Toxic male TV fans + Madonna + George Michael
I’m not sure if many of you watched True Detective: Night Country, but I wanted to write a bit about the reception of it. The finale aired almost two weeks ago and quickly became a subject of online discourse.
I personally very much enjoyed the season and while I started getting worried about showrunner/writer Issa Lopez’s ability to wrap all the mysteries up in only six episodes, I felt the finale was a satisfying conclusion that answered all my big questions. What I most appreciated about the show was that it was a feminist reimagining of a very male-coded show (the True Detective franchise) that revolved around two female cops, and dealt with themes of gendered violence, environmental racism in Native Alaskan communities, and female-centered spirituality. Unlike the other iterations of Night Country took the show's supernatural elements and thus Indigenous spirituality very seriously, and the finale, while answering the central questions of the murders/deaths that took place, was also purposefully ambiguous in certain ways.
Not all critics I follow were as satisfied with the finale, but they all spoke about the show’s shortcomings in constructive ways. What I was taken aback by was the overwhelming amount of hate for this season that I saw on different social media platforms from almost exclusively male fans. Many of the professional critics also noticed it and posted about the sexist response on BlueSky and Twitter. (I’m still not posting on Twitter, but I dip in sometimes because it’s the only way to engage with certain people who are still posting there)
Early on in the season, TD creator Nic Pizzolatto (who wrote and show-ran the first three seasons) distanced himself from this season, even calling one plot point “so stupid.” This embarrassingly childish, unprofessional behavior ramped up after the finale, when he started reposting posts from fans who hated it. The richest part? As the creator of the original idea, he got an Executive Director credit on season 4 and thus made money off it!! I suspect many of the most rabid TD male fans just took their cue from him and ran with it.
Will it surprise you to hear that I think it’s no coincidence that this season of TD was written and directed by a woman—and a non-white, Mexican woman at that? It seems clear to me that the reception of season 4 was a backlash to a female creator offering her version of TD. I just find it very interesting that Pizzolatto felt so entitled to publicly trash Lopez's version, given how badly season 2 was received, both by critics and audiences, and how lukewarm the reviews were for season 3. Not even Mahershala Ali (one of my fave actors), who starred in season 3, could make it interesting for me. So essentially, Pizzolatto wrote one excellent season of television and two mid/bad seasons—like, I’m sorry, but where the fuck does he get off critiquing anyone??
Despite some critics’ misgivings about the finale of season 4, the fact that HBO handed over TD to a new showrunner and writer clearly invigorated the franchise - and of course that was helped by the fact that Jodie Foster was the star and it was kind of a return to the acting spotlight for her (she’s been mostly behind the camera in recent years). And no matter how you feel about whether Lopez’s writing worked, there is no denying Foster gave an incredible performance. Kali Reis and the rest of the supporting cast was also excellent. Critically, it was considered the best season since the first one, and HBO revealed it was the most watched season of True Detective - the finale got over 3 million viewers, easily beating any other episode of any other season. (And BTW, getting 3 million people to watch any TV episode these days, where the landscape is so fractured and there’s no longer a TV monoculture, is a big deal!).
The one really good thing to come out of all this is that HBO has now announced it will do a season 5 of TD with Issa Lopez at the helm again.
So, Mr. Pizzolatto, may I just say, with all the schadenfreude I can muster:
In a larger sense, though, the Pizzolatto fan boys’ response to an explicitly feminist show is part of the wider misogynist backlash since Trump was elected, #MeToo began, and famous men began to be held accountable for their demeaning and violent treatment of women. It reminds me of the abuse piled onto Amber Heard across social media during the 2022 defamation trial with her ex-husband, Johnny Depp. Just as fans of Depp seemed outraged that Heard would "try and ruin his career" by daring to speak openly about the abuse she suffered at his hands, I saw similar displays of indignance directed largely by men toward Night Country, an underlying attitude of, "how dare Issa Lopez taint this singular show and ruin Pizzolatto's legacy as a genius."
Just as happened with Heard, other women who have called out misogyny and abuse have been tarred and feathered by rabid fans, who have built virtual armies on these men's behalf and subjected the women to intense harassment. Victims of this treatment include rapper Megan Thee Stallion, E. Jean Carroll (to whom Trump now owes $83 million for defaming her and continuing to lie about raping her, which he was found liable for), and many others. Although Issa Lopez is not the victim of abuse or violence—I don’t want to suggest it’s the same thing—the dynamic of the discourse, and the way I’ve seen male fans demeaning her work in outrageous ways, just feels very much of a piece with the larger misogynist zeitgeist.
I went to the Madonna Celebration Tour this week and I wore the concert t-shirt from the first (and only other) Madonna tour I had attended: Blonde Ambition. I felt a little sheepish about not planning a more imaginative outfit - and I certainly saw some great ones at the concert - but oh well…It was a lot of fun and while she’s clearly not dancing like she used to, I was still pretty impressed with her choreography. My favorite part of the show was a tribute she did to AIDS victims of the 1980s and 90s - she sang “Live to Tell” while images of Keith Haring, Anthony Perkins, Herb Ritts, Freddie Mercury, Sylvester and thousands of others who weren’t so famous were displayed on the hanging screens. It was incredibly moving - and a reminder that Madonna was on the front lines of speaking out about AIDS when many stars wouldn’t touch the subject.
Then last night, I watched George Michael’s documentary “Freedom Uncut.” It had been on my list for months since becoming available on Prime Video. Like with Madonna, my love for GM was deep as an adolescent—I had a full-sized poster of him hanging up in my room in my mom’s apartment—and I’ve been revisiting his music in the past year. George actually made the documentary himself and was putting the finishing touches on it when he died - very tragically - on Christmas Day 2016. What a year of losses that was. Prince died in April, Hillary lost the election in November, and then George died in December.
The documentary is wonderful - and I’m pretty sure I already recommended the WHAM documentary that came out on Netflix last year - because it’s George telling his own story. What comes through is the stunning depth of his talent and artistry - as a songwriter perhaps even more than as a singer (and BOY WAS HE A SINGER!). This is so clear especially with his second album, “Listen Without Prejudice,” a tape I played and played and played when it came out, despite the fact that it was a radical departure from “Faith” and was an explicit reaction to his experience of becoming the biggest pop star in the world. I love both of the albums, but they’re so distinct from each other. “Faith” was George the (always soulful) pop star, LWP was George the singer-songwriter with a conscience, who didn’t care if his music was marketable or not. There’s a big chunk of the documentary that explains his falling out with Sony when he refused to do another commercial album after “Faith.” It reminded me a lot of what Prince did when he adopted the symbol and refused to use his name while under contract with Warner Bros. Both of them held tightly to their convictions and integrity as artists.
LWP’s first track, “Praying for Time,” is about economic injustice and how rich people ignore the plight of the poor, but I can’t help thinking he was also speaking about the AIDS crisis, how the world was averting its eyes to the fact that hundreds of thousands of gay men had died by 1990 (100,000 had died by then just in the US). It was the height of the epidemic, George was a (then closeted) gay man, and the song is called “Praying for Time”—that feels connected. Of course “Freedom 90” is one of George’s funkiest, best songs as well as being such a clear-eyed critique of stardom and all the madness that comes along with it. And the video!! Do you remember that video, with the supermodels? It’s an all-time great.
The other thing that comes through in this documentary is what an incredibly principled person George Michael was. He refused to play the game and allow himself and his image to be exploited by the industry—he built a career on his own terms, even though it was cut tragically short. The interviewees are all amazing - Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Mary J Blige - and I think they speak to how fundamentally good he was as a human.
I can’t help but think that of the (arguably) five biggest pop stars of the 80s, only Madonna is still with us. George, Prince, MJ, Whitney - they’re all gone. They all died very prematurely (Whitney at 48, the others in their 50s) and drugs/alcohol abuse were a factor in all of their deaths. It just seems like a very big deal to have lost such massive talents in a short period of time. I wonder if there’s a similar phenomenon with any other decade in popular music, but I can’t imagine there is. There’s something about Gen X musicians and early death and I wonder if it goes beyond the obvious explanation of substance abuse—like was there something about the emergence of MTV and how music videos really amplified these stars’ fame and visibility that made the pressure on them more intense? Anyway, let me know if you have any thoughts on the subject.
Until next time…