Story time, all the time
I watch The Mindy Project. It's pretty good. In the shifting world of network sitcoms, which have turned out to be so much more varied in style and bountiful in quality than I could have pictured the last time I watched more than one or two per week (circa 1996 or 1997), it's nowhere near the best years of the best post-crash NBC Thursday shows, nor do I fire it up on the DVR as quickly as New Girl, which has become one of my favorite comedies over the past year. But I enjoy Mindy Kaling's voice as a writer, I'm surprised by how much I've liked Chris Messina's work on the show given the many, many performances of his in movies that I didn't care about, and I'm with Mindy Project as it finds its legs, as so many comedies take a season or so to do.
Because I was not paying a lot of attention to Mindy Project beyond, you know, watching it pretty regularly, and mainly just know what my friends who watch it think of it, I was not aware that apparently people who write about TV for a living and other people on that wavelength have been going through a wild rollercoaster of emotions over the show, swooping from hope to moments of love to, more often, disappointment and even hate. I tend to only look at episode recaps/reviews of shows I really like, and even then, I sometimes lose interest part-way through, so I didn't reach much about Mindy Project between its pilot and a couple of weeks ago, when I idly looked through some episode reviews and learned that apparently it's not just a promising new comedy finding its way, but a constant, flailing bungle of a show whose every minute of failure has been chronicled on the AV Club and the like (by which I mean both "other, lesser pop culture websites" and "AV Club commenters," which are basically the same thing. Which is a compliment to the AV Club commenters, general internet-wide comments considered).
Obviously as someone who writes plenty of criticism (and probably too much criticism-of-criticism), it seems silly for me to say, enough, just leave The Mindy Project alone -- because, among other reasons, I can totally make some critical observations about that show and what I think it does well and what it does not so well. I understand the impulse to discuss an episode with fellow watchers, even if I'm not technically discussing; otherwise, why would I be looking at an episode review in the first place?
But this breathless episode-by-episode coverage, though it has become more or less the convention in TV crit, makes little sense to me for most shows, and makes especially little sense for this one. It turns watching a developing show into eagle-eyed nitpicking about when things are going to get better and how much better they're going to get and whether it's time to give up or keep the faith, all with the additional (and bizarre) meta-narrative about how first seasons of comedies work, where we (as critics, pro and amateur) not only now expect them to not be that good and then later improve, but maybe even have (overdeveloped) expectations about when they should be improving, and how, and to what degree. Episode-to-episode reviewing, as its largely practiced now (lord knows it's been going on for The Simpsons since newsgroup days -- though even the most hilariously humorless and didactic Simpsons fans generally kept things a bit more concise back then), evolved from recaps, which leaves a lot of less talented writers or less worthy shows producing weekly reviews that read to me like listless reactions, grasping for something to talk about in the larger culture or, failing that, ways to explain why the storytelling and the beats of this or that episode just aren't up to par.
At the risk of sounding anti-criticism: sometimes you should just watch a show for a few episodes and shut up about it until you have something more interesting to say than "yay I liked this joke!" and "mehhh, this show isn't working." Especially when a show is both relatively uncomplicated on a thematic and technical level, like Mindy Project, and new, like Mindy Project, I don't really see the advantage of becoming an episode-by-episode watchdog over whether the show is being done right.
As I said, this isn't a quarrel with criticisms of The Mindy Project, per se. I have thoughts about the show, mainly that it's still sorting out how to use its supporting cast, and in what capacity, and their temporary solution has been to lean on the Morgan character as much as possible -- and understandably, as he is a very funny character, but has often been shoehorned into episodes where he would've been funnier in the background. I've also, as Marisa and I have mentioned on Twitter, find it weirdly non-New-Yorky in a retro sort of way that fits with Kaling's stated romantic comedy obsession: romantic comedies equal romantic moments at landmarks equals New York City! (Even if said show is clearly shot nowhere near New York City on sets that often don't seem designed to even vaguely look like New York City.) I guess that's a valid use of the city, but after Seinfeld and 30 Rock and Girls so nailed aspects of New York, and shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation broke out of the sitcoms-in-NYC-by-default mode, I wish Kaling had just chosen a different city and made something more specific. But those observations (or, imagine if I had made other, more interesting or insightful observations) did not require breathless, up-to-the-minute coverage to form. In fact, they'd probably be better-suited to a review covering, say, four to six episodes of the show at a time, tracking its progress in chunks rather than 900-word weekly rants.
Of course, not all individual episode reviews have to be so reductive and empty. Donna Bowman of the AV Club, for example, is absolutely brilliant at deconstructing and explaining the mechanics of shows like How I Met Your Mother and, in her retrospective work, Newsradio. Maybe it's more interesting to read because she's an unabashed fan of both, but I also find her work unusually attuned to the details of those shows, not just whether she likes a particular storyline, and hyper-aware of the way production and performance and writing come together in this particular form -- in short, she produces something not unlike good film criticism.
But most TV criticism is not much like good film criticism (then again, neither is a lot of regular film criticism, but that's another meta-complaint), and I think this problem goes beyond writers' facility for episode-by-episode analysis, and beyond even how many shows can actually support that level of analysis. It speaks to a fundamental way that culture writers/observers/etc. approach television.
So let's back up a little: People got excited about The Mindy Project because they loved Mindy Kaling on The Office, they loved her on Twitter, and they loved her tossed-off book of essays. Makes sense. Cut to halfway through the show's first season, and there's a mountain of criticism: the characters are unlikable and inconsistent; the plots are too traditional and sitcommy; Mindy herself is too superficial and possibly too conservative; and in one AV Club episode review that had me nearly rubbing my eyes with disbelief, the central story isn't going anywhere.
The thing is, much of what seems to bug people about The Mindy Project is totally present in Kaling's other work. I haven't read all of her essay book, but what I did read was largely not the work of a renegade left-wing comic genius. It was about liking romantic comedies, and boys who are tall and smell nice. Don't get me wrong: I like Kaling a lot, find her very funny, very talented, etc. But I'm not surprised that sometimes her show doesn't quite have the point of view its youngish, smartish, leftwingy audience wants or expects it to. What was so pleasing and cute in essays becomes less so in a sitcom, where perhaps a fan of Kaling is coming in expecting to feel 22 minutes of pure love every week. In short, some (not all!) of the criticism directed toward The Mindy Project's trajectory (or rather, speculations about its trajectory, as it has at minimum ten more episodes to air) has less to do with whether it's funny or well-executed, but whether the person reviewing it likes or, preferably, loves it yet.
You might say this sounds like exactly what one should be evaluating in a television show, and you would only sort of be right.
For the past bunch of years, since 2004-2005 or so at least, we've been in the middle of a TV renaissance. Because of HBO and cable and even networks (which are a little slower with the cancellation axe now that their business model has blown up in their faces), there is a greater variety of television, covering a greater variety of subjects, attracting a higher average level of talent than you might have seen even ten or fifteen years ago. There are so many shows! I remember when I was in college, I could get away with watching like, two shows regularly, at a time. Even the first few years after, I might try out one new show per season, if that. I remember being a little disoriented when I was suddenly really into Veronica Mars AND Lost in 2004. Now, obviously, there's even more than that.
This led to what has become a now-standard TV-is-better-than-movies-these-days argument, which I've mentioned and argued against several times on this blog (such as it is) over the years. My main argument was and still is that saying TV is better than movies is like saying novels are better than albums. It's kind of meaningless. They do different things in different ways, and just because they're both things that you can watch doesn't mean that it makes sense to do a side-by-side.
But I have another, more obnoxious argument I'd like to add to that: TV seems better, because a lot of TV critics (or pseudo-critics) mainly want to love it.
I don't mean that TV critics are an easier lay than film critics (though some probably are). I mean that the narrative rush of television often renders otherwise smart critics perhaps less able to discern between something great, and something that makes you really, really want to watch the next episode. And in saying that, I don't mean to discount the pleasure of something that makes you really, really want to watch the next episode. That is storytelling, after all. But I do get the feeling that the pleasure of television sometimes supersedes the art of television.
This is, I think, at least partly to blame for the phenomenon of shows (particularly hourlongs) that people absolutely fucking looooove in their first seasons going (supposedly) horribly wrong in their second seasons. Now, I don't watch (for example) Homeland, so maybe the second season did represent a major comedown from the first, and maybe this common form of whiplash has something to do with the difficulty of sustaining a long-form narrative (which could fit into a different argument about how silly it is to declare TV a superior medium). But it happens so often that it's difficult for me not to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Homeland wasn't actually the best damn thing on TV for that first season. Maybe what it was, was a show people really, really liked watching, and now they like it a little less, because they're used to it or because it's novel or, yeah, because maybe the storytelling isn't as good.
I'm not saying people should not have enjoyed or gotten absorbed in whatever season of Homeland really gripped them; I'm similarly gripped by Justified and I think it's a very, very well-crafted show. I appreciate a ripping yarn, whether in books (I recently read Gone Girl in two days flat) or movies or TV. Undeniable craft goes into that, and I can tell you from fiction-writing experience that it is much harder than it looks! But genuflecting so much to narrative and storytelling and beats, beyond making us all sound like a bunch of screenwriting students, can also turn our criticism disappointingly literal-minded. Wanting to know what happens next is not necessarily the highest possible praise you can afford to art or even entertainment. (Recall the embarrassing New York cover story on Gossip Girl, the basic thrust of which was: This show is REALLY amazing and important, because we enjoy it SO MUCH.) Which is how you get a guy at the AV Club who needs to know where The Mindy Project is going, man, or else it's not worth his time.
Obviously not everyone feels this way; Argo, for example, could very well win Best Picture. I can't imagine even its most ardent supporters (and recall that I did like it) arguing that it contains any really provocative ideas, or even that the technical filmmaking in it is vastly superior to, or more expressive than, anything else they've seen this year (unless they've seen mostly crummy movies). It's all about a gripping story. So while I've found criticisms of movies as "TV-ish" increasingly meaningless as TV has gotten more cinematic -- superficially, at least -- I would say that's something Argo has in common with many of the "great" TV shows of our time. It's largely about narrative effect, about what happens next, and the framing and composition and editing rhythm and music and characterization all serve that narrative. Which is usually a compliment, that phrase "all serve the narrative." But some narratives do ask remarkably little of their audience.
That's the skepticism I feel about a lot of television: not that these acclaimed shows are probably secretly crap because indeed, Argo is very far from crap and in fact has been made by talented people and does its job very well, but that a lot of excitement about these shows has to do with how much they please the audience, not more advanced craft or thought-provoking ideas. Fans of this stuff won't describe it as simple crowd-pleasing, because it's not the simplistic pandering sometimes associated with that term. But they will confer a kind of holy status on a show that makes you want to watch more of that show. It's a good quality; it's just not the only quality. And as a measure of quality -- especially if you're some kind of pro or semi-pro critic -- it strikes me as a little crude. I read Gone Girl faster than I read A Visit from the Goon Squad. Does that make Gone Girl a great book?
Obviously, television is capable of more (and obviously, what I consider "more" is not the be-all end-all of the form). The recent episode of Girls, "One Man's Trash," with Hannah spending a weird, dreamy 36 hours or so at Patrick Wilson's house, reminded me so much of a short story rather than a chapter of a narrative that it made me wish more of the show acted like that a little more often (in part because at under 30 minutes per week, the actual through-line narratives of the show must move both too quick, in terms of screen time, and a little slow, in terms of how much can happen). At the same time, I didn't just like it because it was more like a movie than most shows. It was very much an episode of television, because you had to really know Hannah as a character, for the story to be interesting at all, and for its oddness to have that impact. It was also nearly free of the OMG-did-you-see-what-happened factor that seems to power so much loooooove for so many TV shows (until people get sick of them and move on).
Maybe this is why I tend to favor TV comedies over dramas. I feel like I get something out of shows like 30 Rock or New Girl that feels different from what I get when I see a movie comedy, even one I really like. But as much as I like Justified or Boardwalk Empire (which has the serialized thing going on but also has its less narrative-based pleasures: wonderful dialogue, shots that sometimes mean more than "here is the person who the narrative is happening to now"), it's rare that a TV drama moves or amazes me as much as something like The Master or Lincoln or even, if we want to bring stronger sense of pleasure into it, The Dark Knight Rises. The Mindy Project isn't a great show, but rather than a mutating weekly complaint about it not as closely reflecting the sensibility you wanted Kaling to have, or not being a gripping enough narrative (!) for a half-hour situation comedy, maybe we can try watching it without demanding to love it.
Because I was not paying a lot of attention to Mindy Project beyond, you know, watching it pretty regularly, and mainly just know what my friends who watch it think of it, I was not aware that apparently people who write about TV for a living and other people on that wavelength have been going through a wild rollercoaster of emotions over the show, swooping from hope to moments of love to, more often, disappointment and even hate. I tend to only look at episode recaps/reviews of shows I really like, and even then, I sometimes lose interest part-way through, so I didn't reach much about Mindy Project between its pilot and a couple of weeks ago, when I idly looked through some episode reviews and learned that apparently it's not just a promising new comedy finding its way, but a constant, flailing bungle of a show whose every minute of failure has been chronicled on the AV Club and the like (by which I mean both "other, lesser pop culture websites" and "AV Club commenters," which are basically the same thing. Which is a compliment to the AV Club commenters, general internet-wide comments considered).
Obviously as someone who writes plenty of criticism (and probably too much criticism-of-criticism), it seems silly for me to say, enough, just leave The Mindy Project alone -- because, among other reasons, I can totally make some critical observations about that show and what I think it does well and what it does not so well. I understand the impulse to discuss an episode with fellow watchers, even if I'm not technically discussing; otherwise, why would I be looking at an episode review in the first place?
But this breathless episode-by-episode coverage, though it has become more or less the convention in TV crit, makes little sense to me for most shows, and makes especially little sense for this one. It turns watching a developing show into eagle-eyed nitpicking about when things are going to get better and how much better they're going to get and whether it's time to give up or keep the faith, all with the additional (and bizarre) meta-narrative about how first seasons of comedies work, where we (as critics, pro and amateur) not only now expect them to not be that good and then later improve, but maybe even have (overdeveloped) expectations about when they should be improving, and how, and to what degree. Episode-to-episode reviewing, as its largely practiced now (lord knows it's been going on for The Simpsons since newsgroup days -- though even the most hilariously humorless and didactic Simpsons fans generally kept things a bit more concise back then), evolved from recaps, which leaves a lot of less talented writers or less worthy shows producing weekly reviews that read to me like listless reactions, grasping for something to talk about in the larger culture or, failing that, ways to explain why the storytelling and the beats of this or that episode just aren't up to par.
At the risk of sounding anti-criticism: sometimes you should just watch a show for a few episodes and shut up about it until you have something more interesting to say than "yay I liked this joke!" and "mehhh, this show isn't working." Especially when a show is both relatively uncomplicated on a thematic and technical level, like Mindy Project, and new, like Mindy Project, I don't really see the advantage of becoming an episode-by-episode watchdog over whether the show is being done right.
As I said, this isn't a quarrel with criticisms of The Mindy Project, per se. I have thoughts about the show, mainly that it's still sorting out how to use its supporting cast, and in what capacity, and their temporary solution has been to lean on the Morgan character as much as possible -- and understandably, as he is a very funny character, but has often been shoehorned into episodes where he would've been funnier in the background. I've also, as Marisa and I have mentioned on Twitter, find it weirdly non-New-Yorky in a retro sort of way that fits with Kaling's stated romantic comedy obsession: romantic comedies equal romantic moments at landmarks equals New York City! (Even if said show is clearly shot nowhere near New York City on sets that often don't seem designed to even vaguely look like New York City.) I guess that's a valid use of the city, but after Seinfeld and 30 Rock and Girls so nailed aspects of New York, and shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation broke out of the sitcoms-in-NYC-by-default mode, I wish Kaling had just chosen a different city and made something more specific. But those observations (or, imagine if I had made other, more interesting or insightful observations) did not require breathless, up-to-the-minute coverage to form. In fact, they'd probably be better-suited to a review covering, say, four to six episodes of the show at a time, tracking its progress in chunks rather than 900-word weekly rants.
Of course, not all individual episode reviews have to be so reductive and empty. Donna Bowman of the AV Club, for example, is absolutely brilliant at deconstructing and explaining the mechanics of shows like How I Met Your Mother and, in her retrospective work, Newsradio. Maybe it's more interesting to read because she's an unabashed fan of both, but I also find her work unusually attuned to the details of those shows, not just whether she likes a particular storyline, and hyper-aware of the way production and performance and writing come together in this particular form -- in short, she produces something not unlike good film criticism.
But most TV criticism is not much like good film criticism (then again, neither is a lot of regular film criticism, but that's another meta-complaint), and I think this problem goes beyond writers' facility for episode-by-episode analysis, and beyond even how many shows can actually support that level of analysis. It speaks to a fundamental way that culture writers/observers/etc. approach television.
So let's back up a little: People got excited about The Mindy Project because they loved Mindy Kaling on The Office, they loved her on Twitter, and they loved her tossed-off book of essays. Makes sense. Cut to halfway through the show's first season, and there's a mountain of criticism: the characters are unlikable and inconsistent; the plots are too traditional and sitcommy; Mindy herself is too superficial and possibly too conservative; and in one AV Club episode review that had me nearly rubbing my eyes with disbelief, the central story isn't going anywhere.
The thing is, much of what seems to bug people about The Mindy Project is totally present in Kaling's other work. I haven't read all of her essay book, but what I did read was largely not the work of a renegade left-wing comic genius. It was about liking romantic comedies, and boys who are tall and smell nice. Don't get me wrong: I like Kaling a lot, find her very funny, very talented, etc. But I'm not surprised that sometimes her show doesn't quite have the point of view its youngish, smartish, leftwingy audience wants or expects it to. What was so pleasing and cute in essays becomes less so in a sitcom, where perhaps a fan of Kaling is coming in expecting to feel 22 minutes of pure love every week. In short, some (not all!) of the criticism directed toward The Mindy Project's trajectory (or rather, speculations about its trajectory, as it has at minimum ten more episodes to air) has less to do with whether it's funny or well-executed, but whether the person reviewing it likes or, preferably, loves it yet.
You might say this sounds like exactly what one should be evaluating in a television show, and you would only sort of be right.
For the past bunch of years, since 2004-2005 or so at least, we've been in the middle of a TV renaissance. Because of HBO and cable and even networks (which are a little slower with the cancellation axe now that their business model has blown up in their faces), there is a greater variety of television, covering a greater variety of subjects, attracting a higher average level of talent than you might have seen even ten or fifteen years ago. There are so many shows! I remember when I was in college, I could get away with watching like, two shows regularly, at a time. Even the first few years after, I might try out one new show per season, if that. I remember being a little disoriented when I was suddenly really into Veronica Mars AND Lost in 2004. Now, obviously, there's even more than that.
This led to what has become a now-standard TV-is-better-than-movies-these-days argument, which I've mentioned and argued against several times on this blog (such as it is) over the years. My main argument was and still is that saying TV is better than movies is like saying novels are better than albums. It's kind of meaningless. They do different things in different ways, and just because they're both things that you can watch doesn't mean that it makes sense to do a side-by-side.
But I have another, more obnoxious argument I'd like to add to that: TV seems better, because a lot of TV critics (or pseudo-critics) mainly want to love it.
I don't mean that TV critics are an easier lay than film critics (though some probably are). I mean that the narrative rush of television often renders otherwise smart critics perhaps less able to discern between something great, and something that makes you really, really want to watch the next episode. And in saying that, I don't mean to discount the pleasure of something that makes you really, really want to watch the next episode. That is storytelling, after all. But I do get the feeling that the pleasure of television sometimes supersedes the art of television.
This is, I think, at least partly to blame for the phenomenon of shows (particularly hourlongs) that people absolutely fucking looooove in their first seasons going (supposedly) horribly wrong in their second seasons. Now, I don't watch (for example) Homeland, so maybe the second season did represent a major comedown from the first, and maybe this common form of whiplash has something to do with the difficulty of sustaining a long-form narrative (which could fit into a different argument about how silly it is to declare TV a superior medium). But it happens so often that it's difficult for me not to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Homeland wasn't actually the best damn thing on TV for that first season. Maybe what it was, was a show people really, really liked watching, and now they like it a little less, because they're used to it or because it's novel or, yeah, because maybe the storytelling isn't as good.
I'm not saying people should not have enjoyed or gotten absorbed in whatever season of Homeland really gripped them; I'm similarly gripped by Justified and I think it's a very, very well-crafted show. I appreciate a ripping yarn, whether in books (I recently read Gone Girl in two days flat) or movies or TV. Undeniable craft goes into that, and I can tell you from fiction-writing experience that it is much harder than it looks! But genuflecting so much to narrative and storytelling and beats, beyond making us all sound like a bunch of screenwriting students, can also turn our criticism disappointingly literal-minded. Wanting to know what happens next is not necessarily the highest possible praise you can afford to art or even entertainment. (Recall the embarrassing New York cover story on Gossip Girl, the basic thrust of which was: This show is REALLY amazing and important, because we enjoy it SO MUCH.) Which is how you get a guy at the AV Club who needs to know where The Mindy Project is going, man, or else it's not worth his time.
Obviously not everyone feels this way; Argo, for example, could very well win Best Picture. I can't imagine even its most ardent supporters (and recall that I did like it) arguing that it contains any really provocative ideas, or even that the technical filmmaking in it is vastly superior to, or more expressive than, anything else they've seen this year (unless they've seen mostly crummy movies). It's all about a gripping story. So while I've found criticisms of movies as "TV-ish" increasingly meaningless as TV has gotten more cinematic -- superficially, at least -- I would say that's something Argo has in common with many of the "great" TV shows of our time. It's largely about narrative effect, about what happens next, and the framing and composition and editing rhythm and music and characterization all serve that narrative. Which is usually a compliment, that phrase "all serve the narrative." But some narratives do ask remarkably little of their audience.
That's the skepticism I feel about a lot of television: not that these acclaimed shows are probably secretly crap because indeed, Argo is very far from crap and in fact has been made by talented people and does its job very well, but that a lot of excitement about these shows has to do with how much they please the audience, not more advanced craft or thought-provoking ideas. Fans of this stuff won't describe it as simple crowd-pleasing, because it's not the simplistic pandering sometimes associated with that term. But they will confer a kind of holy status on a show that makes you want to watch more of that show. It's a good quality; it's just not the only quality. And as a measure of quality -- especially if you're some kind of pro or semi-pro critic -- it strikes me as a little crude. I read Gone Girl faster than I read A Visit from the Goon Squad. Does that make Gone Girl a great book?
Obviously, television is capable of more (and obviously, what I consider "more" is not the be-all end-all of the form). The recent episode of Girls, "One Man's Trash," with Hannah spending a weird, dreamy 36 hours or so at Patrick Wilson's house, reminded me so much of a short story rather than a chapter of a narrative that it made me wish more of the show acted like that a little more often (in part because at under 30 minutes per week, the actual through-line narratives of the show must move both too quick, in terms of screen time, and a little slow, in terms of how much can happen). At the same time, I didn't just like it because it was more like a movie than most shows. It was very much an episode of television, because you had to really know Hannah as a character, for the story to be interesting at all, and for its oddness to have that impact. It was also nearly free of the OMG-did-you-see-what-happened factor that seems to power so much loooooove for so many TV shows (until people get sick of them and move on).
Maybe this is why I tend to favor TV comedies over dramas. I feel like I get something out of shows like 30 Rock or New Girl that feels different from what I get when I see a movie comedy, even one I really like. But as much as I like Justified or Boardwalk Empire (which has the serialized thing going on but also has its less narrative-based pleasures: wonderful dialogue, shots that sometimes mean more than "here is the person who the narrative is happening to now"), it's rare that a TV drama moves or amazes me as much as something like The Master or Lincoln or even, if we want to bring stronger sense of pleasure into it, The Dark Knight Rises. The Mindy Project isn't a great show, but rather than a mutating weekly complaint about it not as closely reflecting the sensibility you wanted Kaling to have, or not being a gripping enough narrative (!) for a half-hour situation comedy, maybe we can try watching it without demanding to love it.