This summer, we have been rewatching The Sopranos (my third time, The Girlfriend’s second). We just finished season five last night, and some thoughts have been percolating.

• It’s striking how much both of the “offspring” (Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire) of Sopranos are riffing off Tony’s general story arc. Don Draper is a rising star in a powerful industry with a blonde wife, a penchant for adultery, and some serious issues to process from his childhood. Nucky Thompson is a man in a high position that many view as unearned and — in an echo of Steve Buscemi’s “Tony B.” plot — that only resulted from a happenstance event that allowed him to take the reins from the “real” boss.
• The mafia isn’t the only dying institution portrayed on The Sopranos — talk therapy is also living out its afterlife. In both cases, drugs are eroding the dying institution’s prestige by breaking down its traditional practices. And though this theme is more submerged, I think we can draw a parallel between the corporate world (which the mafia can’t touch, as in the episode where Paulie is so pissed that Italians didn’t create Starbucks) and the rise of cognitive-behavioral therapy, anger management, etc. Christopher’s experience with 12-step programs is a little harder to place in this perspective — perhaps it’s just meant as a parallel to Tony’s talk therapy, in that both methods ultimately prove to be incompatible with the mafia lifestyle.
• Anyone longing for a return to the gift economy should put that idea on hold until they watch The Sopranos. They deploy gifts and generosity almost instinctively as a way of creating a feeling of obligation and complicity in the people they’re targetting. Often they transition seamlessly from generosity to threats, almost as if the gift is necessary to get their claws in initially.
• They are much more devoted to the traditional episode structure than many later “prestige” dramas. Events that I remember extending over half a season often turn out to be compressed into a single episode, and the discipline of having A and B plots with parallel themes is pretty faithfully observed. I imagine this would make Sopranos a better fit for syndication (or just randomly “dipping in”) than other members of the “prestige” genre it helped spawn.
• Finally, it seems to me that basically everything that 2000s-vintage “prestige” drama wanted to do is already being done in The Sopranos: charismatic anti-heroes, careful attention to a very specific milieu, subtle but persistent meta-commentary on American society as a whole, more “cinematic” ambition and experimentalism (I don’t think any show does dream sequences as convincingly), riskier performances (for a whole season, Carmella is apparently all but silent and completely passive, but her feelings consistently surface in the dialogue of those around her), etc., etc. Talking with a friend about what “counted” as canonical “Golden Age of Television,” I joked that if I kept getting more and more strict, the entire genre would eventually consist of the Sopranos pilot.
• A funny meta-element: the first major TV show to aspire to the level of artistry of film focuses on people who quite literally model themselves after movie characters.

Anyway, I think it’s a pretty good show.

Though there are some who would still embrace the rhetoric of the “Golden Age of Television” for marketing purposes, we all know that that storied era is over. If there was any question about it, the conclusion of Mad Men — part of the undisputedly canonical Big Three that also includes The Sopranos and The Wire — dispels any ambiguity. While we might dispute whether a particular show belonged to the classic “high-quality cable drama” genre as established by The Sopranos, no currently running show belongs in that category.

And you know what? That’s okay. The final season of Mad Men reminds us how exhausting the “high-quality cable drama” can be — how much pressure there is to watch, to have an opinion, to be up to date on the online dialogue. You probably felt many things when that Coke commercial came to an end, but the emotion you should have been feeling is captured in a timeless Don Draper line: “That’s relief.” Freed from the burden of High Art Television, we can finally get back to enjoying Good Enough Television — a genre that is truly entering into its own golden age.

It was High Art Television that made the blossoming of Good Enough Television possible. First, there were the aesthetic innovations — the greater artistic ambition on the level of the visual experience (more creative shots, lighting, experimental dream and hallucination sequences, etc.), the greater range of acceptable subject matter (including but not limited to supposedly “edgy” themes), the focus on very specific geographical regions (New Jersey, Baltimore) or milieux (the culture of advertising) as opposed to the generic “suburbs or New York City” format of most previous TV. All of those experiments have born their fruit in the Good Enough Television of today, and the result is more visually interesting television that has more room to explore. Second, there are the commercial innovations, above all the explosion in competition to produce original dramatic content among cable networks. Even AMC may never be able to recapture the cachet AMC once enjoyed, but it has given birth to a number of “middle-brow” cable networks (FX) as well as more mass-produced content (USA).

Against all odds, some of these benefits have even accrued to the traditional networks. For me, The Good Wife is the ultimate Good Enough show — attractive people in an attractive setting, with a plot that (with rare missteps, like Khalinda’s husband) keeps moving you along and sometimes even manages to trick you into thinking that you’re pondering an actual idea. There’s a reason we all marathoned the whole thing when it was first released on Hulu, and that’s because it gives us all the beautifully packaged #pureideology we crave from television at its best.

To what extent are the “great” TV shows great television and to what extent are they just great stories, with great characters, etc.? That is to say, which ones contribute the most to television as a specific artform?

One way to get at this might be to ask whether something similar could be achieved if a show was converted to a novel. I think that a novel of Mad Men would be horrible, for instance, but a novel of The Wire would be a natural fit. Though The Wire is a little more self-consciously aestheticizing in its shots, etc., than one may initially realize, I think ultimately it’s like a serialized novel without the novel. It’s a great television series, but it’s not great specifically as television. Just throwing it out there, I think that Breaking Bad and Sopranos are very TV-specific, while maybe Deadwood isn’t.

Then there’s a question of whether we take the “it’s not TV, it’s HBO” slogan seriously. To what extent have certain shows moved beyond the restrictions of television to become a new genre of long-form visual narrative? All of the “greats” seem to challenge the episode format to some extent, as witnessed by the fact that events blend together when you marathon watch. In a way, you have to be watching specifically for the episode structure to catch it — meaning that it may primarily be a discipline for the writers, helping them to organize the material in a manageable way.

Perhaps the two poles are the purely episodic (which none of the “greats” are and virtually no contemporary drama is anymore) and the soap opera, which degenerates into a newspaper from a fictional universe. It’s a rare Game of Thrones episode that feels like a well-structured episode, for instance, so that it leans more toward the soap opera pole. I think the innovation of Mad Men is to realize that you can just put characters on the shelf without following them, then bring them back when you need them. Not every plot needs to be “ongoing” — we don’t need to know how Stan hooked up with the nurse girlfriend, when and why they broke up, etc., etc. The Wire and Sopranos move in that direction, but I don’t think they take it as far. Meanwhile, the small cast and setting of Breaking Bad and Deadwood prevent much experimentation in that regard, simply because it would make no narrative sense much of the time.

In short, some pretty random thoughts. I assume I’m reinventing the wheel to some extent. But all of this is partly by way of explaining why I think it’s basically not arguable whether Mad Men is the most artistically ambitious and artistically successful television show as a television show of all time — whether or not we agree, as we surely don’t, on its enjoyability, relevance, etc. And to some extent, I think that many of the ideological problems with the show — its limited representation, its “first world problems” focus, its objectively low-stakes setting — are features rather than bugs because they let the aesthetic come to the fore. Similar to how Melancholia basically has to take place in a setting of unimaginable wealth to “bracket out” all other problems.

Whenever I hear someone include Game of Thrones in the canon of the “Golden Age of Television,” I begin to ask very serious questions about that person’s taste and critical acumen. Here are a few reasons why:

• A plot that’s sprawling beyond all reasonable limits — in some episodes, it seems like we’re watching a series of 30-second shorts pasted together. There is just no good reason to have so many ongoing plots that we’re “checking in on” so frequently. Shows like Mad Men and The Wire showed that there is another way: simply ignore the secondary characters till you need them. Instead of following Brianne of Tarth around for three seasons, suddenly she pops back up, and if you have competent screenwriters, they can fill in the background with a few broad strokes instead of tedious exposition. Game of Thrones seems to have picked the worst of both worlds — soap opera-style “checking in,” but often spaced out so distantly that we’ve forgotten about the character.
• All the characters look alike — white people wearing black, smudged with dirt. That’s 90% of the characters. It may be okay if they had discernable personalities, but they mostly seem to do what the plot requires at a given time. What drives Stannis, for instance? Which one is he again? No one knows or cares.
• There’s no interesting thematic content whatsoever — the whole point seems to be that George RR Martin has a sick imagination and has come up with a world where everyone is casually violent, then we are presented with hard truths about how casually violent that world is. Whenever the show tries to “explore” “themes,” the attempt is undermined by an over-the-top presentation. Want to talk about the complex relationship between father and son? I know, have the father be casually abusive to his dwarf son and deride him for visiting prostitutes, then the dwarf son discovers he’s sleeping with the son’s favorite prostitute and murders him! How about the dynamics of abuse and Stockholm Syndrome? Well, one approach would be to spend an entire season showing a man being slowly degraded and tortured, to the point where his dick gets cut off — a sequence that, by the way, is never “shown” in the source material, though it’s implied — and then being enslaved to the torturer through fear. There’s broad strokes, and then there’s crayon scrawls.
• Danaerys’s plot is an absolute shit-show — in this day and age, you’re seriously going to do a full-on White Savior plot with zero irony or self-awareness? And within that frame, you’re going to try to draw “interesting” parallels to US foreign policy (like the suggestion in the most recent episode that they establish basically a “green zone” in whatever god-forsaken hole she’s decided to “liberate”)? If this is the payoff for having an ongoing plot that still hasn’t directly connected to the main plot, all these many seasons later, I want a refund.
• Can winter fucking come already?! — I am so tired of vague foreboding and fleeting glimpses at the supernatural menace just beyond the wall. Or am I more tired of Jon Snow’s random moralizing? Tough call.

I could go on, but those are my main complaints. Lest I seem totally negative, though, I must admit that the title sequence is excellent. That’s what keeps me watching, at the end of the day.

We had the earnest, though chastened idealism of West Wing. We also had the Office-style send-up of Veep. All that was missing in the genre of White House dramas was the dark, gritty version. House of Cards dutifully stepped into the gap.

The last decade or so has also shown us that TV is more prestigious in direct proportion as the characters are shitty people. House of Cards dutifully slotted into that trend, giving us a protagonist who plots and schemes out of sheer spite — and isn’t even very good at it. This is a contrast from the UK version, at least in its first season, where the protagonist brought a mischievious glee and a relentless effectiveness to his efforts. We knew what motivated the UK protagonist, but Frank Underwood is “complex” (i.e., his motives make no sense).

And let’s not forget how “complex” Claire Underwood is! So complex that she can scapegoat a young activist for getting pregnant, that she can emotionally shatter a dying man who confesses to a lifelong crush by giving him an utterly revolting handjob, that she can [SPOILER ALERT] in the current season! Dark, gritty! Complex! Nuanced? Yeah, let’s go with it to meet the wordcount of our thinkpiece.

And can we discuss the sex more generally? I was never quite sure why I was watching Frank Underwood joylessly fuck an alarmingly young-looking Zoe, nor why Meechum became a prop in the sick power struggle of the Underwood marriage. And in the most recent season, they start to show us an actually attractive couple, bound by actual affection for one another, and they cut away before they even start taking off their clothes. Within the frame of the show, it seems, real passion is the true horror.

The first season might pretend to give us a “realistic” view of backroom dealing, but as things move on, it becomes more and more purely fantasy. Frank Underwood is going to destroy Social Security so that he can implement a socialist jobs program that would make FDR jealous! On a certain level, I guess this is dutifully “centrist,” though it arrives at that result through a different formula than President Bartlett’s impotent hand-wringing over the deficit.

For my money, the only really interesting character is Doug Stamper, the career underling. His plot arc this season was much more satisfying than any of the political pyrotechnics, and I think that’s because the House of Cards premise is fundamentally about a career underling who goes rogue. Perhaps we can’t believe Kevin Spacey as an underling, even from the very beginning. When the UK version addresses the camera, it’s conspiratorial gossip, but when Kevin Spacey does it, it’s the authoritative god’s eye view. And what a tedious, vengeful god he is — addicted to scenery-chewing dressings-down, afflicted by self-doubt only when he restrains the fullness of his cruelty.

This is where the Golden Age of TV goes to die — the graveyard of that era is found in House of Cards, Game of Thrones, True Detective… It’s as though a generation of writers and producers watched the true greats of HBO’s heroic era and could only imagine outdoing them by redoubling their cruelty and nihilism. We may not have liked Tony Soprano or Don Draper, but there was something fascinating about them, and their stories told us something about deep anxieties of the American imagination. We may have been chastened by the despair of The Wire, but that despair at least gave it a unique perspective on our political situation. The political scheming of Deadwood involved its fair share of violence and betrayal, but its setting provided a plausible reason for it all while allowing us to view the show as a thought-experiment in the originary violence of founding a society.

Shows like Game of Thrones and True Detective take all the sadism and despair of those modern classics and strip them of the ideas that made them interesting. To their credit, though, Game of Thrones and (especially) True Detective at least remember to give us an attractive, atmospheric surface — but House of Cards phones that in as well. The most interesting thing about the show visually is the title sequence, and that only highlights how workaday everything else is.

And so, as a television commentator, I have done my duty. I’ve watched all of House of Cards. I served my time and paid my debt to society. Now perhaps I can find a show that handles dark themes and atmospheric moodiness with greater subtlety — like Batman: The Animated Series.