“Do you really want to watch TV with me?” Emily Nussbaum scrunched her face, gauging my reaction. She smiled tightly, then plowed forward: “I mean, I get it. But it just seems weird. It’s one of the things we could do. We could watch TV. I do have to watch ‘Chernobyl,’ so we could watch ‘Chernobyl.’ Or I could just describe to you how I watch TV? A lot of the time I’m watching a computer.”
We were in her living room, in the South Slope section of Brooklyn.
Her set-up was modest.
A TiVo machine connected to a flat-screen TV, 46-inches wide, just wide enough to avoid blocking the street-level windows it was positioned between. A dusty XBox, a dusty PlayStation — each at least a generation old. A lava lamp. Across from the flat screen, a couch, and curled on that couch, Bella, her chihuahua-dachshund mix.
So nothing fancy, and itself an answer to her question — why would anyone want to watch TV with Emily Nussbaum? She is the TV writer at the New Yorker, a 2016 Pulitzer winner for criticism, author of her first collection, “I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Though the TV Revolution” (out June 25). But more importantly, Nussbaum, as a critic, feels familiar, as uncertain and exhausted and angered and obsessed by TV as the rest of us. She has become a must-read critic at a time when the role of culture critics at media institutions is in doubt, tied in perception (if not practice) to top-down yays and nays, airless word-of-God judgments that look increasingly antiquated in a social-media age.
That’s not to suggest a Emily Nussbaum review is ambiguous — there’s nothing wishy-washy about referring to “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as a cloying, grating “bright-pink escape hatch” from the gender politics and everyday combativeness of the Trump Era.
That’s not to suggest TV writing was a wasteland before her.
Only that few critics make as strong an argument for the importance of ambivalence, or simply that ambition looks differently on television: She rejects the idea that TV needs literary gravitas or cinematic scale. She makes a case for TV as TV, and not as an inherently “weak sibling to superior mediums.” Fewer critics still are as clued into how the audience’s real-time digital relationship with the mechanics and the creators of television has transformed the way that television is made and how we are watching.
On the underwhelming response to “Game of Thrones” finale: “The real Iron Throne may be the sort of appointment TV that ‘Game of Thrones’ represented.”
On the post-#MeToo legacy of “Louie”: “My mind locks up whenever I think about the series.”
On “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”: “When I was pregnant my unsavory addiction felt something like pica, the disorder that causes people to eat dirt and fingernails.”
“A lot of TV critics even now seem to think their job is holding TV at arm’s length, to remind you of the baggage that TV has carried since it started,” said Mimi White, who has taught TV studies at Northwestern University since the early 1980s. “But Nussbaum is one reminder that a good reviewer is also sensitive to the ways that TV appeals.”
If an old cliche about television holds, that it’s a medium doubling as both family member and furniture, Nussbaum’s New Yorker reviews read as weekly therapy, about the ways this family is joined at the hip. TiVo, for instance. At her home, self-conscious about using the 20-year old DVR service, she said: “Remember when people first got TiVo and it had algorithms to suggest new shows? I liked ‘Buffy,’ so I got kung fu shows. One day I got (the 1948 musical) ‘Easter Parade.’ I loved it! Remember ‘G String Divas’ on HBO? People state their tastes reflexively now, but TiVo used to decide who you were. I didn’t want TiVO knowing I watched ‘G String Divas.’ What would it think of me?”
Like many writers, Nussbaum in person is an extension of her work, casually noting her likes (Tina Fey, reality TV), her dislikes (product integration, Jimmy Fallon), funny and caustic and rambling, with the brisk conversational manner of a Twitter feed, only generous. She meets you with a smiling rush of words, and as the chat goes on, she does not slow. Daniel Zalewski, a features editor at the New Yorker and college friend of Nussbaum, said: “The best thing in the world is Emily Nussbaum trying to explain why you’re wrong and a show is great. Like ‘Oh my gosh, no! Here’s the thing!’ Then there’s a rapid-fire, seductive argument — but one that’s perceptive about your own thoughts.”
When I ask her if she watches “Saturday Night Live,” a cascade of thoughts on late-night TV follow: “Some people get irritated by Samantha Bee and Seth Meyers and what they see as flaunting wokeness, but you know, at least they’re trying to engage. Seth Meyers is smart, that (segment) ‘Jokes Seth Can’t Tell’ is clever, people are put off by things that seem corny or self-congratulatory, which I get but there is good stuff. And look, I was disgusted when Jimmy Fallon ruffled Trump’s hair, which was gross to me, but OK, my point is that this is hard political stuff to pull off and maybe it’s not the job of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ but then I don’t have anything to say about ‘Saturday Night Live’ and don’t want to just offer my take.‘ Though maybe I should be doing that, I don’t know.”
We met at the neighborhood bar where she tends to write, seated in a dark-wooden booth so carved with graffiti that nothing is quite legible anymore. Then we walked to her house, where she lives with her two sons and husband, tech writer Clive Thompson. “He wants to watch TV with me, so maybe, I think, ‘Chernobyl,'” she said, introducing me.
“It’s such a sunny day out,” Thompson said. “Definitely watch a catastrophe.”
She cued up the Kanye West episode of David Letterman’s Netflix show “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman.” The dog slumped against her. She lifted her laptop and took notes, then closed the lid, then opened it a moment later and continued. She watched in silence with a faint expectant smile, then said, “OK, how is it Letterman now comes off weirder than Kanye West?”
My thought exactly.
Depending how old you are, you might be surprised to learn being a TV critic wasn’t always the most obvious path to prestige in journalism. Nussbaum says she gets asked if she always wanted to be a TV critic. “And I think, ‘Why would I ever always want to be a TV critic?’ How in 1988 could this have seemed like a good idea?” TV, she explained, started “as this experimental, wacky form” that took chances on prime-time opera, on live teleplays. “But once TVs got cheaper and advertising took over, it’s not generally regarded as an art form, it’s addictive junk and bad for you. … So for years TV suffered from a hangover because of those origins.” Guilt by association was common.
You could write seriously about theater, books. But whenever TV was smart and thoughtful, the achievement was always couched, as good as a film, as smart as a novel. There’s a legacy of TV critics with clout, including Tom Shales at the Washington Post and Mary McNamara at the Los Angeles Times, but for much of TV’s history, the job somewhat mirrored the B-list role of the medium it covered. Alan Sepinwall got his start as a TV critic in the mid-1990s after writing online recaps of “NYPD Blue”; today he reviews at Rolling Stone. “But when I started, there was no equivalent to Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert. There weren’t those same models to emulate.”
Nussbaum, 53, said she wanted to be a writer, of some sort.
She grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y.; her father, Bernard, was a former White House counsel to Bill Clinton. She didn’t read a lot of criticism, she thought of her influences as Letterman, Steve Martin, Nora Ephron, poet Sharon Olds, cartoonist Lynda Barry. She studied English at Oberlin College, then spent time “as a drifty, crunchy person,” running the children’s program at a domestic-abuse shelter in Rhode Island, working as a real-estate secretary in Atlanta, trying to write a novel. She attended graduate school (New York University) for poetry, planning to get a Ph.D. in Victorian studies, until a “fortuitous” kidney infection put her in the hospital. She had been freelancing for magazines and newspapers, and decided she preferred, as she says, “the pleasurable dilettanteness” of journalism.
But during graduate school she had been watching and evangelizing to friends about the WB’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” She regards the moment now as her “conversion.”
“My odd super-villain origin story of sorts,” she said, “is that I would get frustrated how people would talk, understandably, about the brilliance of ‘The Sopranos,’ but discuss it as more than TV. Whereas ‘Buffy’ was condescended to. It was this beautiful and ambitious feminist myth about sex and mortality — it was trying to do large things, too. The difference was ‘Buffy’ was recognizably TV, the look, structure, the way it was broken by ads, even the title. But when I told someone to watch ‘Buffy,’ it led to arguments. I’m not in that same feverish state for it now, but it made me want to write about TV.”
Even as she studying Victorian literature and freelancing, she was posting anonymously on the early, influential TV forum Television Without Pity, known for its snark and obsessive recapping and conversations that went on for months. She says that if the site wasn’t “quite culture criticism as people knew it, it was a distinctive criticism for a more contemporary era, with a total flattening of hierarchy.” Journalists, fans, artists, TV execs — they were all posting on the site. Two regulars (whom we know about) included playwright Itamar Moses (“The Band’s Visit”) and TV producer Stephen Falk (“You’re the Worst”).
Sarah D. Bunting, one of the co-founders of Television Without Pity, said the site began modestly, out of frustration with the WB series “Dawson’s Creek.” “Which was trying to be ‘My So-Called Life’ and it was sucking at it. … I don’t think we were trying to be mean to anyone but nobody expected better of TV, and better was clearly possible, so why weren’t these people interested in doing better by TV? That was the motivation.”
The follow-through — episode recaps running a few thousand words, a communal dialogue as opposed to the hard-fast judgment of typical criticism — more closely resembled how people engaged with television, as knowing, dyspeptic coconspirators.
Several years after Nussbaum first posted on the site, even after she was hired by New York magazine to edit its culture section, she still hesitated at becoming a traditional top-down critic. Then she decided, “I should feel comfortable saying critical things about television because people are condescending to it. In a way, a negative review of television is a way of praising the medium — of saying it was worthy of serious criticism.”
At New York, she also created the magazine’s most popular feature, the Approval Matrix, a weekly grid bordered by Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant and Despicable, onto which new slices of culture — poetry, film, opera, reality TV, snack foods — is given a coordinate. (It briefly became a TV series on Sundance TV; Nussbaum was not a fan.)
“I guess I have an issue with hierarchies,” she said, “though it’s not as simple as high-low. It’s way more about questioning how (the arts) are set against each other and encouraging something mushier. I mean, my book exists because after I started at the New Yorker, I ran into someone in the hallway and asked what she was watching and she said, ‘Oh, stupid guilty pleasures like “Jane the Virgin.”‘ I unloaded a maniacal speech on her about how it was one of the most thoughtful shows on TV! How it’s a show about storytelling! So she slowly walked backwards and I never saw her again.”
Her new book — largely drawn from her eight years as TV critic at the New Yorker — reads at times like a manifesto, for a new way of talking about television as an art form.
Time, for instance, is a more common subject for Nussbaum than, say, acting. “Because TV is not like a movie, TV doesn’t come out and that’s the thing. TV keeps changing, responding. And the audience is responding. I have nothing but sympathy for TV creators whose shows are huge then they have incredible pressure to come up with an ending. There needs to be language to acknowledge TV happens over time.” The person who creates a TV series, she added, is never the same seven seasons later.
“That’s the nature of TV,” she said, “it happens over time.”
Listening to her, it’s hard not to think of Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s influential film critic, whose writing about movies altered how a generation of moviegoers regarded the medium. Indeed, Nussbaum is often compared with Kael, but she rejects the notion: “It’s a compliment, I know. It’s because we’re both women, both at the New Yorker. We both celebrate culture sometimes seen as junk. But so do others. Also, I didn’t grow up reading Kael.” Besides, added Sepinwall, “Emily may have a Pulitzer but Emily is also not as famous as Kael was, and that’s because it’s hard for any critic to generate that influence now. Nobody doing this job anymore has the power to get a large audience to ask, ‘I wonder what a critic thinks about this.’ That world is gone.”
Before we finished watching TV, Nussbaum asked me what she should watch next. She asks people this all the time. She calls up an app on her laptop that holds a long list of TV shows recommended to her by friends and strangers.
“‘Arrow?'” I offered, randomly.
“I heard that’s good,” she said. “I need to get to that.”
She won’t.
Or rather, judging by the length the list, I doubt it.
The list touches on streaming services, broadcast TV, web productions, old, new. Like you, she feels no need to catch up. Not anymore. No sane person would.
“When I started (at the New Yorker), I had this idea to alternate, network show, cable show, big show, little gem. That’s out the window. I would like to watch more, it’s enriching. But you know what also enriches? Living your life. I used to have a masochistic thing where if I pan a show I had to watch the whole season. ‘It might change!’ Now I don’t do that. I drop shows. I get irritated if a show is bad when there is so much to watch, but I feel self-conscious. I don’t want to hold it against creators of this stuff that I have a job where I get impatient. (For example,) ‘Maniac’ on Netflix. Emma Stone was good, it was cool visually. But pretentious, and in the aftermath, I worried I disliked it more because I was annoyed that I decided to watch it —you know?”
Who doesn’t?
“You don’t want to hold the immensity of choices against anyone. That said, it was a bad show.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
