What does it mean to be a man? No one really knows, but it makes for some damn good television.
In the first decade of the 21st century, a critical consensus formed that we’re currently living in the golden era of television. Just as trashy, CGI-dominated movies continue to own more screens at the cineplex, a renaissance in long-form dramatic story-telling has emerged on the small screen, but now hi-def screen. DVR and iTunes allowed viewers to follow intricate plotlines and nuanced character development, and smaller channels like HBO and AMC made a name for themselves by developing an artier level of TV drama. Chuck Klosterman accurately claimed that the four best shows of this renaissance were The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, and I’d add a second tier of critically acclaimed but less adulated shows such as Friday Night Lights, True Blood, The Shield, The Walking Dead, and Justified.
When you list out the great shows that make up this television renaissance, certain commonalities emerge: high production values, a greater investment in acting talent, and complex plotting that assumes an audience that never misses an episode. But with the sole exception of True Blood—which has camp enough to put it into a genre of its own—all these shows share something else. Every other non-vampire show centers around a modern man struggling with the limitations of his outlook in a world full of complexity and changes that prevent survival through simple reliance on old gender norms. If you want to make a critically acclaimed drama, you need to build up a patriarch, preferably in a highly masculine environment, and then start to peel away his certainty about the way the world works and what it means to be a man in this world.
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The Sopranos kicked off the trend by creating a character right out of the cinematic tradition of gross masculinity, the Mafioso. Gangsters are such symbols of excessive patriarchy onscreen that the most famous movie of all time about the Mafia, The Godfather, directly invokes paternity, both real and symbolic, as the source of power. But The Sopranos played with this image by putting the focus on the feminine sphere of the home and putting Tony in the feminized position of the therapist’s couch, destabilizing the masculinity of this most masculine of filmic character types. After that, the mold was set. Americans can’t get enough of watching powerful men run into walls created by the limits of narrow, traditional masculinity.
The Wire riffed off similar themes, though as a verifiably protagonist-free show, its examination of masculinity often felt more abstract. Nonetheless, the creators delighted in undermining traditional masculinity, making the toughest character on the show, Omar, a gay man, and the nemesis for McNulty, Stringer Bell, a bookish striver with more of an eye toward a desk job than a life as a soldier. And in case McNulty’s masculine excesses that lead to his personal downfall weren’t pointed enough of their own, the character was foiled by the equally smart but more mature Lester Freamon, who spent his time away from work making dollhouses. It all underscored the larger themes of a show that portrayed the highly masculine worlds of cops and drug dealers as a Sisyphean hell from which escape is impossible.
The cascade of quality TV from there on out never strayed far from exploring powerful men in manly worlds facing the limits imposed by masculinity. Mad Men signals the theme from the very title and title sequence of a man in a suit starting off in an executive office, only to plunge into the abyss, surrounded by the ridiculous consumerist images he creates in his own bid to master the universe. The show delivers on the promise. Most of Don Draper’s problems stem directly from his inability to let go of the fantasy life of the executive: barking orders at underlings, using sex as a way to conquer women, basking in society’s admiration of his perfect nuclear family, and attempting to control the dream world of America through advertising.
During the fourth season of the show, we see how much the creators work the theme of toxic masculinity with deliberation. Having lost his family and his firm and nearly his life, Don starts turning his life around by abandoning his attachment to old-fashioned notions of male power. He has a reckoning with his underling Peggy, finally seeing her as an equal. He stops dating women because they fit the mold of the compliant trophies, and instead finds some measure of peace dating an independent, challenging woman his own age. He’s happy for a brief moment of letting go his attachment to the role of the dominant male, but by the end of the season, the fantasy of patriarchal power grips him again, causing him to dump his psychologist girlfriend for a much younger secretary. Viewers fully expect season five to start with Don miserable again, in the grip of this masculine model and unable to find a path back to his true self.
Friday Night Lights tells a similar story, but in much more sympathetic terms, and with less misery and failure for the protagonist. At first, the show appeared to be a celebration of the codes of traditional masculinity-and its patriarch, Coach Eric Taylor. However, a close examination of the show demonstrates that it’s also a show about a man with old-fashioned values having to adapt to live a more fulfilling life. Eric’s masculine code gets him to the top of his field of high school football coaching, but soon his manly honor proves inadequate at protecting his job. (In seasons four and five, Taylor moves to a new high school in a much poorer district.) That, coupled with his wife’s and daughter’s increasing demands for more respect and independence, causes him to start stressing out more frequently, ratchets up his stress level as he finds himself facing problems where his strong-but-silent act doesn’t work anymore.
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