Emily Nussbaum on TV’s “Deluge” of #MeToo Plots

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The #MeToo movement of recent years started in the entertainment industry, with revelations about moguls such as Harvey Weinstein and CBS’s Les Moonves, and, since 2017, television writers have been grappling with how to address sexual harassment for a modern audience. Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, examined the issue in a recent essay. Some of the shows she thinks are doing the best job are actually comedies, from the strange animated series “Tuca and Bertie” to the deeply cynical “Veep.” “Maybe there’s been a hesitation to deal with this head-on in drama,” she tells David Remnick, “because drama does, to some extent, at least, require sincerity, and sincerity can be uncomfortable in talking about trauma and assault.” One of Nussbaum’s favorites from this “deluge” of plotlines comes on the show “High Maintenance,” where, instead of some appalling revelation of misconduct, we watch a character reassessing a seemingly minor incident with fresh eyes. “He’s clearly thought about this in a post-MeToo way, as ‘Is this the shitty thing that I did that traumatized a woman that I know? . . . How do I take responsibility for it?’ ” Plus, Ruth Franklin on the late poet Mary Oliver, whose spirituality, love of nature, and unusual directness made her one of the most beloved poets of our time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.2	It's so hard to talk about this, David, because it's like I'm like flipping from show to show.
0:13.5	Everyone should be talking about Fleabag.
0:15.6	They're talking about dragons all the time.
0:18.3	Don't get me started.
0:19.7	I'm not the world's biggest Game of Thrones fan. Actually, do you watch Barry? I do a little bit. Barry is an interesting show because Barry had a very straightforward second season. You know, if you're going to talk about TV with Emily No Spam, the New Yorker's television critic, you'd better wake up early and you better do your homework. I don't know how Emily has the time for all the shows she's watched while writing for the magazine and winning a Pulitzer Prize for criticism while she's at it.
0:43.3	It's no small feat.
0:45.3	But one thing Emily always pays attention to is how television shows can process and reflect on what's happening in the world around us.
0:53.3	Emily, you've got an essay in This Week's New Yorker about Me Too and television.
0:59.0	You call Me Too a deluge of plot lines in television.
1:04.0	Why a deluge and how does it show itself up?
1:07.0	The Me Too movement was a pivot for me because I feel like one of the things that was happening was that, first of all, the Me Too movement affected Hollywood and the television industry. So what you started seeing were plots that were not so much about acts of sexual violence or acts of harassment, which is a whole different subject, but about people considering their own
1:28.6	collusion within the larger system. So some of these are very ambitious and interesting plots,
1:33.9	and some of these are rude jokes on comedies. But for a while when I was watching TV,
1:39.6	there was pretty much not a single show that I could think of, especially among comedies,
1:43.8	soap operas and
1:44.5	things like that, that didn't have a plot like this. There was a very interesting example on
1:50.0	the Good Fight, which is a CBS show that had an episode this year that was called the one about
1:57.5	the recent troubles that was kind of hard to miss as a reference to CBS.
2:02.2	So what was fascinating...
2:03.1	This is the Les MoonVez affair.
2:04.6	Yes, the less...
	...

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