Recently, I saw this tweet¹
maybe the reason i dont enjoy prestige tv is i am basically happy and well-adjusted and dont identify with any of the fucked up broken husks of people that populate those shows, and its unpleasant to try so i just dont
— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) January 22, 2024
and it got me thinking about the qualities that I do and don’t find interesting in TV, and art more generally.
For reference, “prestige TV” is a term that seems to refer to 1999-present neo-Noir TV shows. Think Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Succession, The Wire, etc. Basically, most of the stuff that HBO is known for releasing over the past 25 years. Among the commonalities between these shows is: I’ve not been able to get into them at all, with the partial exception of Breaking Bad (I watched the first two seasons in college fairly enthusiastically, then got bored during the third season and never finished it.)
Personally, I’ve never been able to like or identify with many/any of the characters on these types of shows, which I’m aware is sort of the point. You’re supposed to watch them make ethically questionable decisions that lead them down an ever-deeper rabbit hole of problems until the showrunners kill them off or the show ends. In some cases, maybe they find redemption at the end — noted film critic GPT-4 claims Walter White’s admission to Skylar that he did what he did for selfish reasons at the end of Breaking Bad is a form of redemption — but personally I find myself having limited interest in a show with a runtime 99% composed of characters making unwise, ethically dubious decisions and even 1% composed of those characters having redemption arcs.
Far be it from me to disparage shows for the inherent darkness of their subject matter. I realize that what I’m saying could be uncharitably construed as the grumblings of someone who just doesn’t like dark shows.
You’re just going to have to take my word for it that I do like some dark-ish shows. That being said, most of them tend to have either an absurdist and/or sci-fi bent to them.
Frankly, my main problem with prestige TV may be that it’s boring. The information density of a Star Trek episode dramatically exceeds that of an episode of any of the shows I mentioned above, as measured by them metric of “interesting things happening per minute of runtime”, let alone an episode of South Park or almost any movie. Make a neo-noir show if you like, but please try and keep the story serialization on the order of individual episodes, not entire seasons, let alone the entire show. If the Wachowskis could condense The Matrix — somewhat unambiguously the most pervasive, enduringly influential movie of the past 25 years — into a bit over 2 hours of runtime, you can condense your show about entitled rich people squabbling over their parent’s company or whatever to the point where each episode is individually meaningful as a standalone work of art. Life is too short to keep getting cucked by HBO’s storyrunners making you watch just one more episode for something interesting to happen.
As much as anything, though, the prestige TV style just feels really affected to me, sort of like overly-ornamented music or sports cars designed to draw attention to how cool they look. A piece of art that feels really cool and zeitgeisty today feels laughable tomorrow — I remember when big room house was all the rage in both EDM and pop music circles. It’s easy for a work of art that effectively says very little to be cool and zeitgeisty, because its authors aren’t going out on a stylistic limb in order to say something. Does Breaking Bad fail to really say something? Probably not, but there are probably shows that imitate it that do.
How is the prestige TV style an affected one? To me, it comes back to the way that the characters behave. In my experience, real-life people generally try and make the wisest decision for themselves and for others under the circumstances they’re in. This is generally not reflected in noir/prestige shows, in which the action is often moved forward by the calculating decisions of others for their own zero-sum gain. Is that an interesting enough premise to make a show or two about? Very probably. An entire genre? Probably not.
1 – a somewhat rare good take from eigenrobot