On January 27, 2020, the reported death toll from the mysterious new disease in Wuhan grew to 106, stock markets shuddered around the world, and I ordered a state-of-the-art fifty-five-inch OLED video monitor. It was time to hunker down.
Newton Minow said in 1961 that TV was a vast wasteland, and his words became gospel to me. For most of my adult life, I was the worst kind of television snob. In college in the late Sixties, and downtown New York in the Seventies and Eighties, we definitely had better things to do in the evenings. Entertainments were supposed to be high art, or highly transgressive. When I did watch television, it invariably annoyed me. Blathering talking heads, unendurable advertising. A premature cord-cutter, I haven’t had cable in this millennium. I hadn’t watched a series since Twin Peaks ended in 1991.
When Downton Abbey arrived in 2011, I was nesting in San Francisco with a new partner, and we decided to give it a go. (On DVD. Remember DVDs?) And we loved Downton Abbey. Who could not love Mrs. Patmore? Otherwise, we stuck to motion pictures. Streaming arrived, and Netflix and Amazon seemed to be vast wastelands of their own, with few quality films and poor interfaces for finding them. The Crown, still the Mount Everest of series for me, was the only one we watched. We relied on Filmstruck and later the Criterion Channel for art films.
Then the pandemic arrived and we were all stuck at home with time to fill—and, well, there are only so many quality movies. Also, a good movie is a full meal, or at least a full entree. You don’t want two entrees in a night, do you? Television series are more like tapas. You can eat some, and then some more. Some are good for starters, and some make good desserts.
I started watching series TV with elitist intent. Netflix had picked up an edgy indie series called Eastsiders, very gay, fresh and original. As usual, one thing led to another. How about Last Tango in Halifax? Not violent, about old people, stars an actual distinguished stage actor, Derek Jacobi. Reasonably entertaining, in its way. Someone recommended the French series Call My Agent (featuring a dog named Jean Gabin). So much fun I doled it out to myself slowly.
Then an old friend recommended Giri/Haji. Quite violent, which used to make me recoil—but it turns out I loved it! Maybe I could handle the highly-touted The Americans. And I did—for a couple of seasons, until its characters’ impossibly conflicting loyalties became too much of a mind-fuck and gave me bad dreams. But I had fallen for Matthew Rhys. What else could I watch him in? Brothers & Sisters, season after season. Some television-watching friends told me I’m nuts: that’s generic situation/soap trash. Am I developing a problem? No. Perhaps it’s okay just to be entertained, without pretensions of enlightenment.
Since I’ve never seen anything, there’s so much to watch. Police procedurals, of course—Unforgotten (Nicola Walker solves cold cases), The Bureau (French spies), nutsy Money Heist (Madrid mint robbers), Endeavor (Oxford), Deadwind (grim-looking Helsinki, sexy detectives), the new Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys resurfaces). But also the wonderful Borgen (Danish parliament), the saucy Love & Anarchy (Swedish publishing house), lovely Rita (Danish school), The Paper (Croatian newspaper, plus crime), The Last Word (German eulogist), The House of Flowers (Mexico City florist), The Night Manager (arms trafficking), Bodyguard (with its high-level tension and swoon-worthy Richard Madden), In Treatment (crotchety Gabriel Byrne and astringent Dianne Wiest as shrinks), Big Little Lies (crazy rich women in Monterey), Dead to Me (crazy women in Laguna Beach), and Chance (all kinds of crazy in San Francisco). Not to mention the most Zeitgeisty show of all, Russell T Davies’ brilliant Years and Years.
One of the joys of rampant television watching is spotting favorite actors in unexpected places. There’s future Queen’s Gambit diva Anya Taylor-Joy as a child in boarding school in Endeavor! There’s Andrew Buchan, the sad father of the murdered boy in Broadchurch, looking dapper at a party with Prince Charles in The Crown! There’s a very young Olivia Colman in the BBC’s The Office from 2002! And wait—that clean-cut cop in Occupied looks familiar. Yes! In a few years Oddgeir Thune will portray Stone Age man Navn in Beforeigners, naked and gnawing on a raw rabbit in twenty-first-century Oslo.
I try to preserve a vestige of my status as a snob. Most days I watch an actual motion picture in addition to television. This year it’s been fun “going” to film festivals, which used to be inaccessible except to industry types and critics, who would gush about things mortals couldn’t see for months. But now that it’s virtual, I too can be at the opening night of the New York Film Festival.
So for the duration of whatever this is we’re living through, I have a routine. A few hours of television, mostly viewed on my large iMac and heard through wireless headphones. Then dinner, which my industrious husband has usually cooked as his own pandemic therapy. More television. At 10:00 p.m. or so, a movie (or more television) jointly selected and viewed on the big screen, followed sometimes by a video nightcap. The resurrected Dr. Who is perfect for that: cartoon-scary, but the Doctor (especially in his David Tennant incarnation) always makes things right by the end.
I am learning so much about life from television. People all over drink way too much. All parents have difficulties with their teenagers. Scandi-navians (and Croatians) say “OK” even more than we do—and it can mean almost anything for them, too. Most importantly, if you cheat on your partner, or lie to your family or business associates, it will very likely end badly. Despite this, people continue to lie and cheat.
David Hollander, a recovering lawyer, lives in San Francisco.
