CONVENTION-BUSTERS
Unhindered by the traditional restraints of TV, the internet is streaming as never before, writes Duncan Greive.
More than most pop culture, television has tended to be intensely compartmentalised: half an hour or an hour; drama or comedy; fictional or factual. This helped network executives understand who might watch a show, and which advertisers might want to sell to those people.
For decades this status essentially held. There were a few major disruptive events: pay-TV bringing multiple channels and different revenue streams in the 80s and 90s; reality TV essentially creating a new format in the 00s.
Yet for all that, nothing has broken television’s natural constraints like the internet — and I think we’re only starting to understand what that might mean. This goes for channels and platforms, for funders, for consumers — but also for creators.
We live in an era characterised by global competition for talent and no reason why a show should be any particular length or format (because timeslots no longer exist). Ad-free is the norm for the paid streaming players, with YouTube and Facebook both ecosystems in their own right and feeder systems for legacy businesses and startups alike.
It’s a revolutionary event, the implications of which we’re only beginning to understand — and the impact on creators and their ability to get weird and be paid back for it is likely to only grow. Three shows I watched over summer all shared some common elements (notably being led by extraordinary and very complicated young women). All play on streaming platforms here and none of them would be imaginable even five years ago.
THE END OF THE F***ING WORLD
The End of the F***ing World is a UK show which snuck out early in the new year and picked up by Netflix, about a teenage boy, James (Alex Lawther) who believes he might be a psychopath, and a schoolmate, Alyssa (Jessica Barden) who projects on to him her desire from escape from an unhappy family life. Both the leads are excellent, but it’s the combination of a humdrum English realism in dialogue and setting with the strange scenarios of the source comic book which really elevate it.
It’s pitch-black comedy and incredibly bloody, but also might be the most authentic representation of teenage lust, longing and loneliness I’ve ever seen. Alyssa’s complexity, her moods and what moves her show what lurks inside adolescents in a touching way, while also being constantly jarring in the small but significant breaks from convention they represent. From its riveting opening to a shocking conclusion it never takes a single easy route, and is all the better for it.
SMILF
SMILF plays on Sky’s Neon, a ropey (it frequently refuses to play random episodes or allow you to remain logged in) and under-marketed platform which nonetheless has one of the best catalogues anywhere. The show was developed from a short film, and stars Frankie Shaw, and is not very loosely at all autobiographical.
She plays Bridgette, a single mother (the title is an acronym for Single Mom I’d Like to F***) to a toddler whose dad is both an attentive and attractive young man, and also a drug addict. Her mother (Rosie O’Donnell) is cantankerous and quite useless, and the pair have a deeply relatable passive-aggressive relationship.
The first episode sees Bridgette fretting about her post-baby body in quite explicit detail — grasping the folds of her stomach in the bath with her boy, saying, “You did this to me” — in sadness more than jest. She obsessively interrogates her gynaecologist about the state of her vagina, and whether it retains its pre-birth characteristics.
There is nothing pulled, ever, and the show is a marvel for it. At one point she masturbates furiously to an image of her ex’s new partner, while her baby sleeps a few metres away, then munches on a half-eaten bag of chips she finds in the drawer where she stashes her vibrator. It’s shocking, for TV, but also displays the strange psychological impulses which drive adult sexuality and behaviour in a way which makes even groundbreaking shows like Girls seem a little mannered.
SEARCH PARTY
The second season of Search Party on Lightbox is the most superficially conventional of the trio, perhaps because it airs on basic cable in the US. It’s about a group of New York 20-somethings (an over-explored subset, for sure, but give these guys a chance) who are drawn into a mystery which becomes a calamity.
The show stars Alia Shawkat — Arrested Development’s Maeby Funke — as Dory, a bored, inquisitive woman who starts obsessing over a missing acquaintance. That’s the arc of season one, while season two follows the spiralling consequences of the death which concludes the first.
Its convention-busting is subtle but unmistakable. There are strange tonal shifts which blow through every few episodes, moving it from noir-ish mystery to crime story to psychological thriller. Better yet are the character arcs, which never let you get comfortable with a personality.
On paper what they’re capable of seems bizarre and incoherent; on screen each increasingly strange and desperate move the product of being a regular person under extraordinary pressure.
Everyone is meticulously drawn — deeply flawed, deeply human — yet it is Dory who really transfixes. Her shiftlessness and the boiling forces inside her make it one of the most satisfying shows on TV right now.
All three of these shows are odd lengths and hard to categorise: out in uncharted waters, trying new things and suited to binge consumption. They are the product of a changed televisual world, one with different values and possibilities that will make television a knottier and much more interesting medium as it evolves.