New Television — From the April 2016 issue
New Television
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“If we want to know what American normality is — i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal — we can trust television,” David Foster Wallace once wrote. Can we? It’s a chicken-or-egg situation. Does television teach us what’s normal? Or does it only absorb new social realities after a quorum of Americans has gotten on board? Certainly a number of recent shows have taken it upon themselves to educate and enlighten their audiences, with story lines about everyday sexism (Master of None), racial profiling (The Carmichael Show), and the experience of undocumented immigrants (Jane the Virgin). These moral tales tend to be gentle and earnest, like the little allegories about diversity that used to run on Sesame Street. Then there’s the Amazon show TRANSPARENT, in which Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffmann) recites a poem by Eileen Myles at a lesbian bowling night:
I always put my pussy
in the middle of trees
like a waterfall
like a doorway to God
like a flock of birds.
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© 2015 Harper’s Magazine Foundation. November 2016 cover: Cover: Illustration by John Ritter. Source photograph of Bernie Sanders © Darren Hauck/Getty Images
