I don't know if she deserved to be the villain, but she's still pretty annoying in this piece.
Reality tv was where I first started to step away from popular culture. I just couldn't watch it. It was worse than Friends.
This part is interesting:
When I was cast on the show, I was very explicitly told only one rule--"Be your 21st century self, but with 19th century tools and technology." This was it. I was constantly reminded that I hadn't signed up for an acting job, I wasn't supposed to pretend to be anyone other than who I was. It was fine if I was a "feminist," but absolutely no tampons. I took this seriously, although I did eventually manage to get tampons, perhaps my one true crime.
--and yet later they (the participants with at minimum some editing-based amplification by the producers) decided to say the primary rule of the show was, uppity women get back in the kitchen. Very 2005.
Whoops, I dropped a "not" in this sentence:
It's also [not] disobeying the rules.
The annoying people defense movement has, shall we say, a steep hill to lift.
On the contrary, there has never been a better time in history to be annoying.
from wikipedia:
"A run-in with a camp of Comanche Native Americans and the spotting of several stolen horses leads to one vaquero being held captive and negotiations between Mr. Cooke and the Comanche leader"
Sounds like the producers must have had quite a task making the Jewish woman into the most annoying one.
Maybe Musk could hire them as consultants.
That's a fascinating and not very surprising story. Before my daughter went off the college (in 2004), we watched a couple of 'reality' shows together, and it was totally obvious that the production teams was intentionally manipulating the participants to produce drama.
It's amazing that we as viewers think we know those people, or Johnny Depp, Florence Pugh, or any of the rest of them.
Lisa Kudrow's show The Comeback is caustic about reality programming, as well as about much of the rest of television. Probably accurate, superficially funny, but fundamentally deeply bleak.
The work OP had to do on the show sounds grueling.
We watched one of the House shows, a British version set in a manor house pre WWI, and it seemed pretty unattractive for the working stiffs.
I should probably have said that the author is the partner of someone I know (though I don't know them very well & have not met the author).
My cousin Alex, the very first Bachelor, was pretty clear that storylines were constructed through steering and editing.
The Ultimatum: Queer Love is agony. The annoyingness quotient is difficult to overstate. It makes an unusually compelling case for heterosexuality.
14: what about making a case for turning off the TV or at least changing the channel? What compels people to watch a show that causes them misery?
The Ludovico technique apparatus.
15; You've seriously never enjoyed anything by hating it?
That reminds me, it's candy corn season.
"Before my daughter went off the college (in 2004), we watched a couple of 'reality' shows together, and it was totally obvious that the production teams was intentionally manipulating the participants to produce drama."
Are there people out there who don't know this? Are they the ones who also think professional wrestling is real?
17: OH, Smearcase! Such a twisted aesthetic, that you can't even imagine a simple and pure person that enjoys watching what they love, and avoids what they hate!
But, no, I'm not that person. And yet, I can't imagine choosing to watch a show that I would describe as "agony". When I think of a TV show that was agony I think of the Wendy Williams show, but I only was watching that, because I was in the waiting area at the ER and so I wasn't allowed to turn off the TV or change the channel.
My wife likes to watch shows full of annoying people who are impossible to sympathize with. I won't watch them with her. We are currently, however, watching Succession,* which she accurately points out fits precisely into that category. I like it a lot more than she does, and I am at a loss to explain why. It really is normally the sort of thing I despise.**
*No spoilers! We're only in Season 3.
**I will say that I have a bit of knowledge of the real-life milieu, and the show is above average in getting the details right. And the actors are tremendous. But that still feels insufficient to me.
I couldn't even stay in the same room when my wife was watching Succession.
shows full of annoying people who are impossible to sympathize with
Who attracted empathy on Breaking Bad? I guess early Walt, Skyler, and Flynn? I don't think of myself as evaluating TV this way, but just recently enjoyed Reservation Dogs a lot because I empathized with the kids on the show, also funny and I liked the supernatural interludes.
I am at a loss to explain why.
Most reality shows, the people are performing lower-middle-class or nouveau-riche, right? There's some social glamor to Succession that lacks.
24: Am in the middle of Reservation Dogs and generally enjoying it. Am finding it refreshingly unpredictable and nicely whacky which can be hard to pull off. I thought High Maintenance also did that fairly well.
24: Walter White is an anti-hero who one often admires in a perverse way. (Tony Soprano likewise.) When Skyler was being evil in opposition to Ted (didn't she basically threaten his life?) I was rooting for Skyler.
Maybe "sympathy" isn't the precise word I'm looking for, but the idea is that there is nobody in Succession who I want to see win. (I maintain that the genius of Pulp Fiction is that in each horrible confrontation, the person you are rooting for ultimately wins.)
To tie it back to the original post, the quality I find impossible to watch is people who are annoying. The main characters in Succession (and most of the minor characters) are grating.
25: I don't think that's it for me. True, it's a high-stakes narrative, but the show works hard to reduce everything to petty, stupid conflicts.
I kind of feel like grating is a subspecies of annoying. How are you drawing the line between them?
27: David Chase made it absolutely clear that nobody was supposed to admire Tony Soprano after Carmela goes to the psychiatrist in whatever episode that was. That people ignored what the showrunner was putting down says much more about people--and the depravity of our culture--than it does about the show. Likewise, Tony Montana and, more recently, Walter White. And yet, people wore t-shirts with those characters' faces on them. Then we elected Donald Trump president. Go figure.
No spoilers please. I haven't seen either the Sopranos or Breaking Bad yet.
No spoilers for me either, please. I haven't watched the 2016 election yet.
I haven't seen Scarface yet either, but I have a reasonable idea how that ends.
28: I didn't mean to be drawing a distinction. My intent was to say that I don't like TV shows populated entirely by grating/annoying characters, and I'm puzzled at why I like Succession so much. The performances really are terrific, though. Everyone is so persuasively irritating.*
*I use that word as yet another synonym for grating and annoying.
32: Don't tell me who his little friend is!!
29: I saw a guy in the subway who was dressed like Walter White, including the pork pie hat. I had to talk to him. He just thought White was cool and enjoyed dressing like him.
I finally figured out that Trump has that anti-hero thing going for him. His charisma eluded me until I understood that his appeal and his evil are inseparable.
I always thought that the caption for this picture should be: "Mitt Romney negotiates the terms of the sale of his soul to Satan."
Trump wisely keeping his hands out of sight for the VF photoshoot.
Is it that strange for people to root for characters portrayed as evil? That goes back to Milton at least.
Absolutely despicable characters? With zero redeeming qualities? About whom the showrunner has painted a giant sign that reads, "THIS PERSON IS MONSTROUS! DO NOT ROOT FOR THEM!"? Yeah, I think it's a sign of a certain amount of moral rot that these characters nevertheless become culture heroes.
(This is not at all the same thing as loving watching terrible, appalling television that one also hates.)
I wouldn't describe Walter White, at least, as such - he had plenty of redeeming qualities as the audience was getting to know him. His decline was the point of the show, sure, but it was in a sense the showrunner's primrose path for the audience. (Gilligan did probably think at some point the audience would have to snap and start despising him, and was surprised that only some of them did.)
I was talking about Tony Soprano. But by late in Season 3 or early in Season 4 of Breaking Bad, it was absolutely clear that Walter White was irredeemable, wasn't it? I don't recall the precise timing. Regardless, that didn't stop people from wearing the t-shirts and thinking of him as admirable.
Absolutely despicable characters? With zero redeeming qualities? About whom the showrunner has painted a giant sign that reads, "THIS PERSON IS MONSTROUS! DO NOT ROOT FOR THEM!"?
I mean, Milton's version is literally Satan, so.
Note: I have neither read Paradise Lost nor seen most of these shows, so.
Succession is funny, and extravagantly overwritten. (Like Tarantino, which I hadn't noticed before.) Part of the genius of the show is the very gradual displacement of humor with horror.
38: He had to deal with losing his stapler and his job, but they didn't even fire him so he couldn't get unemployment. I don't see why people are calling him Satan just because he blew up and empty building. He was just a working guy pushed to far.
Teo must really hate the workers is what I'm saying.
I did just let my new employee clock out ten minutes early, though.
30,000 people attended Clyde Barrow's funeral (or viewing). Sure people hated banks and cops, but that's still a lot of people.
I do like the Arrested Development assholes.
Fortunately, I know what a banana costs.
I'm interested in von's explanation for why people watch Breaking Bad or the Sopranos. I contend that it is NOT because they are rooting to see justice served on these evil men. I am also curious as to whether von perceives any difference between anti-heroes and villains.
Teo gets me in 44. Satan is a recurring figure in literature and TV, and pretty much always presented as a charismatic anti-hero.
42: But this is all wrong! Walter White was a terrible human (even when he was a teacher), but he was also a tragic figure who had a genuine moral compass that was compromised in horrible ways. In the end, White repented his flaws and tried to make amends.
I was ok with the ending of Better Call Saul, but I thought Jimmy's sort-of redemption was cheaper and less earned than Walter White's. White killed Nazis, freed Jesse, confessed his fault to Skyler, killed the evil Lydia, and made financial reparations to his family, which he had abused. And all of it was entirely in character.
(And my goodness, what a performance by Bryan Cranston!)