Monsters of Television

“I would rather work at Arby’s.“

I would say I have a complicated relationship with premium cable shows, but it’s generally not that complicated: I tend not to like them. A large part of this is just the rhetoric that surrounds shows, both before they premiere and as they air episodes. The albatross of their “quality” and “risky” content tends to weigh me down as much as it weighs down some shows that seem delighted just to be able show sex as often as they please instead of necessarily crafting interesting stories and characters.

So, as is often the case, I tend to avoid premium cable programming until after it’s on DVD (sometimes well after), or if the buzz is positive enough, I’ll dive in shortly after DVD (looking at you, Homeland). In any case, with a free preview of House of Lies (available here on YouTube; apologies if blocked in your region), I figured I would give it a go if only due to lack of options on my basic TV services.

House of Lies concerns itself with a group of management consultants, with the show being headlined by Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell (both of whom I thoroughly enjoy in other projects). Their presences would have been enough to get me to acquire the episode following its official premiere on Sunday.

Their presences are not nearly enough to make me sit through another episode of this obnoxious show.

I wrote the opening to this post before watching the show. I often do this before an episodes airs to sound out where my mind is before the episode begins, so I have some way of knowing where my prejudices are and what my particular expectations for that week’s airing are. Sometimes those openings get scrapped altogether because of the episode, and other times they’re tweaked a little bit and all’s well that end’s well.

I didn’t have to adjust the opening for this post at all because House of Lies falls into all the things I’ve generally come to dislike about premium cable programming. It’s smug, thinks it’s smarter than it really is, and is generally the same type of show that Showtime generally puts out, which is dysfunctional white person struggles to survive their relatively well off life.

I suppose the innovation here is that the lead is black. And Don Cheadle’s Marty has, as the show is quick to tell us (as if his penthouse apartment didn’t),  a seven figure income, which makes him just incredibly well off.

In any case, House of Lies‘s pilot episode is tone deaf. I think there’s a desire to be satirical here, or at least darkly funny, but it falls flat for me. Marty’s big pitch of mortgage amnesties that will never get through the process to cover the company’s executive bonuses is exactly the sort of thing that happens. So while the scene is played for laughs with the CEO looking stunned that people hate him and his company and then thrilled at the PR coup they can land, I’m struggling to find the humor in it. Is it funny because the presentation is so bombastic or is it funny because it’s true? Either way, I was only thinking, “Oh. Good. Everyone gets to keep their money. Yaaaaaay?”

Oh, and since Marty landed the account, it gives a big “Fuck you!” to his ex-wife (who uses drugs and shows up for “anger sex” with him), the lead of the rival management consultant team, who was also angling for the job. Yaaaaaay?

As this particular part of the plot finished, I was left wondering why I should care. What was at stake here for Marty and his team? Were they going to be fired and out of a job? Because, you know, watching a guy who has a seven figure income suddenly lose his job and have to figure out how to survive with a live-in dad and a son who wants to be Sandy in the school’s production of Grease while trying to find another job in this economy would actually be interesting.

The rest of the episode is a haze of freeze frames to explain jargon (eugh), affluence, and look-once-and-then-have-sex, both of the heterosexual variety in a van and then of the homosexual variety in the women’s restroom. Why?  I have no idea. You could make the case for the the former that Marty is compensating for perceived impotency at home or dissatisfaction with his job by fucking anything with breasts, but I think that’s probably giving the show too much credit. The latter is just lady-on-lady action for the sake of lady-on-lady action. Sure, yeah, it spurs the fight between Marty and a client (the only funny thing in the episode), but there are a number of other ways to have achieved that same result, but the show wanted two attractive women making out in a bathroom. Because it’s premium cable.

So we’re left with Marty, after being quickly business psychologized by Kristen Bell’s Jeannie, staring at himself in a foggy mirror, having himself a moment of existential angst. And while Cheadle is hustling and trying his damnedest to sell this material to me, this scene is the only time it feels like he’s genuinely acting, and the episode hasn’t earned this moment. Is he weighed down by the moral conflicts of job? Is he worried about being a good parent? Is the suicide of his mother still hanging over him? I have no idea. I like to imagine it’s all three but I genuinely don’t know. All I do know is that I don’t care enough to find out the answer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Kristen Bell is fine, though I’m frustrated that her character is a) the token female and b) has to put up with Marty explaining the wherefores and howtos as to why they will or will not have sex at some point. Yaaaaaaay.
• There are two other team members. I have no idea who they are. One of them wears glasses.
• Yes, I did watch the preview version which has been edited for a TV-14 rating. This means no nudity, no swearing, and no middle finger waving. The removed swearing breaks the rhythm of the dialog in real ways sometimes, but it doesn’t change the point of the dialog.
• I really cannot express how much I hate the freeze frame device. It makes the show doubly obnoxious because it either tells me what the character is thinking, which is odd since, until that very last scene, what the characters are thinking is all readily apparent (“Oh, you don’t think having anger sex with your ex is a good idea? I had no idea based on your behavior of rushing her out the door and denying her French toast that you felt that way, Marty.”) or is there to explain an insider-y term. I’m fine with, and encourage, shows to have to engage in jargon, but instead of stepping outside the narrative to explain it to me, explain it within the narrative through context. If you can’t do that, I just think you’re lazy.