Thank you, thank you, thank you, Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker. Ms. Nussbaum hits exactly why I was so disappointed in this award winning show from the start. The Wife, The Daughter, and I watched this for a few shows in the first season, and the word Emily Nussbaum uses not enough, "cloying" and "anachronistic," were exactly what I thought. The Wife and The Daughter were merely unimpressed with the show.
Ms. Nussbaum hits the manner in which the parents and in laws are played, but does not mention the two unmentionables which inspired the show's writer: the Seinfeld show (which I think is the single most overrated sit-com in television history, edging out "MASH," and by far the meanest, most morally vacuous sit-com that still defines white, urban aging Baby Boomers and our parents), and the now dead and gone, Philip Roth, who is, as those who know me well, not a very good guide, and highly overrated himself during his life (I expect Roth's literary reputation to fall off a cliff following his generation's demise; trust me on this one). Roth's hostility and then, again, cloying attitude toward his Jewish neighborhood's strivers was at once petulant and tone deaf, as if Roth wished he could be the anti-phony phony Holden Caufield and the idiotic and shallow Jack Kerouac.*
I found the show's dialogue so self-conscious as to make me wince in pain. Nussbaum compares this dialogue writing to Aaron Sorkin, but I think it is worse, and I happen to have loved Sorkin's dialogue in "The Newsroom." For me, the show is the bad and later Neil Simon and bad and later Wood Allen, where every single person who speaks are simply Simon's and Allen's ventriloquist's dummies. I, too, found the weird and twisted rip off, posing as an homage, to Joan Rivers to have been a fatally misplaced effort, and I am ecstatic Nussbaum spoke so brightly about early Rivers' trailblazing ways.** And man, am I glad to not have wasted my time with Season 2 of this terribly overrated show. Nussbaum's characterization of the other character nemesis in Season 2 definitely sounds like the "bad" Joan, though Joan was never overweight.
The only thing the show's writer got right in those first three or four episodes I saw was Lenny Bruce, and the guy who plays him nails him. But it sounds like the show's writer has sanitized Lenny into what I used to ironically call "St. Lenny." I knew Lenny was not so nice to his wife then ex-wife, and that he was definitely a man of his time regarding women in general. Other than that, this show has been an exhibit for the failure of even elite white Baby Boomers and my parents' generations. Plus, there is, as Nussbaum says, much better television out there. I think this particular show only appeals to white, suburban/urban late Baby Boomers and our parents, and it shows how pathetic we've become. Having worked for years for a guy who was the model for the boss in "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," I find I only watch that musical comedy/drama show in snippets The Daughter sends as it is a bit PTSD for me--but from what I see, that show is both brilliant and highly creative, and the dialogue and singing sizzle. And "Broad City" is rough around the edges, meaning it is very, very edgy, but hits home almost every single time.
I find people my age have a hard time with "Rick & Morty," "Bojack Horseman," "The Good Place," and similar shows. I note too that when I post on FB the latest brilliance in "South Park's" Season 22, most Baby Boomers and oldsters on my FB page run away rather than engage with what is going on with the episodes. My age group and our parents remind me of how my grandparents could never stomach "The Twilight Zone" and would literally say they didn't really follow plot lines or understand the ironic endings. I find I have more fruitful dialogues with thoughtful younger people about the feminist oriented shows Ms. Nussbaum mentions and the shows I am mentioning that are not directly feminist. Oh well. Again, I am so, so glad someone has finally come forward in print/Internet in a major cultural magazine to say what I felt since the start of this overrated show.
* Some explanations: Seinfeld is mean because the humor is Calvinist, not Jewish humor, but mouthed by whiny New York Jews. Jewish humor is, "I fell in the mud, isn't that funny, because we all fall in the mud at sometime in our lives." Calvinist humor is, "You fell in the mud. You're a loser." It's Nelson Muntz. Also, too many people, including me, who loved "MASH," now must admit how much the laugh track grates on us, how the show was so full of itself, especially as it aged, and just how mediocre it all really was. As for Roth, let's simply compare Roth to John Steinbeck, and ask who better describes his characters' surroundings. When we visit Salinas after reading Steinbeck, and this happened to The Wife and me, we felt like we had seen it before. No such luck with Roth. I find the only people who understand the environment in Roth novels had to have grown up, like Roth, in it. The other point about Roth, made in the body of the post, stands as my other criticism of Roth. Roth lacked Sinclair Lewis' subtle observation skills, where Lewis likes Babbitt and Gantry, to take two early examples of Lewis' writings. Where Roth liked his characters, he shouldn't have, as in the petulant, misplaced confident male lead character in "Goodbye, Columbus." Holden Caufield, the fictional anti-hero of "Catcher in the Rye," is most misunderstood by readers as he raves against phonies and barely sees until the end how much he has been wearing a different kind of mask. Finally, I wish Paul Goodman's take down of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" was on the web. It is a 1930s radical making fun of the ultimate consumerism in Kerouac's rebellion (cruising around the new and old highways looking for burgers, as if that is a revolutionary act). It can be found in Appendix E to Goodman's "Growing up Absurd" (1960), which main book I recall so angered George Will for decades (no links, but I tried as nothing of Will showed up from the 1970s or 1980s), but now Goodman has nearly as much in common with poet Robert Bly about "manliness," which for modern readers, may likely drown out Goodman's otherwise cogent, trenchant insights, particularly about male criminals and MBAs, and what modern social anthropologist David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs."
** When I saw Mrs. Maisel rip off her top, I said to myself, "Oh my, is this Rusty Warren they are channeling here?" I could not make up my mind if this is Rusty Warren or Joan Rivers to which the show was trying to pay some sort of homage.
** When I saw Mrs. Maisel rip off her top, I said to myself, "Oh my, is this Rusty Warren they are channeling here?" I could not make up my mind if this is Rusty Warren or Joan Rivers to which the show was trying to pay some sort of homage.
