in the golden era of television. Just as trashy, CGI-dominated movies continue to own more screens at the cineplex, a renaissance in long-form dramatic story-telling has emerged on the small screen, but now hi-def screen. DVR and iTunes allowed viewers to follow intricate plotlines and nuanced character development, and smaller channels like HBO and AMC made a name for themselves by developing an artier level of TV drama. Chuck Klosterman accurately claimed that the four best shows of this renaissance were The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, and I’d add a second tier of critically acclaimed but less adulated shows such as Friday Night Lights, True Blood, The Shield, The Walking Dead, and Justified.
When you list out the great shows that make up this television renaissance, certain commonalities emerge: high production values, a greater investment in acting talent, and complex plotting that assumes an audience that never misses an episode. But with the sole exception of True Blood—which has camp enough to put it into a genre of its own—all these shows share something else. Every other non-vampire show centers around a modern man struggling with the limitations of his outlook in a world full of complexity and changes that prevent survival through simple reliance on old gender norms. If you want to make a critically acclaimed drama, you need to build up a patriarch, preferably in a highly masculine environment, and then start to peel away his certainty about the way the world works and what it means to be a man in this world.
♦◊♦
The Sopranos kicked off the trend by creating a character right out of the cinematic tradition of gross masculinity, the Mafioso. Gangsters are such symbols of excessive patriarchy onscreen that the most famous movie of all time about the Mafia, The Godfather, directly invokes paternity, both real and symbolic, as the source of power. But The Sopranos played with this image by putting the focus on the feminine sphere of the home and putting Tony in the feminized position of the therapist’s couch, destabilizing the masculinity of this most masculine of filmic character types. After that, the mold was set. Americans can’t get enough of watching powerful men run into walls created by the limits of narrow, traditional masculinity.
The Wire riffed off similar themes, though as a verifiably protagonist-free show, its examination of masculinity often felt more abstract. Nonetheless, the creators delighted in undermining traditional masculinity, making the toughest character on the show, Omar, a gay man, and the nemesis for McNulty, Stringer Bell, a bookish striver with more of an eye toward a desk job than a life as a soldier. And in case McNulty’s masculine excesses that lead to his personal downfall weren’t pointed enough of their own, the character was foiled by the equally smart but more mature Lester Freamon, who spent his time away from work making dollhouses. It all underscored the larger themes of a show that portrayed the highly masculine worlds of cops and drug dealers as a Sisyphean hell from which escape is impossible.
The cascade of quality TV from there on out never strayed far from exploring powerful men in manly worlds facing the limits imposed by masculinity. Mad Men signals the theme from the very title and title sequence of a man in a suit starting off in an executive office, only to plunge into the abyss, surrounded by the ridiculous consumerist images he creates in his own bid to master the universe. The show delivers on the promise. Most of Don Draper’s problems stem directly from his inability to let go of the fantasy life of the executive: barking orders at underlings, using sex as a way to conquer women, basking in society’s admiration of his perfect nuclear family, and attempting to control the dream world of America through advertising.
During the fourth season of the show, we see how much the creators work the theme of toxic masculinity withdeliberation. Having lost his family and his firm and nearly his life, Don starts turning his life around by abandoning his attachment to old-fashioned notions of male power. He has a reckoning with his underling Peggy, finally seeing her as an equal. He stops dating women because they fit the mold of the compliant trophies, and instead finds some measure of peace dating an independent, challenging woman his own age. He’s happy for a brief moment of letting go his attachment to the role of the dominant male, but by the end of the season, the fantasy of patriarchal power grips him again, causing him to dump his psychologist girlfriend for a much younger secretary. Viewers fully expect season five to start with Don miserable again, in the grip of this masculine model and unable to find a path back to his true self.
Friday Night Lights tells a similar story, but in much more sympathetic terms, and with less misery and failure for the protagonist. At first, the show appeared to be a celebration of the codes of traditional masculinity—and its patriarch, Coach Eric Taylor. However, a close examination of the show demonstrates that it’s also a show about a man with old-fashioned values having to adapt to live a more fulfilling life. Eric’s masculine code gets him to the top of his field of high school football coaching, but soon his manly honor proves inadequate at protecting his job. (In seasons four and five, Taylor moves to a new high school in a much poorer district.) That, coupled with his wife’s and daughter’s increasing demands for more respect and independence, causes him to start stressing out more frequently, ratchets up his stress level as he finds himself facing problems where his strong-but-silent act doesn’t work anymore.
By FNL’s fifth and final season, Friday Night Lights had become, arguably, not just a examination of masculinity but a show with an overt feminist agenda. Coach Taylor is forced to accept, in quick succession, a female student demanding he mentor her in coaching, his daughter’s demands to be accepted as an adult who has to make her own mistakes, and his wife’s demands that he finally, after 20 years of her supporting him, turn around and start supporting her. Slowly, Eric begins to realize that there’s no real reason to fight them. When he comes around to their point of view, he’s rewarded with a happy ending: We see Eric on a field with his new rag-tag team of misfits—college students now—to build into a real team, and we have every reason to believe that his new, more mellow outlook in life will serve him well with his new project.
Starting off as male-centric and then allowing the female characters to bloom and take over more of the show—if only as a counterpoint to the main character’s struggles with masculinity—happens routinely in these shows. Friday Night Lights starts off as a show about a man with a housewife and a football team, and by the third season, it would be better described as a show about a married couple tackling the world as a team, with Tammi Taylor’s career getting nearly as much screen time as Eric’s. Fans routinely joke about how it is that a show called Mad Men beats the rest of dramatic television in crafting fully drawn, fascinating female characters, including characters who are beginning to make overtly feminist demands (and will probably be dropping the F-word before the show is over).
Starting off as male-centric and then allowing the female characters to bloom and take over more of the show—if only as a counterpoint to the main character’s struggles with masculinity—happens routinely in these shows.
|
And, of course, you have Breaking Bad, whose main female character, Walt’s wife, Skylar, spent the first two seasons carrying the idiot ball, existing solely as someone from whom to keep secrets. But once she dropped the idiot ball, wised up to what was going on in her life, and started making decisions of her own, the show kicked into another gear, competing with Mad Men for the best show currently on television.
The critique of toxic masculinity on Breaking Bad may be even more stinging and compelling than on Mad Men. Unlike Don Draper, Walter White does not start off the show a cutting figure of dominant manhood. On the contrary, Walt is portrayed as a weak, emasculated schoolteacher, whose sole source of power, his scientific genius, buys him nothing in a hyper-masculine capitalist world. On the contrary, his smarts appear to have rendered him to the role of the quisling nerd his whole life. Even his choice to enter the world of making and dealing meth is coming from weakness; Walt believes he’s going to die of cancer before he has to deal with the consequences, either from law enforcement or the gangsters that control the drug market.
But as time churns on and Walt’s cancer goes into remission, he becomes more and more obsessed with the idea that his genius at making meth makes him a real badass, the opposite of the nerdy dork that the world sees. The more obsessed he becomes with proving his ability to dominate and control, the more he drifts away from his friends and family, turning in on himself to be eaten alive by his own obsession. Don Draper could be seen as the Hamlet of high-quality TV, drawn to idealized fantasies and unable to deal with reality. But Walter White is Macbeth, eaten alive by boundless ambition and pride. Or, as my boyfriend and I say at least three times per episode during the ongoing fourth season, “Christ, what an asshole.”
♦◊♦
Shows like Justified, The Shield, and The Walking Dead don’t interrogate masculinity as closely as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or even Friday Night Lights, but they still work some of the tropes of troubled manhood to get audiences addicted. The main characters of all three of these shows come from the world of law enforcement, and much of the tension of these shows comes from the main characters facing personal limits stemming from their own views of manhood. Men keep finding more trouble than not from the belief that men should be in control, able to act decisively without help, and able to lead without anyone questioning their authority. The result is addictive, entertaining TV.
But if TV producers stray away from the magic formula of building a show around a powerful man grappling with the limits of traditional masculinity? So far, no dice. The irony is that these new shows about men mine territory familiar to feminism, and could even be described in many cases as explicitly feminist. But for all the feminism on TV, high quality dramas about women haven’t taken off. Women get plenty of meaty, complex roles in these top tier shows, but only as supporting characters in shows centered around men’s gender drama. AMC’s one attempt to build a show around a female character to complement the slate of male-centered shows, The Killing, turned out to be nonsensical and criminally boring. Part of the problem was that the main character, Sarah Linden, didn’t bring any of the internal drama to the table that we get with our troubled patriarchs (or even their complicated female friends). It didn’t help matters when the show tried to raise the stakes for Sarah by making her a workaholic with a whining son and fiancé; audiences have long grown weary of stories portraying women as incapable of having a work life when home life calls, especially when said women have teenage children who can feed themselves.
Other upcoming female-centered dramas that aim to get a chunk of the audience for quality dramas don’t look any more interesting. Pan Am, a drama about stewardesses in the ’60s, seems like it’s trying to be Mad Men without any of the smarts. The Playboy Club looks like it was created by people who are sick of the actresses on Mad Men getting away with wearing ordinary clothes that have zero animal tails stuck on their asses. The non-’60s female-centered drama Smash looks less like a compelling drama and more like it’s a retelling of All About Eve that casts Eve as a sweet-minded ingénue instead of a backstabbing monster.
But for all the feminism on TV, high quality dramas about women haven’t taken off…. I blame the nation’s inability to deal directly with women engaged in complex, dramatic struggles that call gender roles into question.
|
I blame the nation’s inability to deal directly with women engaged in complex, dramatic struggles that call gender roles into question. We are, after all, a country where people can go on TV and call Sarah Palin a feminist without choking on their own tongue. Perhaps the absurdities of being female in this modern era don’t lend themselves well to drama, but have to be approached sideways, through comedy. Women do very well heading up some of the best comedy on TV: 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Sarah Silverman Show.
In the meantime, this feminist won’t feel guilty about watching a parade of fascinating men with power issues butt up against a world where the old, clear-cut rules of manhood don’t apply any longer. In the real world, strongly defined gender roles have started to fail men, and the men who thrive in the changing world are the ones who have the flexibility to get past the straightjacket of traditional masculinity. It’s marvelous to have shows reflects these men’s struggles and victories, and to build audience loyalty and critical acclaim while they do it.
♦◊♦
Main Photo srqpix/Flickr
The Wire Photo mariosundar/Flickr
Mad Men Photo mawphoto.com/Flickr
Friday Night Lights Photo Jeff Moss/Flickr
Greetings! Very useful advice within this post! It’s the little changes that produce the largest changes.
Thanks a lot for sharing!
ho trovato il vostro sito web oggi e ho letto alcuni articoli impressionanti. http://lettereamore.leggiweb.com
I just found the show Justified and am surprised (even though I shouldn’t be) about how testosterone-driven many of the characters are. I find it interesting that the women on the show are gun-toting and ready to kill people just as readily – if not more so – than the guys. Is this equality? I don’t know.
A show i really like these times is “Pretty Little Liars”, it’s pretty girls blackmailed by someone, and dealing about it. The producers didn’t really introduce any brainy character, but they all have their past, history, fears and loves. (I especially like that the show never show sexy girls sexy-for-the-screen. And the lesbian heroin has to deal about it with her parents but after that, everyone is just perfectly fine about it ! So cool !)
Lesbian heroin? Tell me more. 🙂 PLL is a good show. I would argue that Spencer is the brainy character. I would also say the characters are actually fully fleshed out versions of traditional stereotypes. Spencer – the smart one, dealing with the demands of her rich and hypercompetitive family Emily – the athlete, who is having to become comfortable with her sexuality and the impact on her relationships with her family and friends. Aria – middle of the road “normal” kid (who happens to think she’s very mature because of her literary background, who is also having an ill… Read more »
Love this show. I’m all kinds of ready for the Halloween episode tomorrow! @Plop:The producers didn’t really introduce any brainy character… Well that I think depends on what you mean by brainy. (Spoilers) Spencer is at the top of her class in academics (even though she did cheat on an essay back in S1) and the other three liars pick on her about it regularly. Also there is Mona. Before Allison died Mona was actually the typical “brainy” girl that gets picked on by the popular girls. After the one year skip (the series starts with Allison’s body being found… Read more »
Regarding Battlestar Galactica;
Certainly a tv series/movie/book can discuss important themes significant to us and our society here and now regardless of when (past, present or future), or where (in our backyard or in another galaxy) it is set!
But maybe Battlestar Galactica doesn’t suit this discussion (even though it’s one of my all time favorites and has a lot of really interesting characters (male and female) and addresses many important and significant issues and themes) because it is driven by a fairly large group of characters rather than focusing on a few central characters and their development.
“Big Love” discusses gender roles; what it is to be a man, a woman, a husband, a wife. The characters are all struggling to find themselves and struggling with the expectations and limits of their roles. Both the roles of man and woman in their religion, and in the society as a whole. Bill definitely fits the role of the fallen patriarch struggling with what it is to be a good man and husband, and does so surrounded by strong women who evolve and change and come into their own. Barbara, Nikki and Margene are not extras or sidekicks to… Read more »
What about Big Love? Fits both the “fallen patriarch(s)” and the female-centered drama category.
Either way, a good tv show with a lot if interesting female characters.
Other female centered drama, maybe The Good Wife, or Weeds?
What? 1. Sex And the City – a comedy but more successful than any other HBO program besides the Sopranos – if you don’t count the movies. 2.Desperate Housewives – huge ratings bonanza – hour long dramedy 3. Grey’s Anatomy – uh still on TV title based upon the female characters name… drama hour 4. Brother’s and Sisters – hour drama 5. The Good Wife – hour drama Are you not watching TV by the way I love all of the shows listed The Wire and Sopranos and Friday Night Lights in particular except for Breaking Bad which I have… Read more »
“In the meantime, this feminist won’t feel guilty about watching a parade of fascinating men with power issues butt up against a world where the old, clear-cut rules of manhood don’t apply any longer. In the real world, strongly defined gender roles have started to fail men, and the men who thrive in the changing world are the ones who have the flexibility to get past the straightjacket of traditional masculinity.” am and yet the men who HAVE pushed past ‘traditional masculinity’ – feminist men – seem to be less appealing to feminist women, than ‘traditional men’. there was a… Read more »
“In the meantime, this feminist won’t feel guilty about watching a parade of fascinating men with power issues butt up against a world where the old, clear-cut rules of manhood don’t apply any longer. In the real world, strongly defined gender roles have started to fail men, and the men who thrive in the changing world are the ones who have the flexibility to get past the straightjacket of traditional masculinity.” You know, not all defined gender roles are bad. Sure, maybe they’re not for you and that’s fine. But they work for others, and that doesn’t make those people… Read more »
Don’t waste you time Daddy Files. You do realize who this is right?
“Quisling” means “traitor.” Otherwise, nice article.
Breaking Bad is another example of the exact opposite of what you claim it is. That chemistry teacher was a pussy-whipped little man child being dominated by his wife. She was 100% correct in having contempt for him. But then cancer backs him against a wall and he grows a pair of balls. It is a story of how a weak man can embrace a dominant masculine role, protect his family, and regain the love of his wife. Every woman would way sooner be married to the that bald violent shit-kicker than the bent backed high school teacher he replaced.… Read more »
Are you watching the same Mad Men I am? Mad Men is a romance novel fantasy for women – about a world where powerful men bed hot young women. Men are constantly pushing women into corners and then groping, kissing and then bedding them. I have yet to see a scene where women give explicit consent. This of course is because despite what feminists tell society about what women want (equality, sensitivity), what women actually want are dominant men, and all that goes with it. Mad Men delivers this fantasy, complete with a full cast of different types of dominant… Read more »
“Mad Men is a romance novel fantasy for women – about a world where powerful men bed hot young women. Men are constantly pushing women into corners and then groping, kissing and then bedding them. I have yet to see a scene where women give explicit consent.” I write romance and science fiction novels. What you just said is the stereotype of the romance from thirty years ago, not the real thing. I’ve, in fact, never watched Mad Men because the premise as you just described it so turned me off. The vast majority of the romances that I read… Read more »
What an incredibly obtuse and wrongheaded analysis.
Have fun never getting laid, dude.
…or, perhpas, dudette?
Lots of people are wrong about lots of things in boring, trivial ways. The spectacular character of the wrongness of your interpretation of Mad Men is very special indeed.
Just to underline. The wrongness. Really spectacular.
The exclusion of Six Feet Under is notable, as it is often mentioned in the same breath with The Sopranos as the show that helped inaugurate the modern TV drama. It’s interesting that in 6FU, the patriarch character dies in the first episode, and therefore the show becomes less of a “patriarch struggling with the demands of the modern world” show, and more of an investigation (first season) of the damage caused by the patriarch to his own family, followed by various attempts by the characters to re-define themselves outside of his worldview. Game of Thrones is also an interesting… Read more »
Great point about 6FU vs. Sopranos. FemPop has several very informed posts out now on the female characters in Game of Thrones: http://www.fempop.com/2011/09/07/is-game-of-thrones-sexist-part-2-catelyn-as-odysseuss-penelope.
As for women in lead drama roles I want to throw in Rizzoli and Isles and The Closer on TNT and another new show on Lifetime called Against the Wall. Its about a woman who gets promoted to detective but the only opening available is in the Internal Affairs division, much to the joy of her grandfather (who is deceased), father, and three older brothers who are all cops. While gender does come up I have to say that its done in a pretty decent manner such as in one of the first episodes she had to deal with a… Read more »
Those 30 or over will remember the Cosby Show. It’s too bad there weren’t/aren’t more shows like that. It showed what good men and women mean to their families. Although not a drama, it had some good messages. An intact A-A family with two accomplished professional parents who weren’t so preoccupied wiht their careers that they were aloof and disconnected from their kids or each other, and where the father was not a complete baffoon with the mother as the only grown-up in the house. What a concept. Dr. Huxtable was a father who was close to his kids, providing… Read more »
Yes I remember the Cosby Show and you’re right. There were moments when Dr. Huxtable was the butt of the joke but for the most part he was a good dad and husband. Compare that to today’s shows like The Simpsons where Homer being the butt of the joke is a main attraction of the show.
Dr. Huxtable was also the main joke-ster, obviously. I have no problem with him (the dad, the man) being the butt of jokes as long he’s not portrayed as a helpless baffoon child. Everybody should be the butt of jokes sometimes, the dad, the mom, kids, grandma, everybody – because we’re all human and do dumb things.
My mind isn’t made up yet about Fiona, but Madeline Weston is a fantastic character. Much like Sam Axe, Fiona is simply a foil for Michael, while his mother has a much more developed backstory. We also get a better sense that Madeline has a life outside of her relationship with her son. Fiona, on the other hand, is one mean fighting machine, she’s also the stereotypical woman waiting around for Michael to get his romantic act together. I’m tired of her being tired of Michael’s inability to commit. When Jesse joined the cast, I thought she might move on… Read more »
I give the shout out to Fiona because, despite what you say about her relationship with Micheal which I agree with even the hope there would be some serious Fiona x Jesse action, she pretty well smashes the notion that only men can be kickass fighters. One episode this season had her and Jesse planning to sneak into a house full of armed guards. Jesse says it would be best if he went in the house but before he could get the “because…” Fiona reminds him that she will hit him if he brings up gender. But in fact Jesse… Read more »
1) Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and Dexter deserve a place in the pantheon of great recent TV shows, far more than, say, Justified, True Blood, or The Walking Dead. 2) One could write an even more sweeping essay about how the primary theme of recent quality TV is the personal struggle between the will-to-power and morality/humanity in late capitalist society.. Tony Soprano, Walter White, Nate Fisher, etc… sure, these characters all struggle with finding a way to define what it is to be a good man, and do so in part within the context of their relationships with women.. But… Read more »
game of thrones has some pretty strong female characters as well
I’m glad someone mentioned Buffy, Veronica Mars, The Good Wife, and Battlestar Galactica. While Battlestar Galactica was an ensemble cast, it definitely offered some fantastic female characters whose arcs were fundemental to the overall plot of the show. Starbuck, Boomer, and President Roslin were more than just water-carriers for the male characters. The point about women in comedy holds true also for female characters in genre television, but aside from True Blood no other genre shows were mentioned. Here are a few that were overlooked: * Myka Bering from Syfy’s Warehouse 13 * Dr. Helen Magnus from Syfy’s Sanctuary (and… Read more »
Or maybe like the article writer, some people dont want to hear about great women leads
I love this article and love the shows discussed. (Though, like others, I think Amanda dropped ball by being unaware, apparently, of plenty of shows featuring compelling female leads). I’d add DEXTER in the mix, as well, by the way — where Dexter is a man always trying to fit in as a man by adopting the disguises of men. I wanted to add, however, that these themes aren’t new. Nor were they introduced by feminism. They’ve been around in stories forever. Go take a look at post-WWII movies, for example. These kinds of stories are new to *television* —… Read more »
Maybe female dramas are slow to come by because Women for the most part have this wealth of emotional freedom to self identify while Men are confined to defend “MANHOOD AT ALL COST!.
Obviously Woman hood doesn’t need such a vigorous defense because it can’t be taken from women for not holding up the moral code.
I guess thats why Television seems to be flooded with well-adjusted women and Bad Boys ;Bones, House, the Good Wife etc.
this is one Of the best articles that I’ve read in a while.
Show that wasn’t mentioned?
weeds?
Buffy? Veronica Mars? The Good Wife? Battlestar Galactica?
Buffy isn’t a drama and it went off the air in 2003. Veronica Mars was cancelled in 2007 (and IME was more critically-acclaimed than popular, although it has a devoted audience). Battlestar Galactica went off the air in 2009 (also, since it’s set in a completely different timeline, we can’t really expect either the male or female characters to be struggling with modern gender roles). The Good Wife may someday become as popular as the shows that Marcotte mentioned, but it’s not there yet. I wonder if you understand what Marcotte was saying about current television series?
What is Buffy if not a drama? It’s not exactly a comedy or a documentary. And yes, off the air. But off the air after seven seasons. I don’t think you get to dismiss it that easily. As for BSG, whenever its set, it’s viewed now. Which means it has the interpretations of gender that now has just as surely as the SHatner star trek had the interpretations of gender then (women don’t do much, and even having them on board is somewhat surprising).
If you add The Good Wife to the shows Marcotte listed, it would almost certainly be the ratings winner. It’s already more popular than anything listed!
The Good Wife: 13 million viewers, on average
The Sopranos: 8-10 million viewers is a good guess (Nielsen’s methodology for most of the show’s run overstates viewership by counting the entire HBO constellation of channels as one)
Mad Men: 2-3 million viewers
The Wire: somewhere under The Sopranos
Breaking Bad: 2-3 million viewers
Friday Night Lights: 4-6 million viewers
and so forth…
Have you watched The Good Wife? That is a very high quality drama that challenges traditional gender roles…
These shows are just all bad stereotypes and have very little to do about masculinity. What would a woman know about that anyway?
@Bad Man Dude have I got the book for you…’SELF-MADE MAN: ONE WOMAN’S JOURNEY INTO MANHOOD AND BACK AGAIN,’ BY NORAH VINCENT Long story short a Women (lesbian) goes into full drag and impersonates be a man for a year and a half, she ends up in a mental institution. This is an academic observation of the unspoken laws of man. It’s well written truthful and enlightening. But that’s not why you should get this book, No my friend, it’s the payback you want… You should get this book for the payback. The sweet sweet vengeance of having… (warning this… Read more »
But for all the feminism on TV, high quality dramas about women haven’t taken off.
Castle?