This Bad-Vibes-TV Moment Needs to End
8 min read
First came a 40-minute, mostly wordless episode of television that seemed designed to replicate a character’s traumatized, fracturing psyche. Second: a courtroom procedural punctuated with bizarre dream sequences and misleading fantasies. Then a prestige series threw in a Freudian vision of a character having sex with his own mother. Lately, TV has felt to me like one long bad trip, a season of moody episodic rhapsodies that eschew the conventional architecture of narrative for something more subliminal, and more disturbing.
Although the willingness of creators—and executives—to experiment is admirable in the current economic climate, it’s hard to say that any of it is working. The third season of FX’s The Bear offers up 10 episodes devoted to Carmy’s rapidly dissolving state of mind, as well as some gorgeous montage sequences of food service, but absolutely no forward momentum. Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake gives a Baltimore-set murder mystery a mind-boggling surrealist makeover. Even more traditionally structured series, such as Netflix’s 1980s-set Eric, David E. Kelley’s Apple TV+ courtroom drama Presumed Innocent, and HBO’s second season of House of the Dragon, have featured outlandish hallucinations and fantasy sequences that destabilize their own stories and characters.
The unsettling landscape of dream logic doesn’t lend itself to many formats, least of all the rigidly formulaic, comfortingly predictable whodunnit. In trying to be both things at once, Lady in the Lake, though lavish and elegantly constructed, ends up coming across like Agatha Christie on acid. In the first 13 minutes, a man dressed as a mailbox urinates in a trash-strewn alley, grotesque oversize puppets lumber through a Thanksgiving parade by way of Tim Burton, a little girl discusses seahorses with a man whose eye is swollen shut, and a model posing in a department-store window laughs maniacally while watching a carcass being butchered on a black-and-white television.
Lady in the Lake is cinematic and meticulous: One early shot of its protagonist, a woman named Maddie (played by Natalie Portman) who eventually leaves her husband and teenage son to pursue her goal of being a journalist, shows her walking up the stairs in a floral apron with a highball glass in her hand, the walls appearing to close in on her. Within those few seconds, the tightly framed visual says more about Maddie’s mental state than does any of the dialogue. But over the rest of the episode, the director Alma Har’el, who also created the show, peppers the action with so many symbols and recurring images—sheep, ghosts, a bloodied baby made of newspaper—that the story itself fades out of mind. Not until I picked up the 2019 novel by Laura Lippman that Lady in the Lake is based on did the show’s beats become clear.
In some ways, this disaffection with realism suits the mood. When André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto a century ago, the First World War had ended, and art had never seemed less capable of addressing the darkness of reality: first and foremost, the millions of bodies that lay dead on the fields of Europe. Surrealism, Breton argued, would aim to solve “all the principal problems of life” by honoring the omnipotence of dreams and seeking out the beauty and fecundity of “the marvelous.” Over the past months, we’ve all been witness to scenes of unimaginable violence and brutality playing out in the most banal locations: children’s hospitals, music festivals, grocery stores. Survey the year in news, and you might also conclude that art in its realistic form isn’t enough to shock us out of our numb, horror-saturated indifference.
In practice, though, pairing the strange and the marvelous with the necessarily conventional beats of a scripted drama is hard. Har’el, like The Bear’s executive producer Hiro Murai, established herself directing music videos, an art form that rewards indelible visuals and requires little to no plot. With Lady in the Lake, she seems to want to keep the violence of the show’s two central murders at the forefront of our mind by interspersing dramatic scenes with a series of eerie, primal images. The issue is that there’s not much else left to occupy almost seven hours of television, and the show’s glacial pace and discordant interludes become numbing in their own way.
In Lippman’s book, plot is fundamental and clear: Maddie is a pinched, self-sabotaging heroine, a Jewish housewife in 1960s Baltimore who chafes at how small her life has become. Intent on pursuing the professional ambitions she abandoned after becoming pregnant, she fixates first on the abduction and murder of a girl in her community and then on the mystery of a body found in a lake, that of a Black woman named Cleo Sherwood.
Cleo’s narration and the perspectives of other characters Maddie meets interrupt Maddie’s own in the novel, adding texture to the story. But the series uses just one narrator, Cleo (Moses Ingram), whose monologues skewer Maddie’s self-centeredness and blind ambition so effectively that Maddie herself becomes hard to bear. And Ha’rel dispenses with even basic exposition in favor of mood and perplexing imagery. “You don’t look Jewish at all,” a saleswoman tells Maddie, shortly before we get a fleeting glimpse of a battered girl gazing at Santa Claus while he holds up a seahorse. Maddie’s son, Seth (Noah Jupe), is shockingly cruel to her in front of guests; a few minutes later, as Maddie flees her own house, she stares at her younger, high-school self, who appears next to her in the car. A man puts on a gas mask and immerses himself in a bathtub filled with fish, until he’s discovered by a woman and beaten.
These scenes, for me, muted themes that the show seems interested in: the plight of a woman trapped within a stifling performance of femininity, the cruelty of a society that refuses to see Black murder victims on the same terms as white ones, the prejudice against Black and Jewish Baltimoreans during the ’60s. Lippman’s novel also alludes to the predation inherent in reporting writ large and to crime reporting in particular—a job that requires you to respect absolutely no one’s privacy and to blindside people who don’t want to talk. All of this is fascinating, and timely. And yet, in the show, these vital narrative beats are buried within a fog of weird.
Lady in the Lake’s insistence on abstraction is intense, but the series is hardly the only one mired in toxic vibes and charged flashbacks. The first-ever episode of The Bear begins with a loaded scene of Carmy creeping toward a growling, caged bear, which, the minute he lets it loose, attacks him. Symbolism and dream logic, then, are never far from the surface. But the show’s more insistent trudges through Carmy’s psychic injuries in the most recent season felt frustrating; viewers were left uncertain of what was real and what was a trick of the mind. The season’s first episode, an extended, mostly wordless interlude of flashbacks and intrusive thoughts afflicting Carmy in the weeks after his restaurant opens, manages to be strikingly ambitious while also comprehensible. But over time, the lack of story becomes stultifying.
Presumed Innocent, one of the more watchable shows of the summer, benefits from the sturdy structure of the courtroom drama, in which the narrative closure of a verdict, at least, is inevitable. Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an assistant prosecutor in Chicago who becomes implicated in the murder of another prosecutor. The show’s lightning-quick progression is, in its way, nightmarish and Kafkaesque—although the evidence against Rusty is circumstantial at best, he’s arrested, charged, and put on trial. Kelley, whose love of whimsical interludes is virtually unparalleled in television, throws in abundant dream sequences—notably one in which Rusty throttles the murder victim, and a disturbing moment in which a prosecutor’s head literally explodes in court. The point, maybe, is to emphasize that everyone and everything we’re watching is unreliable, in drama as much as in real life. If nothing else, I could appreciate how the show’s odder touches (notably the uncanny Disney-villain accent of O-T Fagbenle) jarred pleasantly with the otherwise rote premise.
This is not the case with Eric, a dour and sprawling series seemingly hamstrung by its own conceit: Its central character, a puppeteer named Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) whose son has gone missing, is being haunted by an imaginary giant purple monster named Eric. The surreal joke of seeing a purple monster stroll through a homeless encampment or a Studio 60–esque nightclub becomes less interesting the more Eric relies on it to soup up an otherwise leaden story. Why make a morose hallucination so central to the show if he’s only throwing out punch lines like a foul-mouthed ALF? Too often, surreal interludes are used lazily for shock value: The second season of House of the Dragon has deployed bloody, horrifying visions featuring murder and maternal incest to signify the turbulent psychological state of Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith).
Surrealism’s most useful insight, as the art critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote, is “that the mind possesses a deep formality that may assert itself when conscious control is suspended.” The trick for television, I think, is to shock us not with sequences we could never have anticipated seeing but rather with ones we’ve long intuited and not quite been able to visualize. Lady in the Lake, which explicitly mentions surrealism’s devotion to the “marvelous” in one scene, offers a series of flat images rather than a cohesive, unnerving whole. It made me long for the weirder episodes of Mad Men, the ones where drunken revelry could lead to cartoonish violence, or where a scene of banal dialogue between two characters teemed with real but inexplicable menace. This, I think, is what TV at its best excels at—less shading of the ambiguous world of dreams, and more investigation of how shallowly horror can be buried in our real life in any given moment, poised to spring to the surface.
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