There was a time in my life when I could be thought of as normal. I used to hold safely prescribed views held by most people and felt no particular impulse to threaten their conventionality. These views, in keeping with the overall attitude of the moment in time, were of a broad civil libertarian bent. That which prizes private judgment, that doesn’t go around peeping in windows (or through screens), scrutinizing shelf contents, or agonizing over words and gestures for moral lapses. That which sees the individual as the sole proprietor of their moral and spiritual destiny.
Like most people, perhaps even like you specifically, I felt safe in applying this framework upon as many things as would fit my (our) view of the world, even if their actual size was not in equal dimension.
For instance, I accepted a conception of Socrates as being, in essence, a civil libertarian of the modern post-Cold War sort, despite being a product or pre-Christian antiquity. I sympathized with this man and turned over in my mind a solemn, if abstract resolution to defend the miscreant philosopher, fused out of George Carlin and Joe Namath and Columbo, against his tyrannical Athenian persecutors. Of course I’d have taken the side of Socrates against Athens, I inoffensively thought, for it is the side of truth over sophistry, freedom over uniformity, virtue over vice, and curiosity over indifference, and all that other civil libertarian shit you probably still eat up like a roving mountain of sewer rats upon a single scrap of garbage.
I lived this way and thought this way for I don’t know how many years of my early life, and in that time I never once considered ever having to question those inherent collective truisms, let alone to abandon them like dolls I melted over a grill for fun.
Funny how time has a way melting your brain over a grill.
Ask me today how I’d see the Socratic martyrdom and you’d find my sympathies somewhat reversed. Now deep into my 30s, and as far from civil libertarian permissiveness as you can get in this society, Socrates’s grand project doesn’t seem very compelling. “Pursuit of truth,” or whatever the fuck it was, feels either like a futile craft hobby that leads to boredom and arrogance or a dangerous impulse enabling only misery and internal strife. In the long barren winter of my maturity, anyone who prizes the power of thought and the reach of ideas must accept that “corruption of youth” is a pretty substantial and punishable charge.
But even that is still pretty theoretical and toothless. My conviction solidifies itself more concretely today when applied to a truly modern, living incarnation of Socrates. What would a modern Socrates be like, you ask? Well, not, alas, like the scruffy, contrarian gadfly, or that somewhat likable proto-slacker of Aristophanes’s satirical dramas. No. A Socrates of the 21st century variety would be more cautious in his demeanor and expression. He would be more unwilling to offend in his views. He would, in fact, be congenial to the very authorities that could, at the slightest misstep, crush him.
Certainly almost everything about Alan Sepinwall bares as little a resemblance to the actual Socrates as anyone can. He’s not clever and has no sense of irony. He lacks those (likely Plato-inflated) allusions, dialectics, and turns of phrase, any playfulness whatever, having instead mastered a guilelessness that taxes all good sense. Sure, they are both critics, but Socrates was an independent dissector of morality while Alan Sepinwall is an indentured defender of media. Despite these differences, though, Alan Sepinwall’s vast influence on scores of readers and writers lifts that of his predecessor back out from its crypt; now standing outside our windows, draped in rags and chains, it practically taunts us to act.
Ours is an age that finds the prestige, let alone the authority, of the critic in a very precarious position. Making a living off of it was never as easy as the cultural nostalgists like to think, but the window of timing through which talent slips under the cover of darkness is both narrower and more wire-tripped. Alan Sepinwall is the luckiest of that already minuscule elect. He has staked out a career of incredible sweep in professional sustainability and, rarer still, real public influence. His place in our culture seems less like that of a beat journalist than that of an Anglo-Saxon myth. He started critiquing television while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, which got him hired to the New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger. He remained at the Ledger for 14 years before moving to HitFlix, later absorbed into Uproxx. Now he is at Rolling Stone. In every venue he has done the same thing: review and analyze the most relevant, substantial, and interesting television now on offer.
Sepinwall’s appeal is in his passion. Some critics are known for their derision; others are known for their advocacy. Sepinwall’s work falls into the latter category. If he’s laid hatchet jobs against shows he hates, they shrink next to his many crusades for the shows he loves. He is a man of deep fixations that started in college with NYPD Blue. His skill in making The Sopranos palatable to his New Jersey readership launched him nationally. He became the golden voice of the platinum age of television. He is credited with saving Chuck and throwing life preserver after life preserver to Community. Shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men were not just uncommonly intense outlets of Sunday night diversion, but complex works of art, embodying the fraught character of our times, demanding active, close viewing. “If you wanted thoughtful drama for adults,” Sepinwall writes in The Revolution Will Be Televised, “you didn’t go to the multiplex; you went to your living room couch.”
Like most popular critics, Socrates included, Sepinwall is not a man of systems or theories. He has, rather, a turn or a bit. An attitude, maybe. A certain way of looking at things that his readers can rely on. Most think of it as simply “TV is an artform like novels and films are artforms,” and by watching important TV, you become what you’ve most longed to be: an imbiber of important things. While that is what he says, this is hardly unique if you’ve seen Twin Peaks, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, St. Elsewhere, The Prisoner, Route 66, or The Monkees. That’s not enough for a critical arsenal; it certainly wasn’t enough for Pauline Kael. And indeed, that is only the thin surface coating a deeper, wider, murkier pool: the Showrunner as Hero. Sepinwall revives that Carlylean concept of Great Men propelling civilization through sheer force of genius. “[S]ince it is the spiritual always that determines the material,” Carlyle said, “this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person.”
He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The world's manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world's general position. Looking well at his life, we may get a glance, as deep as is readily possible for us, into the life of those singular centuries which have produced him, in which we ourselves live and work.
Same energy!
Even if Sepinwall doesn’t like this or that episode of a given show, the reader does not come away with the larger fear that the showrunner has erred, their genius is fully intact. Consider the series finale of The Sopranos. I remember distinctly watching this with my dad when it aired 15 years ago, and both of us staring dumbstruck at our idiot box as the scene abruptly cut to black and the credits rolled. “The most common complaint I still hear about the finale,” Sepinwall wrote in 2012, “is that it made some people think their cable had gone out.” I just thought David Chase ran out of real ideas and decided to ghost. But worry not: it’s all part of the showrunner’s prophetic vision!
American TV viewers had seen great series finales prior to June 10, 2007, and terrible ones, wholly satisfying wrap-ups and cliffhangers that never got resolved due to cancellation, but we’d never seen … this. No one had challenged his audience not only up to the last frame of footage, but for many seconds beyond that. … Chase not only never worried about having a likable main character; he didn’t need a likable series. He didn’t care about giving his audience what they wanted, didn’t need to give them the warm fuzzies in the finale. Instead, he took a kind of scene … turned it on its head through music and editing, and either went away by pulling the rug out from under his viewers one last time, or by killing his main character in a way that … could fuel arguments from here to the end of Western civilization.
Don’t threaten me with a good time, Alan. Sure, I’m speaking as someone who never really liked The Sopranos. I thought it was dour and dull and indulged rather than articulated rancorous elements of the middle-class psyche. And whatever unique qualities it was alleged to have had about New Jersey or manhood or immigrant diasporas or whatever became diluted as its seething-male-anithero model replicated itself across channels like archetypal Levittowns. Sepinwall’s attitude and style followed suit.
While publications online and off routinely hemorrhage staff, TV reviewing—or “recapping”—is a solid mainstay. I don’t have any exact figures but I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that recappers are so profuse in the industry that their skulls may well fill a TV critic equivalent of the Capuchin Crypt. On multiple platforms, shows are recapped episode by episode, often in fathomless depth and excruciating detail. They are eagerly clicked-on and skimmed at the very least.
And the heroism professed by Sepinwall confers an equal level of authority upon the hero-watcher, who in turn becomes the hero-elector. Publications have the fair but arbitrary power to pick and choose what shows are worth their time. In July of 2017, The AV Club announced that it was ending its coverage of Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here because it did not live up to expectations. “Sadly, some of what the show has been attempting to do is exactly what I want out of a TV show,” the show’s assigned critic Jesse Hassanger writes, “at least in theory. While it does attend to some ongoing plotlines, I’m Dying Up Here allows its character focus to shift from episode to episode, and has yet to turn overly serialized.” In September of 2018, the show was cancelled.
Sepinwall may be pure in talent and intent, but he has nonetheless corrupted not just television viewers and the writers who imitate him, but the whole contemporary culture. People who fear the effects of this corruption are obligated to repel it. Provided, of course, that I am able to convince enough people to stop being normal and to start being proper citizens in a respectable democratic culture. There are a few ways I can pull this off. I could mercilessly lampoon the whole affair as Aristophanes did. If only I had such ability! Alas, my toolbox is a smaller one, containing nothing more potent than good old moral censure. So I must trudge on, like a fusion of Anytus, Robespierre, and Newton Minnow—but funnier and more handsome.
If I was tasked with prosecuting Alan Sepinwall for corruption, I would do it on two main counts.
The first count would be the proliferation of superfluous content. The internet has released a flood of language—among other things—unprecedented in human memory; yes, more significant than the rise of the printing press. Sepinwall’s efforts have only intensified the flood to drown just about everyone in words. Take all the episode recaps into a bundle for posterity. How many volumes would that make? Hundreds at the very least. And any good scholar would have to include the fringe blogs committed to Straussian esoteric readings of every hand gesture seen on The Bachelorette. So make that several thousand volumes. For a single person of even higher than average intelligence to give each piece his or her fullest attention would require an impossible demand on his or her time. Whole commitments to work, family, and health would have to be reduced. Society would come to a standstill; no, it would collapse far more quickly than it already has. Of course no one does that. But the material gets written anyway; it piles up in the digital store rooms never to be read, no usable data to be mined for advertisers. All is awash in verbal vomit.
The second count is the effect these words have, whether read or not. In general, TV recapping’s quality requirements are no different from any other criticism besides its speed of production—sometimes an hour after the episode being recapped airs. It is fluid, concise, funny, erudite, firm where it needs to be, impassioned where it can afford to be, and most of all smart. Some of the smartest writing may come from these recaps. But the more it is carried out, the duller the smartness becomes. All the wit, the insight, and the analytical precision dissolves into a fog of sameness. A sameness of aesthetics, psychology, and politics. A show that hits the ground running with positive notices seldom loses speed. One that abuses a collective trust never really regains it. Ultimately the glut of recapping creates a fevered atmosphere where cleverness is confused for smartness and enthusiasm is confused for wisdom.
The sameness of smartness almost makes you long for stupidity. Stupidity is like the lover you let get away because you did not appreciate its affections enough and just took it for granted. That kind of longing makes you think about stupidity endlessly and late at night, looking at its Instagram posts under your covers in the dark. Pretty soon you waste water in the shower masturbating to any object that comes into your head—a swivel chair, a spatula, an inexplicably flame-engulfed 1970 Dodge Charger—that will help you forget that, in the end, you had to settle for smart.
Sepinwall and his defenders will find such charges impossible to overcome, leaving only the manner of punishment to be decided. Obviously it’s not going to be a self-administration of literal hemlock. I may not be normal anymore but I am not insane. Instead, think of hemlock as a useful metaphor. Everyone gets their own personal hemlock in the end. Custom-made hemlock, you could say. For Sepinwall’s platinum-coated standards, only the platinum era of hemlock will suffice. Once pronounced guilty of cultural corruption, he will submit to handing over his DVD player and whatever DVDs he owns, to discontinuing his cable and internet provider, and to destroying all his writing instruments. He will be given a VCR and a specially made VHS of every available episode ofYoung Sheldon and the post-Sheen run of Two and a Half Men. He’ll probably spend a lot of time fishing.
Now you might be tempted to wonder where, exactly, this all leads, seeing as how the suppression of Socrates didn’t exactly impede the spread of Western philosophy. There’s wisdom in that. The normal are always going around being wise. But I don’t know. Having abandoned normalcy, I concern myself only with justice. And who’s to say that justice will not prevail against wisdom this time around? But that doesn’t depend solely on me, as I am not a “hero” like Chase or Sepinwall. I am but a humble citizen, surely one of several, compelled by civic pride and all the communal duties tethered to it, and the also the belief that NewsRadio got an unfair shake.