As the news shows, real life right now is heartbreaking, terrifying, depressing and exhausting. But as entertainment? Real life is hot, hot, hot, baby!
The first few months of 2022 on TV were a non-stop parade of reality-ripped series. That juicy magazine article you read a few years ago? It’s a show now: “Pam & Tommy” (based on a Rolling Stone article), “The Girl from Plainville” (Esquire), “Inventing Anna” (New York). We got three series on disgraced tech giants, based on a book and two podcasts. We get the Julia Roberts Watergate story “Gaslit,” based on another podcast. “The Thing About Pam”, based on a “Dateline” study. “Joe vs. Carole”, based on – no, not the Netflix “Tiger King” docuseries you’re thinking about, but the “Tiger King” podcast you might have drunk after watching it.
These series, unlike the sweeps specials and cheap docudramas of the past, are generally well-polished. An almost embarrassing amount of creative and acting talent is thrown at them. And they’re talked about well, because they focus on the personalities and scandals that people like to talk about.
But what makes them reliable — they’re stories that the public is already interested in, because they’ve been told before — makes it hard for them to be more than digestible versions of things that already exist, the video equivalent of audiobooks. The truth may be more vivid than fiction right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s as interesting.
Imitation, not an invention
Why are there so many of these stories, so lavishly produced? Perhaps because drama has been competing for cultural space with non-fiction and documentary for years, and often loses.
In 2015, the true crime documentaries “The Jinx” on HBO and “Making a Murderer” on Netflix dominated the TV conversation and, like the first season of the podcast “Serial,” made headlines. Then followed a deluge of conversation-dominant legends about true crime and crooks telling the story: ‘Wild Wild Country’, ‘McMillions’, two Fyre Festival documentaries at once, two Nxivm series and more.
Meanwhile, scripted TV is in a curious place. There are so many platforms, which require so much material, that there is theoretically more room than ever for innovation. But the abundance of content also makes TV shy. The surest way to grab people’s attention amid all the clutter is with a twist on something familiar.
In one sector of TV, that means brand extensions for intellectual property from Marvel, Star Wars, and the ’90s sitcom catalog. In another, it means retelling recently told nonfiction stories. Two audiences, one principle: yet another multi-part saga from a recently infamous tech magnate is “The Book of Boba Fett” for the high-gloss limited series fan.
Rather than the imaginative flights of original fiction, these series offer large, ostentatious performances built around eccentric, flamboyant figures. (There are exceptions, such as Hulu’s gloom and reserved “Dopesick.”) Instead of ingenuity, they yield imitation. They are rich in accents, tics and prosthetics. Stars are transformed into eerie Madame Tussaudian replicas in “Impeachment,” “Pam & Tommy” and, later this month, “Gaslit,” in which Sean Penn, as Nixon’s assistant John N. Mitchell, is buried beneath enough rubbery jaws to at least make half a Jabba the Hutt.
The False Heiress Who Scammed the Rich of New York
Anna Sorokin was found guilty of theft of services and grand theft in 2019. She is now facing deportation to Germany for overstaying her visa.
Peacock’s “Joe vs. Carole” uses the gifts of John Cameron Mitchell and Kate McKinnon to turn Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin into even more tacky cartoons than the stupid Netflix series. In NBC’s bizarre true crime story “The Thing About Pam,” Renée Zellweger portrays a portrait that aspires to a “Fargo”-esque dark comedy, but gets closer to an “SNL” sketch.
At times the caricature is so transcendently over the top that it becomes art in its own right, like Julia Garner’s otherworldly interpretation of the Euroscammer Anna Delvey in “Inventing Anna.” The series itself drags on, and I have no idea if it’s an accurate or fair portrayal of reality. (It starts with the statement that it’s a true story, “except for the parts that are completely made up”) All I know – just like Poochie in “The Simpsons” – when anyone but Anna was on screen, I would feel restless wondering where Anna was.
But the dazzle of these performances often hides question marks at the core, as in the season’s accidental trilogy of tech-hustler series. In Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed,” Jared Leto Leto appears as WeWork founder Adam Neumann, with a manic intensity and an accent somewhere between Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Gru from “Despicable Me.” But there’s no real idea of the character beyond an overwhelming shamelessness.
Likewise, in Showtime’s “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber” (based on a book by DailyExpertNews reporter Mike Isaac), Joseph Gordon-Levitt is nothing but all-in as the ride-share entrepreneur Travis Kalanick. But the series, with its breathtaking soundtrack and video game visuals, is all sound and alpha fury. It doesn’t really develop its central character outside of the way he describes himself in the pilot – as (to use a milder term) a jerk – and he behaves in every situation the way you would think a jerk would do.
In the best of the three tech series, Hulu’s “The Dropout,” Amanda Seyfried is spectacular as Elizabeth Holmes, the young biotech entrepreneur who claimed her start-up, Theranos, could run a series of tests on a single drop of blood. It’s an urgent, wild performance, envisioning Holmes as a bundle of mania and green juice, dancing on her nerves in private, hiding her beads of sweat behind a husky voice and a Steve Jobs turtleneck sweater.
The story – how Holmes brought in old, stupid money, the goddamn Potemkin machinations behind the fake technology of Theranos – is breathtaking, and the producer Liz Meriwether (“New Girl”) tells it with flashy and dark humor. But that story has already been widely reported in news reports, a book, an HBO documentary and the podcast on which the series is based. Holmes, meanwhile, largely remains the enigma she started with.
Now it’s absolutely true that real life doesn’t always give you neat “Rosebud” statements; real people are often a jumble of unresolved contradictions. But that’s one of the reasons we have drama: to give emotional, if not literal, meaning to these types of figures. (Hence, Orson Welles reimagined William Randolph Hearst as Charles Foster Kane.)
When people say, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” they mean it’s more inexplicable. It’s random; it is poorly predicted; any character other than ourselves is a black box. This is where, in a story, the imagination comes in, not to tie everything in a neat bow, but to offer insight. Instead, too many true series these days feel like the student in a writing workshop justifying a confusing plot twist with “But it actually happened!” – a line implying that literal reality is both the ultimate defense of fiction and its greatest ambition.
And you might wonder if most of these series build on the coverage we already have. Elle Fanning (“The Great”) will likely challenge Seyfried in award season, as the young woman in “The Girl From Plainville” who leads her boyfriend to commit suicide. But the story was already chillingly told in Erin Lee Carr’s documentary ‘I Love You, Now Die’.
Adam McKay, who laid out real-life stories in his films “The Big Short” and “Vice,” entered the reality derby with his HBO hoop series, “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” based on the Book Showtime by Jeff Pearlman. I had high hopes for it, in large part because of the way McKay’s podcast, “Death at the Wing,” used stories about ’80s basketball to create an overarching, justifiably furious case about the Reagan era and the war against drugs.
But “Winning Time”, while aggressively entertaining, is addicted to the tiresome style that characterized “The Big Short”, full of screen captions, fourth wall-breaking and ever-changing film stock. It never ends. It’s never boring. But it lacks the coherence and vision of well-thought-out fiction. It’s a dunk contest masquerading as a championship series.
A realism fetish
All this is not to say that real life can’t be a big drama. “Mrs. America,” for example, told a parallel story about the 1970s Equal Rights Amendment movement and its nemesis, Phyllis Schlafly, in the process that provided a foretaste and origin story of today’s culture wars. Recaptured a few years earlier “The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story” explored the racial dynamics of the celebrity murder trial and claimed prosecutor Marcia Clark as the victim of sexist double standards (It may not be a coincidence that these examples are several decades away from their have subject.)
Yet there is a greater tension in series that borrow snippets from real stories and go wild, such as the legal drama ‘The Good Fight’, where nuggets about troll farms and social media are turned into a vision of democracy under cyberattack. The recent season premiere of “Atlanta” turned a true crime story about an adoptive family into a hallucinatory fable about the racism of the well-meaning.
But fiction today faces a culture that practically fetishizes the realism of ‘it really happened’. The distinction between the purposes of fiction and nonfiction is so vague that professors report their students using the term “fiction novel” (what you may know as a “novel”). Cultural Journalism Has Fallen In Love With “What [Show or Movie] Passes right/wrong [Person or Event]Fact-checks, the kind of red-pencil critique that turns art into an AP subject.
What is art actually required to ‘get right’? Not facts but feelings, human nature, his own world view. His job is not to tell you things to look up on Wikipedia; its job is to tell you what you didn’t know, what you didn’t know you wanted to know, which may leave you wondering what’s “right” long after you’ve read or watched it.
Perhaps the best judgment about TV’s true story addiction is hidden in the kind of comparisons these series get. After all, the biggest compliment you can give to any of these stories is that it resembles a “real-life” version of “Succession” or “Silicon Valley” or “Scandal.” These fictional series set the standard precisely because they are free to follow not the documentary truth, but the truth of their dark, satirical or bizarre visions.
Does the current plethora of shows talk about scammers to our moment? Secure; as a group, they have something to say about the perverse, warping incentives of the modern economy. But individually, no tenth is as surprising or effective on that subject as “Severance,” a sci-fi parable about workers cutting their consciousness in half to make them more productive — a premise that comes close to literal reality. , but feels, in execution, deeply true.
Reality has its virtues. But nothing beats the fake thing.
