The way some shows see it, multiple points of view make for good TV
There are facts, no matter what you hear.
We live in a moment when even that fact is in dispute, as the social-media game of telephone enables all kinds of misinformation and disinformation. There are facts, those hard and cold things that no amount of denial can erase and no amount of imagination or desire can create. Facts, as David Byrne once put it, “don’t do what I want them to.”
But we all interpret facts differently. It’s the nature of subjectivity that we see what we want or need to see for whatever psychological, spiritual, or emotional reasons. All narrators are, to some extent, unreliable.
And you may ask yourself: What does all this have to do with TV? In recent years, a few series have been toying with the notion of subjectivity, devoting entire seasons to the so-called Rashomon Effect, named after the 1950 film about a murder seen from four contradictory perspectives. There is a fact — a murder, a divorce, an argument, an affair — and then there are the different takes on it. Episodic television is an excellent way to pursue those differing takes, as it can so easily slide into and out of a person’s mindset. Fittingly, “Rashomon” itself, which was directed by Akira Kurosawa, is being developed into a series at HBO Max.
The Rashomon Effect is in full play in “Paul T. Goldman,” a fact-fiction hybrid whose six-episode season is currently being released on Peacock. The real Goldman wrote a memoir, called “Duplicity,” about discovering that his wife is a con artist with a secret life tied to a prostitution ring. The show is about the process of making a scripted series out of “Duplicity,” and we meet and talk to Paul, the real people in his life, and the actors who are playing the people in his life. Gradually, with each new half-hour, we see how Paul’s story — which has been a memoir, then a script, then a directed and edited TV show — has drifted from the facts of the case. We realize that Paul’s version is very much Paul’s version, fully submerged in his subjectivity and his desire to be a hero.
One of my favorites from last year, Apple TV+’s “The Afterparty,” used the Rashomon Effect for comedy. The “Knives Out”-like show, which will return for a second season with a different case and cast, is about a murder at a 15-year high school reunion gathering. One by one, and episode by episode, Tiffany Haddish’s police detective interviews those in attendance, and each person delivers a different account of what went down. Furthermore, as each guest describes his or her experience that night, the format of the flashback reflects his or her temperament — one’s recollections are shown as a rom-com, another’s as a musical comedy, another’s as a thriller, and so on.
That genre hopping on “The Afterparty” brings distinction to the “Rashomon” formula, adding a kaleidoscopic tone to the season. “The Affair,” too, relied on the Rashomon Effect, but in a far more sober way. Subjectivity was both its format — segments of each episode showed many of the same events from different points of view — and its central subject, as we saw how characters were at odds with each other despite their efforts to stay close. The drama, which wrapped up its four-season run in 2019, was particularly powerful when it showed the more subtle differences in the way each person understood small moments — each thought the other was doing the flirting, for example. “The Affair” was chillingly honest about how thoroughly we can misunderstand one another no matter how intimate we may be.
The Rashomon Effect isn’t new on TV, even while it fits nicely with the popular habit of blurring facts with what we want to be facts. A number of old — and wise — comedies devoted episodes to it. Back in 1962, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” did an episode called “The Night the Roof Fell In,” which chronicled an argument between Rob and Laura from three points of view: his, hers, and that of a fish in their aquarium. In 1976, “M*A*S*H” gave us “The Novocaine Mutiny,” which found the characters testifying to very different takes at a mutiny hearing initiated by Frank against Hawkeye.
And most gloriously, “All in the Family” featured a “Rashomon” episode perfectly titled “Everybody Tells the Truth” in 1973. In it, Archie, Michael, and Edith recall — quite differently — the visit earlier in the day by an Italian-American refrigerator repairman and his Black assistant. The Rashomon Effect is just the right way to get inside the heads of two famously oppositional men, Archie and Michael, as their politics colored every facet of their interpretations. Like so much about “All in the Family,” the episode was way ahead of its time.