Critic’s Notebook: Capitalism and TV Today, a Love/Hate Story

Daniel Fienberg
·7 min read
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The intersection of late-stage capitalism and late-stage Peak TV has made prophets of people normally fixated on profits.

It would be borderline madness if, on a weekly basis, the Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon and Apple were to send shareholders an email with the subject line: “The End Is Nigh.” But the television industry, which has normally explored issues of class with the same skittishness it reserves for religion, has started to treat the economic realities of our American experiment with far more pessimism than you would expect.

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The irony is plain: These content producers/unlikely doomsday preachers are putting out a steady stream of shows about the corrosive impact of a system that treats workers as interchangeable cogs existing only to fatten the bottom line; at the same time, they’re raising subscription prices on loyal customers and killing off completed productions that employed hundreds for tax write-offs.

If you don’t believe that’s a recipe for revolution, watch Tony Gilroy’s Disney+ series Andor. The show uses the comforting backdrop of the Star Wars universe to issue a far less comforting warning about the consequences of allowing the wealthy to create their own insular world where they can use authoritarian tools to quash dissent and raise their own standards of opulence. It’s a note of caution that has been in the franchise since long before it made George Lucas a billionaire, but union hater Walt Disney would be rolling over in his grave at a show whose progressive protagonists make Norma Rae seem as militant as Melania Trump (although nobody respected co-opting values in the name of value like Disney; see Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride).

When HBO isn’t giving John Oliver a platform to relentlessly chide his WBD “Business Daddy,” the company is spinning variations on Business Daddy: The Show. Whether it’s Succession or The White Lotus (or House of the Dragon, if you boil it down to its essence), these are satires that so perfectly reflect our growing distrust of the rich that Emmy voters are able to treat them as dramas. They’re have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too shows that portray the wealthy as cannibalizing monsters who alternate between backstabbing and virtue signaling, but take the sort of exclusive vacations that could fool you into thinking it’s all worth it — unless you stick around HBO long enough to watch the humor-tinged disenfranchisement and desperation at the heart of Rain Dogs or Somebody Somewhere.

TV has always been a medium built around labor — from the centrality of workplace sitcoms and workplace procedurals in programming lineups to the traditional structuring of daytime television around the rhythms and purchasing power of “homemakers.” The broadcast model said, “Here, watch shows about people going through the motions at work — and make sure to pay close attention to the products you can purchase depending on how lucrative your own professional endeavors are.” Shows like The Office or Taxi or Cheers didn’t sugarcoat the grind that was day-to-day work. But there was usually an underlying message that work was still a place to find a secondary family and, occasionally, the partner with whom you could create a primary family.

Compare that to the nightmare of Apple TV+’s Severance, in which neither the means of production nor the actual product is clear, and people have to submit to mind-altering surgery in order to give themselves an illusion of work-life balance. Lumon Industries doesn’t have the technology to create robots to do whatever it is they do, so they turn people into automatons whose ability to push buttons on a laptop isn’t impacted by the baggage of their humanity.

In Apple TV+’s retro-futurist Hello Tomorrow!, cheery robots do most menial jobs, enabling people to concentrate on assimilating into a society defined by 1950s-style conformism. Its heroes are hucksters and scammers manipulating a marketplace in a way that’s wholly comparable to fact-based cautionary tales like The Dropout or Super Pumped or WeCrashed.

Yes, WeCrashed is another Apple production — as was the two-season run of The Mosquito Coast, an amusingly if unintentionally ironic adaptation of Paul Theroux’s 1981 anti-consumerist novel. The show was an attempted work of art about a man attempting to escape the retail rat race, funded by a company that has turned the retail rat race into an art form.

Apple is no likelier to tell viewers to skip the next generation of iPhone or iWatch than Amazon is to tell audiences that tech companies are so devoted to their bottom line that they’re willing to make a deal with the devil to get there. But that sure is the plot of the latter streamer’s new show The Consultant! Featuring a reptilian Christoph Waltz as its lead, the series has flaws, but its mockery of modern employee-friendly offices will keep you busy just long enough for Amazon to quietly cancel three or four acclaimed shows you’ve never heard of and greenlight several more adaptations of the airplane novels your dad loves.

Maybe you can watch The Consultant, ignore its allegorical undertones and just pretend it’s a messed-up horror series about Satan running a video game company. Maybe you can watch Netflix’s You just as a warped love story featuring a hunky sociopath and pretend that building its entire, recently released season four around the so-called Eat-the-Rich Killer isn’t about the need to fight back against the exploitative upper class. Maybe you can watch two-thirds of Bravo’s programming and ignore that beneath the dishy reality soap operas about real housewives and crews on yachts is a warning that the gap between haves and have-nots is widening to an even more shocking degree.

Even though you’ll still get 50 shows about authorities fighting crime in New York or Chicago before you see a single show about the inner workings of a union, several of my favorite current broadcast series are making their concerns about this moment of economic instability more text than subtext. NBC’s American Auto hails from Justin Spitzer (creator of the exceptional minimum-wage gem that was Superstore), and it feels like a true successor to one of my favorite anti-corporate comedies, ABC’s Better Off Ted. The characters on American Auto work in the executive suites of a Detroit-based mid-tier car company, and the show proves itself to be uncommonly savvy in picking apart the capitalist apparatus, from town-devouring factories to misleading advertising to the hollowness of well-meaning diversity programs.

I’m even more impressed by what ABC’s Abbott Elementary, the first broadcast awards juggernaut in years, has spent its second season doing. The Emmy-winning comedy has always focused on the underappreciated heroism of teachers, but this season’s primary storyline about charter programs and the danger of corporate encroachment into public school systems — especially those servicing economically disadvantaged urban spaces — has been scathing. In a political landscape where teachers unions are a frequent conservative bogeyman, Abbott Elementary has dared to yearn for a world in which those unions have even more power.

Abbott Elementary is a hit, but it’s not as if it’s as popular as Paramount Network’s Yellowstone, a celebration of dynastic capitalism that’s sometimes referred to as one of the more conservative shows on TV by people who ignore Taylor Sheridan’s palpable ambivalence. (See Tulsa King and its very conflicted take on the corporatization of legalized drugs, or Mayor of Kingstown, which doesn’t always know what it’s saying about the prison industrial complex.)

So grab a placard and join a picket line. It’s what the biggest media giants in the world want you to do. And don’t worry, your streaming subscriptions are all on autopay.

This story first appeared in the March 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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