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Emily Nussbaum is a critic who had been writing about television as an art form years before virtually anyone else considered it one, when it was still a point of pride for intellectuals to not have a TV set in their home. Her recent essay collection, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, is a collection of 32 essays that include reviews, profiles of TV creators, and more general meditations on the television landscape, most of which were previously published in The New Yorker, where Nussbaum is the television critic.
She begins with her essay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that made her want to be a TV critic in the first place. She describes watching the show when she was a grad student at NYU studying literature, and how it “spiked [her] way of thinking entirely,” and gave her reason to believe that art centered on the perspectives of young women ought to be taken seriously. Her male classmates dismissed the show as a soapy teen drama, which is when Nussbaum began interrogating the structures of genre, gender, and quality within in a medium that still wasn’t considered to be real art. In another genius essay on HBO’s Sex and the City, Nussbaum recasts Carrie Bradshaw as TV’s first female antihero, belonging in a category with Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and the other male antiheroes who’ve populated “the Golden Age” of TV. She asks why Sex and the City isn’t given the same credit as The Sopranos in launching HBO’s quality television model.
She descibes debates with her male colleagues in the academic world about these questions of gender on TV, recalling, “When I proselytized for Buffy, or debated my fellow graduate students about Sex and the City, the fight felt like a way to hash out other questions — questions of values, which were embedded (and often, hidden) in questions of aesthetics. Centrally, these were arguments about whose stories carried weight, about what kind of creativity counted as ambitious, and about who (which characters, which creators, and also, which audience members) deserved attention. What kind of person got to be a genius? Whose story counted as universal? Which type of art had staying power?”
For Nussbaum, the gender question on TV is also the genre question. Why is a show about violence more serious than a show about sex? What does it mean for a television programs to be praised only for their proximity to film or literature, never within the context of their own medium? Shows centered around females (Buffy, Jane the Virgin, Sex and the City) draw from traditional television genres like soap operas, telenovelas, and cable dramas, while shows centered around males are always described as cinematic. Nussbaum argues that transcendence of the medium is not the point, that shows don’t have to be better than TV to be good, they can simply be good TV.
The collection is chock full of Nussbaum’s sharp and insightful reviews, and favorites of mine include her takedown of the sexist first season of True Detective, her dismantling of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel‘s artificial airs, or her hilarious review of the reality TV program, Vanderpump Rules. In one of the only essays in the collection that was not previously published, Nussbaum attempts to navigate television in the #MeToo era with a thoughtfulness and honest self-interrogation that is so refreshing. She discusses her relationships to the bad actors exposed by the movement—she is a lifelong Woody Allen Fan and interviewed Louis C.K. the week allegations against him began surfacing—and provides one of the most interesting commentaries on what it means to separate the art from the artist that I’ve ever read. The collection reinforces how all of Nussbaum’s work is infused with this quality of thoughtfulness, this genuine effort to engage with the subject matter and generate meaningful discussion. This collection feels generous, witty, culturally sharp, and well researched, capturing the work of a woman who has guided her readers through the rise of one of our most dominant entertainment mediums with absolute grace.