Some Things Don't Need To Be Discussed

I dreamt last night that I was Walter White. Walt is not a happy person to be at this point in Breaking Bad , and my unwaking self endured the full brunt of his fear. I was Walt, hat and beard and panicky, sinister cleverness and all, racing cross-country in hiding, dodging the police by just a few steps, wondering if I had enough bullets left to settle my problems or if I would have to figure out a way to buy more without being recognized. I mention this not just to brag about how exciting my dreams are—and they are fabulous—but to point out that Breaking Bad  has become embedded not just in our collective unconscious, but in my private one too. So why don't we just shut up about it?

This is the best moment in history to be making television, and the worst to talk about it. Each week, tens of thousands of words are churned out about the hot TV topic of the moment—whether it's Breaking Bad  or Mad Men  or last season's hit drama Complaining About Mad Men —in recaps, podcasts, think pieces, and commentary shows produced by the networks themselves. Each moment of the show is picked over, retold, argued about and pondered, again and again until, by the time "Last Week On Breaking Bad " rolls around, the previous show has grown stale in our mouths. It is the single greatest act of collective, instantaneous criticism that has ever happened, and I think it's too much for one TV show to bear.

Breaking Bad  is a crime drama. This is my literary turf. I think crime dramas have endless appeal, both for their comforting repetitiveness and for the art that comes from exploiting that repetition, but I've also found that writing seriously about them is not always a good idea. In college I wrote a paper about The Killer Inside Me , Jim Thompson's most literary novels, and one of his best. Despite that book's surprising amount of literary merit, though, I found it was a tough paper to get through. Stories of suspense do not demand much intellectual underpinning, which is why I like them. But when a novel's foundation is 90% plot, the critical structure you can build on it can only get so high before it collapses, and your teacher thinks you an idiot. 

So, the best way to appreciate crime is to read it, muse on it, and let it go. Suspense television is the same way.    The plotting in Breaking Bad  is intricate and brilliant, but great plotting is rarely more than a clever trick. Delving into it for hundreds or thousands of words at a time—something practiced by traffic-hungry publications who should know better—is the critical equivalent of explaining a joke. The trolls who haunt the comment sections of these godforsaken bits of writing are even more misguided. Take the top comment on this week's Vulture recap by Matt Zoller Seitz, the gold standard in overly literal recaps. From Jake_M:

I’d like to believe that the opening sequence for episode 5.09, skaters in empty pool, the opening for the final eight episodes, is important. There are 4 persons at the pool. Two skaters performing/playing, one person videotaping the performance, and one person sitting on the edge of the empty pool, watching the performance.  

What if this is a sketch of the defining moment in Walts tragedy as he sees it. That he was reduced to be a spectator in every way to the succes of Gretchen and Elliott. That they got the succes, happiness and attention he was cheated for and believed he deserved. That their wrongdoing, in Walts mind, propelled him into all these catastrofic events in life. Then it seems probable that the ricin he is collecting is intended for G and E.

 "I'd like to believe ___________ is important" is the watchword for all those who demand too much from their TV. Of course we want to believe it's important, because otherwise, why did we waste so many hours watching it, thinking about it, dreaming about it? But TV is better when it isn't weighed down with the importance of being the only healthy area of American mass culture. Suspense shows are mostly plot, and everything else—bits of great acting, characterization, and directing—are morsels to be savored, and savored quietly. 

A year or two ago, I quit reading anything anybody wrote about Mad Men . That includes recaps, obviously, but also more pieces to which more care was paid: interviews and historical nitpickings and deep unpackings of all the little symbols that Matthew Weiner shoves wherever they will fit. My enjoyment of the show skyrocketed. As we stumble towards the finale of Breaking Bad , I suggest doing the same thing. (Right after the end of this paragraph.) It's a beautifully constructed piece of television. Turn down the outside noise, and you might actually be able to hear it.

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.

Play Nice, Dammit, Or Don't Play At All

The excuses are numerous: “I’m just tired of writing negative reviews”, “If I don’t have something good to say, better to say nothing at all”, “I don’t want to discourage anyone”, “my audience isn’t sophisticated enough to handle it”, “it doesn’t make any difference any way”; to all of these excuses by theater critics and reviewers here in Los Angeles – and anywhere for that matter – for not writing negative reviews I say to you, “Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.” And even more than that I say, “Shame. Shame, shame, shame.”

Shame and bullshit.

You are not theater boosters, you are not theater cheerleaders, you are not theater publicists, you are theater critics. Act like one.

Bold words from Colin Mitchell, writing in the excellent Los Angeles theater blog Bitter Lemon. It is a well-worth-reading long rant against what one of his fellow writers, in an otherwise incoherent column, called "the sin of Nice Guyism." Though I applaud Mitchell's attitude, something about the complaint leaves me cold. It made me wonder—and I feel so wonderfully Carrie Bradshaw right now, ending my lede with a rhetorical question—is it ever nice...to be nice?

(An aside: there are so many wonderful pictures of Carrie looking thoughtful while asking inane rhetorical questions:

​My friends and I used to play a game called Carrieism, where we would try to think of the most perfectly thoughtful stupid puns. My all-time favorite, imagined for an episode about the pressures of planning an anniversary—"And so it made me wonder...at what point does a milestone...become a millstone?" Send $45 to this blog and I'll teach you how to play at home.)

Toxic reviews, are as irresistible as fried food, but Mitchell isn't calling for nastiness—just good, honest criticism. Theater criticism is not the same as writing about film, books or art. It's more like music writing—bigger and smaller at the same time—and there are a couple of reasons to argue against honesty. I'm not sure I entirely agree with them, but it seems worthwhile to raise, if only because I've got most of a cup of coffee left, and I can't enjoy coffee if I'm not typing half-witted nonsense at the same time.

The first is a question of column inches. Dozens of shows open every week, and even the Times—New York or L.A.—can cover only a handful. Savage reviews are delightful, but unless a show is a notable flop, the space can be better used. Why waste the paper's space and the reader's time on a show that's not worth the ink?

The slightly squishier argument is that, in some cases, it's better not to kick a production while it's down. At first glance, the thought of a critic refusing to speak out on behalf of the audience seems cowardly. In taking down an overblown Broadway show, the critic is, uh, whatshisname. That short guy that threw that rock at that big guy. But step down the ladder a few ranks, and suddenly Whoosewhatsit Shortguy looks pretty goddamned big. 

I'm not talking about amateur theater, although writing this did remind me of David Sedaris' vicious reviews of children's Christmas plays—"The story of the first Christmas is an overrated clunker of a holiday pageant." Small-scale theater in New York, and I say this as someone who writes for small-scale theaters, is mostly garbage. To indulge in a cliche, because I'm not getting paid to write better than this, when searching for diamonds in the rough, a critic shouldn't complain when he doesn't find a jewel. A salary, health insurance, and a full set of teeth make a professional critic a fat cat compared to most people who work off off Broadway. Tearing down their work would make him a bully.

Again, I'm not entirely sure I agree with the argument for kindness, unless it's my own work that's being reviewed. Even as I type this, I can think of one good reason to savage the smallest production: a lazy script. Last year I saw an acquaintance's play performed at a well-respected small downtown theater. The production was simple but gorgeous; the acting was mostly good; the seats were comfortable. But the script was repetitive, shrill and trite. That's not a crime—plenty of my best friends are repetitive, shrill and trite—but the playwright had spent over a year on this play, workshopping it several times and changing almost nothing at all. 

Present a play in good faith, and the critic owes you the benefit of the doubt. But if your playwright—or director, actor, designer—isn't capable of self-criticism, he is wasting the audience's time, and deserves a taste of the ax.