#112 - Hyper Middlebrow-ification
Recently my wife and I have decided to indulge in some television with our very limited free time. In general, I think television is bad and there has not been anything good on TV since season 9 of the Simpsons (1998). In the last decade or so of my life, I’ve found the only thing I truly enjoy watching are live sports and the occasional feature film. Despite my general skepticism of television and most streaming platforms, I still subscribe to many of them.1
We recently watched HBO’s The White Lotus (season 1) and are in the middle of Hulu’s Fleishman is in Trouble. We landed on watching these series based on buzz we had both seen on social media platforms. I am here to report that they both have been extremely disappointing. I’ve found the experience of watching these shows simultaneously frustrating, tedious, and boring.
I won’t go into an in-depth synopsis on either2, but they generally seem to be chasing the same audience. Downwardly and/or upwardly middle class people with college educations and too much time on their hands. They revolve around themes of class, marital conflict, sex, and mental health. Watching them both is an exercise in extreme eye-rolling.
The way the shows are written seem to be designed to both titillate the audience while angering them. It’s a lot of gawking. “Look at these privileged people and how terrible they are. Their existence is rife with hypocrisy!” It is very obvious that the audience is supposed to ingest this message and then think positively of themselves in comparison. “If I were in their position, I wouldn’t behave this way,”3 they say as they sit in sweatpants drinking wine and eating an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
I’m overall frustrated watching these shows because they just seem plainly obvious and I am generally curious why they have gotten so much attention in the first place. There was an equally frustrating article in The Cut, “The Fleishman is in Trouble Effect”4, talking about the hypocrisy of privilege and class, along the frustrations of life in New York. All relevant topics, but engineered for discussion in a way that was not productive and clearly designed to get people “Mad Online.”
My point is that it seems like we are reaching a point in television culture where these types of middlebrow dramas are written in a way to elicit feelings of validation with a side of hopelessness. The perfect cocktail to get those same overly educated and time rich viewers to go online and post about them. Signaling to the rest of the world that they are good people for understanding the hypocrisy of upper class malaise. They seem to be pointing at a general “middlebrow-ification” of culture. Entertainment has to be written in a way that will get people to engage and validate their own middling existence. It’s ok that I feel this way because the people on the TV also feel this way, and reflexively this means that my emotions about this are valid.
In the end the episodes leave me feeling the same way I feel after eating fast food. Disappointed, uncomfortable, and unfulfilled.5
I’m an idiot. I know.
I’m sure that many of you have watched some or all of these shows so I won’t bog this down
You probably would. The entire premise is that attaining that level of status inherently psychotic…or maybe you are a good person after all and I am wrong.
Full transparency this article is one of the reasons why we decided to watch the show.
Yes I recognize my own hypocrisy, posting about shows that are designed to be posted about and I am part of the problem.