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You're listening to the On The Media Podcast Extra, I'm Michael Loewinger. Last week on the show, Brooke spoke to two women about new wrinkles in the now six-year-old Me Too movement. One of them was writer and stand-up comic Vicky Wong. She's written about Taiwan's Me Too movement that started earlier this year, inspired by a viral scene in a Netflix show that opened the floodgates for Taiwanese women to come forward and share their stories.
Our plan was to have a whole segment about other ways in which the television landscape has changed over the last half decade as Me Too stories have woven themselves into the fabric of our culture. But, and here's a peek behind the curtain at OTM, the four interviews we did for the show were so good that we couldn't cut them down enough to fit them all in the show.
This podcast is The Missing Segment, Brooks' interview with Washington Post TV critic Lily Loughborough. They discuss three phases of the post-MeToo movement as seen on the small screen. And by the way, this conversation includes a spoiler for something that happens in the morning show from Apple TV and a content warning. There are references to sexual assault and suicide in this interview, so bear that in mind.
Phase one of Me Too on TV, Lily says, has a bit of an after school special vibe to it. I have said that, yes. I would say that the first phase of any movement like this tends to be blunt, confrontational, and also a kind of testimony.
It's about hearing about one person's experience or one population's experience of a particular kind of oppression or marginalization or loss of agency and how that has ramified in all kinds of injurious ways throughout mankind.
society. Do you have a prime example of that? An example that springs to mind that is, I think, very good, but that does fit into this model is Unbelievable by a rape victim who wasn't believed. No signs of forced entry. Doors and windows were locked. No DNA. Not a single neighbor saw or heard a thing. I'm pretty positive that it happened. Pretty positive or positive. They just kept asking me the same question. How come your story doesn't add up? I wanted to go home.
I don't have a victim here. It's bogus. She made it up. And it very carefully showed the kind of skepticism that survivors are confronted with. And I don't want to impugn this first wave because it's deeply necessary, right? Like, I mean, in order to get to these other movements I'm talking about, you do have to first start with the straightforward story. And I think that Unbelievable is one of the best examples of that.
What about the shows that seemingly didn't change? I mean, Game of Thrones debuted in April 2011, concluded in May 2019. It was a show where rape was treated, even by the female protagonists, as the cost of doing business in a medieval sword-and-sandal world. In 2014, Game of Thrones...
featured a scene that has stuck out to me as very useful and really actually instructive about how TV offers us a shared spectacle that we can all use to talk about what consent means and what rape is and is not. And I'm thinking of the scene where Cersei Lannister is raped by her brother Jaime at their son's tomb. Their son Joffrey is dead. They're grieving. And then
There is a scene that was actually not a rape in the book, but in the show, it definitely is. You're a hateful woman. Why have the gods made me love a hateful woman? Jamie, no, please. And one of the really strange things about that was that the director of that episode said that it was not, that by the end, she had consented. And so it became a really interesting pre-Me Too test case scene
for everyone to talk about what rape is and is not because what always happens in these kinds of conversations about rape is that it is always called a he said, she said story where nobody can actually have all of the relevant information. And here was a case where we all did, right? We all saw exactly the same thing and we could therefore collectively discuss whether what we saw amounted to rape or didn't.
And yet the fact that we all collectively saw it didn't mean that we all came to a collective conclusion. That really, I think, proved to a lot of people that even when some people see what is clearly a rape on screen, they will say that it is not a rape, right? Like, that's how bad this has become. I think that for all that Game of Thrones showed a terrific amount of sexual violence, I do think...
that it was a little bit more careful about that sort of thing going forward. That is to say, I don't think its directors in future episodes were confused about whether what they were directing was a rape or not. It very straightforwardly was, horrifically, or was not. So I would say that even that, right, improved.
You've said, before we leave stage one, that Me Too earned some of the qualities of a brand with results both positive and problematic. What do you mean? There was a moment when a lot of Hollywood folks were interested in supporting Me Too and supporting Survivors in doing so publicly, showing up at awards shows and sort of spectacular demonstrations of unity and of support. If I may be so honored...
to have all the female nominees in every category stand with me in this room tonight. The actors, Meryl if you do it, everybody else will, come on. The filmmakers,
Time's Up was an organization that sprang into being to support survivors and help get them good legal representation, help victims use female professional networks in the best possible way to improve workplace conditions, to move away from nondisclosure agreements that had been used to keep people silent. I ended up reporting on a lot of internal problems that it had. And, you know, among those, there was a pay gap in a place whose number one issue was pay equity. Ha ha ha!
The chairwoman resigned after it was revealed that she advised then-Governor Cuomo's office on how to handle Lindsay Boylan's allegations of sexual harassment. You know, so there are things like this that cannot help but tarnish an effort that was, I think, supposed to be intended only to help victims. You know, I think that Me Too suffered some setbacks there.
For those reasons, but also, frankly, Brooke, just because of, you know, the backlash was always going to come. We knew that. We knew that when it started, right? Is that essentially what phase two was about then?
So what I would say is that I think that the backlash was always coming because we all know that this is not a world where women are saints and men are evil or whatever, right? Or that, you know, that there are not ambitious women who will also do whatever they need to do to advance in the professional world, et cetera, et cetera. Like that's not a secret. We all know that, you know, people are, they're complicated, they are flawed. And I think that...
One of the more interesting conversations that emerged out of Me Too was the question of complicity, of how an environment is created by everyone who works in a place that makes this kind of conduct permissible. And one of the more interesting treatments of that, I think, was The Morning Show, which started in 2019. And it was a very thinly fictionalized version of Matt Lauer, basically, that Steve Carell was playing.
where this was a morning show, this star, Mitch Kessler, was greatly beloved. And the point was that the entire network was kind of orbiting around his star power and deeply invested in keeping him happy to such an extent that
that he may not have always even entirely known that people were doing things not for him, not because they wanted to, but because there was so much ambient pressure to keep him happy.
The show, I don't think, went quite that far as to suggest that Carell was totally ignorant of the dynamics that he was participating in. But it was interested in looking at the ways in which other people, including women like his co-star Jennifer Aniston, who on the show is named Alex Levy, were complicit in overlooking things that they saw him do that they could tell were making his subordinates uncomfortable. Alex Levy, Aniston's character, was both
forced into a position where she had to claim to be shocked and horrified by what her co-star had done. This affects me, okay? My on-air partner, my TV husband,
is a sexual predator now? But also felt strange about that because it wasn't totally honest. She knew quite a bit of it and had not flagged it as a problem. So I think it was a show that was really invested in exploring that kind of willed blindness. So it seems like this is the time when television depictions of Me Too were beginning to come into their maturity again.
You know, so the second season is notable in that it spent a lot of time exploring Mitch Kessler's perspective, his kind of anomie, his reflections on the career that he's lost, his bitterness towards the people who turned on him, who he had thought were his friends, his loneliness as a kind of ex-celebrity. Alex, you don't actually think I did that. Mitch, just because you didn't mean...
To do it doesn't make it okay. Is it the fact that I didn't mean to do it worth something? I guess I don't have the tools to understand. Could you teach me? Teach me. Could you teach me, Alex? I want to be better. I want to be a better person. Please. I know. No, seriously, Alex. I just, I want to be a good person. I know. I know. I can't. Honey, I just have to go.
It ends with him committing suicide, essentially. It's a rather sympathetic exploration of a character who is the bad guy. This was not a move that lacked critics because it definitely does seem like it's participating in the logic that holding people accountable for things that they have done can only result in them succumbing to despair. And I don't think that's a super common thing.
arc for people who have been predatory in the workplace. But I do respect the way in which it is trying to look at how
Even predators are a little bit the victims of a society that facilitates predation and does not fully alert them to the monstrousness of what they are doing. I do think that the move of trying to figure out what the aftermath of a Me Too exposure ought to be
was relatively new territory. Like I don't think a lot of shows or institutions really had a lot to say about what should happen after. Like what kinds of repair do we want? One of the things that I would have liked to see me to move towards would be some sort of
agreed upon way of dealing with these kinds of situations. And instead, I think there has been a hodgepodge of solutions where people scotch tape together remedies, but no consensus as to what it is that should happen.
The far extreme of that, for those who revile cancel culture, and as we know, there are a lot of people who hate cancel culture now, is that there is no redemption. That once you have been tarnished with a Me Too brush or as a racist or as whatever else, there is no way back. So anyway, I think that's interesting terrain that the morning show is mining. I don't think it nailed it, but the attempt is respectable.
And so I would say that that's kind of like the second wave where we're looking at other perspectives besides the survivor. Did we get to a place in 2019 where black and white stories were no longer necessary? No.
2019 marks this point where we had this peak TV moment where there were hundreds of scripted shows that had been greenlit by studios where there was a lot of creative freedom for folks to do what they wanted. And that enabled a lot of very subtle, complicated storytelling about female subjectivity, for example, that I think made visible a lot of these contradictions about the way in which women might have their own erotic impulses in the workplace. And
And I think that the richness of that particular moment, which I think is now ending for a variety of reasons, did make it possible to explore marginalized subjectivities and realities in ways that we hadn't seen before. And that I think were helpful in trying to think through how to get back to a place of agency. Because I think the thing that I sometimes lament about the sort of after-school special trend is...
And it cannot be helped because it's what the story is about, is that it is about a person being acted upon. And that wasn't the case with Fleabag. This was the British comedy drama that was created and written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She falls into unhealthy coping mechanisms of maybe hypersexualizing herself. And, I mean, she's got issues, but she also has agency, right? Oh, God, I can't believe how attractive I am.
Kind of worried I'm going to make a sex offender out of the poor guy. Here we go. This better be good. Here we go. A walk of shame. It did deeply investigate both the kind of creepy experiences that a lot of women can have, but also...
fully honored the kind of weird passions and proclivities that people come up with in order to make themselves feel better when they are feeling wretched or guilty or deprived or sad. And because that character was so aggressively empowered in all of her scenes with the audience, I think it was also just a very bold experiment in unveiling the ways in which even that kind of performative character
power by a woman ends up being a crutch, right? Like the most powerful moment in that show is when she walks away from the audience and stops talking to us. If there's a phase three, how would you describe it? Fewer projects are going to be greenlit. Many deals have been canceled. And the things that will be made in the future, I think will in
broad terms probably be a little bit less experimental and adventurous than the things that came before. I also think there are exceptions, but I think as a trend, that's likely what's going to happen.
But I do think that Me Too has really actually penetrated the public consciousness in terms of if you see a guy who's a manager hitting on a secretary, you are not going to find that charming anymore or even annoying. You will find it a little bit sinister. It will be an indication, I think, that that character is probably not too great, right? I mean, I think those kinds of shorthands are examples of the way that Me Too is going to kind of filter through. Yeah.
Yeah. Lily, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Brooke. Lily Luthborough is the TV critic for The Washington Post. Thanks for listening to this midweek podcast. You're definitely going to want to go ahead and tune into The Big Show this weekend. I'm taking on the boom and bust cycle of our medium, the podcast industry. See you then. I'm Michael Ellinger.