A show about fake ultrarich people played by less rich people watched by poor people. A show that has pretensions about flagellating the rich while still somehow revelling in their debauchery and parasitism, a sort of recursive self-awareness that is supposed to somehow absolve the characters (and the irl rich?). Somehow it is both the sale of anti capitalism back to the anti capitalists whilst also scratching a Keeping Up With the Kardashians itch for watching the inter-familial spats of our feudal overlords.
A contemporary Game of Thrones where everyone is bad and there is no good and it’s just a TV show so it doesn’t matter, which handily conceals the fact that our everyday reality is literally this show, and that the stakes in real life are actually weighty and have moral and material value and can easily be viewed as right and wrong.
Along with a healthy dose of “their daddy was mean to them so it’s not their fault they’re all disgusting bourgeois pigs”.
What the fuck. We desperately need prolekult. I’m so sick of this two faced culture that sells our own hatred back to us and pokes the reward centres in our brain - “hey you just watched a pithy comment that could KIND SORTA be construed as anti capitalist on a million dollar show on a billion dollar network, you’ve done your leftism for the day!”
What stage of capitalism is it when everyone is so widely aware capitalism sucks that the most successful business model is pretending you agree that capitalism sucks?
AAAAAA
Halfway through the pilot I realised, yes, it’s probably good, but rich people in NY? I’ve seen that already.
I think the shows I enjoyed most in the past few years all took place outside of the clichéd NY/LA settings. Righteous Gemstones, Justified, Fargo. Recent Breaking Bad discourse also had me curious if it’s success is not partly explainable by its setting of New Mexico not California as they intended.
