Some Thoughts on Three Television Stories about Sexual Harassment

I haven’t talked much on the blog about #MeToo or Time’s Up, although it’s an issue I care about and many actresses I admire have been doing brave, excellent work in forcing the conversation on this subject.  And even today, I don’t want to talk specifically about that, but rather several TV episodes that deal with the topic.  I’ve been thinking about this lately, three different episodes dealing with sexual harassment/abuse (two specifically within the entertainment industry) that were all written before the Harvey Weinstein story opened the floodgates.  They weren’t made right on top of one another, but I happened to see all three in moderately-close succession, and as I’ve been following the news the last few months, all three have been on my mind.

The first I want to talk about is an episode of BoJack Horseman.  It’s from season 2, so it actually came out a couple years ago, but since I only got into the show late last spring, it’s still relatively fresh for me.  Next is a season 2 episode of Master of None, which came out over the summer.  And finally, there’s an episode of Big Mouth, whose first season dropped in the fall – I think the show came out slightly after the Weinstein scandal broke, but the episodes obviously would’ve had to have been written before that.  (Side note:  as I write this, it occurs to me that all three shows are Netflix originals.)  Spoilers ahead for “Hank After Dark,” “Buona Notte,” and “The Head Push.”

“Hank After Dark,” the BoJack Horseman story, features Diane speaking up about the rumors on “Uncle Hanky,” a legendary, much-beloved TV personality (shades of Bill Cosby,) and later trying to publish an article with an on-the-record accuser.  Of the three episodes, I think it’s the most true-to-life, especially for a “pre-Weinstein” world (of course, all this stuff was still going on in Hollywood at the time, and had been for decades, but it was still in “whisper network” territory.)  It’s a great, hard-hitting episode about an awful topic, and it’s not afraid of the ugliness of how these things go down.  While the show stays vague on Uncle Hanky’s specific allegations, it’s clear what type of creep he is and that it’s the sort of “open secret” that most people have been ignoring for a long time.  When Diane addresses the rumors, she’s the one who’s attacked, and she finds herself in the middle of a media firestorm full of people demanding to know why she’s determined to destroy a “great guy” like Uncle Hanky.  She’s dragged through the mud, she faces protesters and receives mountains of hate mail (including death threats,) and in the end, after Uncle Hanky himself creepily puts the pressure on, her source backs down and can’t go through with the article.  Uncle Hanky remains “spotless” in the public eye.  It’s a devastating ending, like so many BoJack Horseman episodes have, but until very recently, that’s how must of these stories have gone, and the show is incredibly honest in its depiction of how women have been vilified for accusing men of sexual assault/harassment.

Next is Master of None’s “Buona Notte.”  I’ll start out by saying that I don’t want to get into the stuff about Aziz Ansari, but I will say that, prior to reading that article, I’d already been uncomfortable about the approach this episode takes compared to the other two.  In it, Devin finds out that Chef Jeff, the celebrity chef he’s just partnered with for a new series, has a history of harassing female crew members, including a friend of Dev’s.  With the series about to premiere and ads with his and Jeff’s face on them plastered all over the city, Dev is sitting on this information and not sure what to do with it.  When the news comes out in the middle of a live interview featuring both Jeff and Dev, Dev is caught in the crossfire as someone marketed as the “best bud” of this serial harasser.  So, here we have a story about harassment that, for its time, is pretty unrealistic in the way the accusers are instantly, universally believed and the accused’s career takes a severe, immediate hit.  We’re seeing a lot more support for accusers now and swifter consequences for outed harassers, but when this episode came out, that just wasn’t the world we lived in.  It echoes the sort of disconnect you see between some men in Hollywood worrying about the current “witch hunt” and how careers are being tanked over “touching a girl’s knee,” when it’s clear to anyone who’s paying attention that that’s not what’s going on; it’s that kind of out-of-touch.  What’s more, the main focus of the story is on “poor innocent Dev” getting blowback due to his association with Jeff rather than any of the women who were harassed.  As such, the whole thing has both a fairly idealized outcome with the swift judgment (although it’s framed, not as a good thing, but as a problem for Dev) and kind of a weird “but what about the men who didn’t know only recently knew about it?” air.

Finally, we have Big Mouth with “The Head Push.”  This one is different in that it doesn’t involve the entertainment industry (although the incident does take place at a cast party for a school play) and it involves teens instead of adults.  In the story, Andrew and Missy see Nick’s older sister Leah making out with Daniel, the play’s dreamy lead, in her bedroom.  They’re horrified as Daniel repeatedly tries to push Leah’s head down to give him a blow job, despite her obvious indication that she doesn’t want to do that.  The kids don’t understand exactly what they saw, but they know it’s bad.  However, when they try to tell Nick about it, he brushes it off, unwilling to believe anything unflattering about a cool high schooler like Daniel.  The episode does a good job nailing that kneejerk dismissal, as well as Leah’s feelings of shame and isolation after what happened.  The story ends with Daniel being exposed and everyone at the party turning on him, which again, isn’t very realistic, but I have more appreciation for the way Big Mouth goes about it.  First, they do include Nick initially not believing his friends’ account, and second, when the truth does come out, it culminates in a neat story about victims of harassment supporting each other.  When Daniel, still the life of the party, starts up a game of charades, Leah pantomimes making out and pushing someone’s head down, which another girl instantly recognizes as Daniel.  He tried the same stunt with her, and when she refused, he spread lies about her blowing him and earned her the nickname the “blow-job queen.”  It’s only when both these girls, who were made to feel very alone and powerless after their experiences with Daniel, find each other and corroborate each other’s stories that people start to listen.  Still overly-optimistic for anything before the incredibly-recent past, but I like the theme of girls supporting one another, as well as Nick having to confront his own assumptions when he realizes the truth.