Television and technology comfort us when they’re known quantities. “Here is this thing, here is how it works,” is the basis for most TV pilots and consumer tech. The faster the product can put you at ease about what it’s offering, the faster you’ll be able to use it, and get other people to do he same. Familiarity and simplicity are critical. The television itself once exemplified what it meant to be state-of-the-art, combining the ease of radio with the look and sound of the movies, all available from the comfort of your living room.
It’s maybe coincidence, and maybe not that the programming renaissance of the last decade-plus coincides with a proliferation of TV-viewing outlets. As cable distanced itself further from the dependable procedurals of broadcast networks, a correlated rise in TV quality appeared to follow. Routine formats had become just that: broadcast programming may still be dominated by procedural crime stories and sitcoms, but on cable, the dangerous unpredictability of serialized, serious storytelling has become as big a draw as lax content restrictions.
Along with the evaporating need for rules dictating runtimes, storylines, or even act structures, the most talked about dramas became the ones uninterested in comforting the viewer. They wanted to shock you by having Tony Soprano strangle a man, on-screen, in the fifth hour of The Sopranos, or make you weigh your investment in Vic Mackey against the crimes he committed week after week on The Shield. To do that, American TV needed to unsettle you, and tell stories contradictory to what ads have been telling you since they first justified the medium: not everything is okay. You are not okay.
Cable’s po-faced appeal seemed to reflect a change in cultural sensibilities, but viewers weren’t just itching for shows as dark as they were modern. Horror and high fantasy make up some of the biggest hits of the current day, handling serious drama with the safe fictional distance afforded by genre gloves. Yet when looking at three of the best “realistic” shows of the last eight years, Mad Men, The Americans, and Justified, a throughline stretching from the ‘60s to the present day charts the cagey, but familiar relationship we’ve had with technology in the time since state-of-the-art went from firewood and tinder to Firefox and Tinder.
In different phases of each program’s life, we find evidence of how changing technology is as much about embracing the future as it is mourning the past. In its premiere season, Mad Men used psychiatry as both a boogeyman, and a series Rosetta stone. AMC’s flagship drama was rife with subliminal text and messy character psychology from episode one, following advertising men and women as they struggled to get inside the heads of consumers. But it’s set in a time where mental health care is about as respected a study as phrenology. In the second episode, “Ladies Room,” an exchange between Don Draper and Roger Sterling equates psychiatry to a vestigial concern from wartime:
Don: We had one headshrinker in the army, a gossip, busting with other people’s thoughts.
Roger: Hasn’t changed much, just costs more.
Don: You can’t shoot at them.
Roger: We live in troubling times.
For much of 1960-set first season, and the rest of the series, social change would be the wolf knocking at the door for already troubled individuals, whether it was divorce taking root it suburbia, or the civil rights movement. But the biggest shadow over the first season belonged to The Bomb. Consumer gadgets provide Don moments of gentle reassurance during early Mad Men, whether he’s taping his daughter’s birthday party on an 8mm camera, or pitching a slide projector like it’s a time machine. But these are devices used to immortalize the past. Looking ahead leads to nothing but worry.
“I guess a lot of people must come here worried about the bomb,” Don’s wife Betty tells her psychiatrist in “Ladies Room.” Even if Betty’s real issues are much more personal, and people make light of doom-saying (“Hiroshima, I know” Betty’s neighbor jokes well gesturing to a cluttered living room), the fear that everything could come to an end at any moment is constant. Advancements in consumer products meant to make life more enjoyable are just a reminder that the ability to destroy the world in minutes is an unchangeable binary. An ad selling “space-age” aerosol deodorant can’t be set in actual space, reasons Don midway through the episode. “Some people think of the future and it upsets them. They see a rocket, they start building a bomb shelter.”
Mad Men’s characters would grow right along with its worldview, but the M.O. for the first season was simple: ache for the past (Don settles on a cowboy to sell the aerosol), ignore the present, deny the future. We have to track twenties years into the future, and across networks to get to the bargaining phase. The Americans, an FX drama about undercover Soviet K.G.B. operatives living in 1980s Washington, is the youngest of the shows in discussion here, premiering in 2013. The airing third season has added religion to its “conversation taboos of interest” list, with the political focus being on Russia’s war in Afghanistan and apartheid in South Africa.
It was last week’s episode that returned the show to the tech focus much of its second year was occupied with. An unusually structured and despairing hour, even by The Americans’ high standards for the latter, “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” marks almost the exact midpoint of the series, which (God willing) is expected to run five seasons. The bulk of the episode follows married spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings as they plant a recording device in an F.B.I. mail robot. An older woman (another Betty) gets caught up in the mix, and while Philip plants the bug, Elizabeth “takes care” of the witness.
Rather than pushing the world to the back of their minds like the characters of Mad Men, the personal and political are inseparable on The Americans. It’s about people from opposing nations who want an active say in what will become of the world as a whole. But as it follows agents committed to ideology from both sides of the Iron Curtain, The Americansshows individual morality as the first casualty of a hidden war. Molded since teenagers to deceive, kill, and sleep with whomever, whenever to achieve mission success, the Jennings have been increasingly at odds with one another this season, as Philip’s growing guilt clashes with Elizabeth’s resolute commitment to The Cause.
The title reference to Philip K. Dicks’ sci-fi novel sets up “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” as a test of whether Elizabeth is capable of empathy after decades of dehumanizing work. She passes, but only by acknowledging that her nation’s need to maintain technological parity with the U.S does not absolve her of sin. “We’re making the world a better place,” she explains to Betty. “That’s what evil people tell themselves when they do evil things,” Betty replies, before suffering a slow, labored death.
As the race for leverage in the Cold War drags on, the moral compromises stack up. In a way, the Jennings end up helping preserve the world instead of bettering it, as stealing America technology and intelligence helps ensure a balance of power. A major thread of the second season was the development of stealth technology, which leads to the kidnapping of a defector scientist, and more murders. A speech in this season describes the ARPANET, the military-funded network that would be the foundation of the modern Internet, as both God and a beast, an “endless ribbon of virtual highway.” “Going where?” Philip asks. “To the future.”
It’s a small scene from last week that foreshadows where the fiction and reality are all going: while Philip and Elizabeth are busy trying to prevent WWIII by any means necessary, their son is at home playing with a handheld game device, tuning out everything else around him. The Cold War will end within a decade, but its technological offspring are already setting up for long-term residence in the home.
Jumping ahead once more, we arrive at Justified, The Americans’ FX alum that’s ending a seven season run in just a couple weeks. Despite its present day setting, the show isn’t technophobic or political so much as agnostic of both, a cops and robbers show that never worried about paranoia getting in the way of a good yarn.
That changed with the start of Justified’s final season, as the embattled Harlan County, Kentucky faced a threat greater than any drug lord or crime outfit: modernity. In the season premiere, the musical Brigadoon is referenced, and sets the stage for Justified’s entire final arc. In the play, a priest asks God for his town to be protected from the changes of the outside world, and his prayers are answered. Brigadoon only appears to the rest of the world once every 100 years, but should any citizen leave it, the spell will be broken.
From the start of its closing season, every major character on Justified -whether it’s Stetson-wearing lawman Raylan Givens, criminal Boyd Crowder, or his informant wife-to-be Ava- wants to get out of Harlan. At the same time, Avery Markham, a notorious moneyman, moves into town looking to buy up property for a legal marijuana grow-op. For those trapped in Harlan, it’s their world that’s in danger of coming to an end, not the greater one that’s just as susceptible to nuclear annihilation as it was 50 years ago.
A series that casts Kentucky as the new Old West, it’s fitting that Justified would feint at an ending about the death of its throwback setting. All season, the characters talked about how the Harlan they know was dying, and it was hard to disagree. The criminal enterprises of old are mostly gone, (illegal) family businesses done in by government intervention. Smartphones have become a more prominent object in the hands of characters than guns or bourbon glasses. The villains are conspiring in fancy hotels, and hipsters are serving the coffee at the diner. The outside has started invading Harlan even before anyone could get out.
Yet Justified hasn’t spent this season bemoaning the end of old Harlan; if anything, it’s been about proving the many ways things don’t change with the times. The series has positioned Raylan, Boyd, and Ava as the last survivors of their generation, but there’s another one waiting just around the corner. The marshals service is just as set for replacements (one an Iraq War veteran, whereas Boyd served in Desert Storm) as Harlan’s criminal element. In a moment almost out ofIt’s a Wonderful Life, teenage entrepreneur Loretta McCready rallies the landowners of Harlan away from Markham, offering to keep the county’s “green” future squarely in the hands of those who live there. Justified has always been about how the ghosts of the past haunt the present, but it is not without hope for the future.
It was a show about a robot-engineered apocalypse that made a mantra out of “All of this has happened before, and all this will happen again,” but where Mad Men and The Americans look forward with trepidation, we’re still here because of the virtues exemplified by Justified: adaptation and acceptance. TV can still provide comfort even as it lacks assurances for what will be; there’s a sense of security that comes with knowing the concerns of the here and now are nothing new. “It wasn’t calculators and robots then! The world changes. Some things stay the same,” Elizabeth is told by the reminiscing Betty. A sweet old lady is just who we want to hear such wisdom from, but even a deeply flawed and younger man like Boyd can arrive at a similar conclusion before his time is up: don’t eulogize the past until the future gets its turn.