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.
