At the urging of my two sons, I have thrust myself into the world of streaming television. I was aware of how popular certain series were, but I had carefully avoided them on the grounds that life, especially with a heart condition, is too short. However, the boys, whose opinions I value, told me that I was missing an important part of contemporary culture, and so began my binging odyssey.
On their recommendation, I started with Mad Men, a series set in the world of Madison Avenue advertising in the Sixties. Thinking I would just give it a try, it quickly proved to be an addiction. Very well written, acted and directed, it recreated the era in which I was raised, and I found the verisimilitude exacting. The characters, though all of them loathsome, were engaging, and, despite my best intentions, I watched it through to the end. Why? Because I just had to find out what happened to the members of this odd and predatory sub-species.
Having had a taste of the binge, I next turned to Breaking Bad, which both boys assured me was well worth my limited time. Though a bit more uneven than Mad Men, it shared two salient characteristics: it was well written, acted and directed, and the characters were all despicable. But again, I was hooked, and I endured to the end to see how the creators would resolve this complex puzzle of contemptible people engaged in the worst sorts of anti-social behavior.
Now thoroughly infected with the binge bug, I undertook the Breaking Bad spin-off, Better Call Saul, which traces the prequel career of the sleazy lawyer, Saul Goodman, explaining (at least to the extent that it has reached) his journey from failed ambulance-chaser to monumental disgrace to his profession. Again, the show, though less even than either of the others, was engaging, well acted and written, and generally well directed. It was a brilliant idea: anyone who had watched Breaking Bad would be unable to resist the backstory of the meth master's attorney-cum-confidant, played with charming unscrupulousness by a very good actor, Bob Odenkirk.
Since Saul has yet to play itself out, I next turned my attention to House of Cards, though neither son favored it especially. However, I know that it has had an important influence on our culture, and especially on the popular view of politics, and so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I didn't make it through the second season. Unlike the others, it is rather poorly written, and since each episode is directed by a different person, it is inconsistent in tone and look. The acting varies from very good (Spacey and Robin Wright) to adequate to amateurish. Once again, all of the characters are flawed, and most of the important ones are revolting. But in the pursuit of venality, House of Cards goes over the top. The Kevin Spacey character, Underwood, is deliberately, calculatedly vile, lacking the kind of scurrilous spontaneity of Walter White or Don Draper or Saul. Where the other shows give the impression of following dark truths about humanity, House seems forced and overly-plotted. These political vermin are evil, the show tells us, so let's sit back and enjoy them devouring one another. Well, I found it rather unenjoyable, and some of the plot devices, such as Underwood's murders and the whole subplot of replacing the vice president and killing off the cross-addicted, whoring would-be Pennsylvania governor simply unbelievable. It was all too much. Even evil must be moderated if it is to be entertaining; otherwise it is just a tepid bath in dirty water.
What interests me about these series as a cultural phenomenon is that each one draws you irresistibly into a world of unredeemable characters. Walt, the fallen high-school chemistry teacher who slides eagerly into drug-dealing, Don Draper and his ad-world colleagues, who satiate themselves leech-like upon the vulnerability of consumers, and Jimmy McGill, aka Saul Goodman, who, despite a residue of altruism which occasionally bubbles to the surface, finds his true moral home in craven dereliction. So, why? Why are we fascinated by these archetypes of evil-doing, though we would never dream of associating which such creatures in real life? Why do we feel compelled to follow their footsteps through the mire episode after episode?
I think the answer is rather complex. First, audiences have always had a soft spot for the villain - Iago, Lady Macbeth and Richard III come to mind - and it is a truism of drama that villains always get the best lines. We identify with their foibles, even with their depravity, as a vicarious thrill, though we have been acculturated to expect them to meet justice in the end. Some of the horrid creatures in Breaking Bad do end badly, though others survive and even prevail. In Mad Men, since it is the times and the profession that are the real locus of evil, everyone gets away Scott free in the sense that, to the very end, few of the characters learn anything worth knowing, and Madison Avenue continues to flourish and exploit.
(Now I must add that much depends on how you interpret the final scenes of Mad Men. Personally, I saw them as a broad condemnation of the era and its values, but I have gradually come to the suspicion that the last image is, in fact, an affirmation of everything hateful about the period. Mediocrity prevails; manipulation makes its masterpiece. Though I had resisted this conclusion for a while, I now realize that the cynical view is the one more consistent with the tone and experience of the series.)
Beyond that, we are now living in a divisive and contentious time. It is sufficient for a hero or a moral icon to emerge from the daily round for him or her to be strip-searched and desecrated in the public sphere. Gorky once said of the Russian people that they would much rather tear someone else down than elevate themselves. We are doing that now. With the surfeit of electronic media, the meanest minds and most cynical voices rise to the surface and choke out real introspection and expression. For every model of selflessness there are hundreds of selfish brutes ready and eager to lash out and destroy. And so, I think, the villains of the streaming series merely reflect the worst of our societal ethos: the bad guys are not only the new heroes, they are what we ourselves envy and would gladly emulate but for fear of punishment.
Finally, I think that the vile characters who inhabit the binge-worthy shows represent a new era in literature: the era of the anti-hero as surrogate hero. Unable to sustain heroism in the face of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the social media circus, we substitute for heroism in the traditional sense this image of the successful monster, the charming Frankenstein. He or she becomes our fantasy, our guilty daydream. If only we could screw society out of every hard-earned penny and get rich and drunk and laid, they make us think. Why slave away at a job we hate when we could so easily turn to the most heinous crimes - drug-dealing, even murder - and make a fortune, and, like Walt's young partner Jesse, just walk away into the night? And if power corrupts then absolute power must be the rationale for every deceit and hypocrisy imaginable, up to and including homicide.
These are the messages that the binge-shows are sending to us, and, given the leaking, rudderless nature of contemporary society, they are messages which we are only too eager to hear. Walt and Don and Saul would have been secondary characters in the arts of the past; today they are offered as our role models, not shining and inspiring, but dark and demoralizing; and, God help us, we love them.
Having said all this, there is one exception - I would have said one bright spot, but it is in fact even darker than the rest - Chernobyl. Both of my boys and all of the critics insisted I must see it, and so, dutifully if doubtfully, I plunged in. It is brilliant - not uplifting or inspiring, but soul-searing in its drama, and awesome in its execution. As in the other series, the characters are despicable; in fact, since they are almost all Soviet bureaucrats, they are the definition of evil banality. Nonetheless, out of this radioactive heap of human rubble three characters manage to emerge, and to reach a kind of nobility: the physicist Legasov, the academician Khomyuk, and the apparatchik Shcherbina. The last of these is, in some ways, the most interesting since he mutates under the truth of the cataclysm from a soulless functionary into a human being; no mean trick for a career Soviet official.
Chernobyl is an enigma of catharsis. How did it become so successful, given that it is darkness descending into darkness? How did it get made, with its unrelieved tragedy, an almost entirely male cast, a mere splash of a love story in which the boy literally melts before our eyes, and given that it is a period piece which takes place in a country we know little about and about which we care even less? The series is not only a marvel of storytelling, it is a miracle of production. That it managed to make it to the screen, and that it boasts such extraordinary production values is, to me as a filmmaker, astonishing.
Good as the other binge-series are, Chernobyl outstrips them in every regard. The cast is extraordinary, especially Jared Harris (who was wonderful in Mad Men) and Stellan Skarsgard. The directing is flawless, the art direction is beyond impressive, and the sheer size and scope of the recreation of the period and place and of the disaster are breathtaking. One wonders how it is possible to watch such a darkly powerful tale as entertainment, yet it is impossible to take one's eyes from it. And not, as in the other series, just to find out what happens next, but to experience the fear and danger, and to learn from them through the characters' eyes. This is why I say that Chernobyl is catharsis, in the ancient Greek sense of the word: an experience of horror the depth of which scours our souls and leaves us feeling not wearied but wiser, not entertained but edified.
But what impressed me every bit as much as the intense drama, the historical context and the character development is the fact that, for all its darkness, Chernobyl serves as an antidote to the anthropomorphism of the undercurrent of evil in our society. Even out of this massive, murderous climate of lies and destruction and death, it seems to be saying that something valuable may be learned and something noble may arise. From the toxic rubble of Chernobyl comes something to be admired and even cherished: the spirit of goodness which resides in each of us and which, even in the most horrific circumstances, may yet take wings and fly, if only for a moment.
