Warning: this article contains spoilers.
Taboo is like one of those hidden stages at Glastonbury where you turn up expecting Mumford and Sons and instead get three circus performers riding naked on a bear while a wrinkled man, equally naked, shouts polemical blank verse over his cousin’s remix of the Prodigy played entirely on squeezebox. It’s different, it’s challenging, and in a way not easy to put a finger on, it will change you.
Tom Hardy’s story of voodoo, incest and trade regulation on the Canadian west coast has been variously described as thrilling, visceral and, on our own pages, “completely batshit”. All of this helps make Taboo something distinctive – not an easy task in today’s saturated TV landscape. At the same time, it’s probably best enjoyed without truly trying to understand it. If you start quibbling about the sex magick James Delaney can conjure up from the grate of his fireplace, it might have an adverse effect. You could even end up developing the haggard countenance of the frustrate-watcher.
Frustrate-watching is a new concept invented by me to cash in on the popularity of the phrase “hate-watching” which is something I have never actually done (unless you count the news when Iain Duncan Smith is on). Frustrate-watching, however, I am intimately familiar with. It is the process of persisting with a TV programme even though it frustrates you. This can happen for a number of reasons, but a couple pop up more frequently and I believe they are linked.
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief” he may well have had a naked Tom Hardy in mind. Writing in his Biographia Literaria, the notorious opiate consumer was reflecting on his hit collab with hill rambler William Wordsworth, the Lyrical Ballads, and trying to explain what made them so great. [Admittedly this was complicated by the fact that the two had by this point fallen out and Coleridge was most keen to point out how his former mucker was completely deluded.] The deal, as Coleridge recalled it, was that Wordsworth would write poems that sought to bring out the transcendental glory of the everyday; the wonder of a humble flower, that kind of thing. Coleridge, meanwhile, was to write about spooky, supernatural stuff, but try to make the reader believe it was real. In other words, he would force them to suspend their disbelief.
Nowadays it often feels like the manufacture of disbelief is the obligation not of the creator but the audience. Rare is the serial where, if I’m going to stay engaged, I don’t have to pretend certain things didn’t happen. I love Mr Robot, for example, but the revelation halfway through season two that the protagonist has actually been in prison the entire time was a difficult one to take. Line of Duty has some of the best scenes in TV, but when it turned out a massive conspiracy had been buried by the actions of one gangly copper? That was tough. And these are just the dramas I liked.
To forcibly suspend disbelief so you can stick with a show is frustrate-watching. Also frustrate-watching is continuing with a series in anticipation of some resolution. I kept with Mad Men for seven seasons in the hope that I would eventually find out what Don Draper wanted (and the fact no one can truly know what goes on inside another’s head was not the answer I was seeking). I went all the way through the first season of Better Call Saul on the verge of falling asleep but confident that at some point there’d be some gonzo action (it never came). And I hear even Walking Dead fans have got bored of years of endless wandering punctuated only by moments of desensitizing ultraviolence.
One of the things people tend to say about television shows is ‘oh it gets good in the second season’. In the case of Boardwalk Empire, I heard it said about every single season of its five-year run. If you’re talking about the average American drama, that means watching at least 13 hours of the moving image before you actually enjoy yourself. And you’re never getting that time back.
Frustrate-watching is, to my mind, a consequence of the “golden age of TV”. Such is the sheer number of dramas that there is real pressure on the discerning viewer to choose wisely (Emily Nussbaum wrote something typically great about this with relation to Better Call Saul). What’s more, there’s pressure on producers to make their show stand out, hence the moments of sex, violence or dramatic contrivance that might prompt conversation. As for the delaying of gratification, that’s a given if your interest is in carrying an audience over to a second/third/94th season.
Frustrate-watching is something viewers will have to live with, but I would ask creators to consider once again wild man Coleridge and his maxim. The most successful show in the world right now, and perhaps in the medium’s history, is certainly full of extreme moments which prompt shock and outrage that keep people talking. But Game of Thrones is successful less because of these moments and more because they make you believe that not only dragons are real, but so are the machinations of houses who sleep with family members and keep wolves for pets. If old Samuel were alive today, he would binge on it I’m sure.
My TV frustrate-watch
House of Cards
When House of Cards began, everyone knew what it was; an entertainingly barmy game of cat and mouse between an obnoxious reporter and a slippery career politician with a tendency to deliver fourth-wall asides in the style of Foghorn Leghorn reciting beatnik-era tone poetry. It wasn’t great, but it was good. And then the politician shoved the reporter under a train.
In that moment, with that shove, the show traded all its tension and sexual intrigue for an instant of gimmicky spectacle, and it never recovered. I’ve sat through three post-shove series now, in the desperate hope that someone will give Frank Underwood an opponent worthy of Zoe Barnes, but it never happens. Instead we’re left with endless footage of him twisting in the wind, filling time by engaging in mind-numbing machinations or impassively staring at his wife until one of them snogs a security guard for something to do. House of Cards hasn’t been good for years. Why do I keep watching? Clearly, I must hate myself. Stuart Heritage
Mr Robot
I love almost everything about Sam Esmail’s hacker drama. The fantastic cast, the twisty plot that nods to the paranoid state we are living in, the endless pop culture references. I even love that the second series pretty much disappeared down a David Lynch wormhole, riffing on everything from Twin Peaks to Lost Highway. But Mr Robot also drives me up the wall.
It’s that nagging feeling that Esmail might not truly be in control of the material, that he’s keeping so many plates spinning he’ll inevitably drop one or two. Plus the fact that he loves to tease. After two series, we still don’t know whether the creepy Tyrell Wellick really exists, what game hacker and double agent White Rose is playing or even what Elliot Alderson’s ultimate aim is. No one who sat through all six seasons of Lost will ever feel entirely comfortable watching a drama with an unreliable narrator – and they don’t come much more unreliable than Elliot, who has dissociative identity disorder. Sarah Hughes
The Simpsons
It’s hard to believe this now, but The Simpsons used to be incredible. Overflowing with charm, intelligence and a wit that managed to be both inclusive and waspish. To call it the best cartoon on TV was to damn it with faint praise. It was the best thing on telly. Simpsons-ologists often point to the episode in which Principal Skinner’s identity theft is revealed to the town as the start of a plummet in quality. But it’s not that simple.
The Simpsons carried on being very good for a long time after that so most people, myself included, carried on watching. But its aura of infallibility was pierced. Quality control, once breached, became dangerously elastic. And the overall effect has been incremental decline, like driving on a tyre with a slow puncture. You didn’t notice it happening until eventually, you were bumping sadly along the road, getting nowhere fast. But enough’s enough. I can’t understand why they’re still making The Simpsons. So I can’t be bothered to watch it either. Phil Harrison
Girls
Over the years, I’ve met many Hannah Horvaths: highly strung, unreliable, self-absorbed and convinced they’re only a blog post away from a six-figure book deal. But I too can sometimes succumb to a bit of millennial navel-gazing, and perhaps that’s why I still watch Girls. Back in 2012, it was comforting to see a group of young women who, like myself, didn’t have it all figured out. Girls also presented serious topics with sincerity. Hannah’s mental health issues were nuanced, Marnie’s struggle for fame was bittersweet, Jessa was gorgeous but tortured and Shoshanna was the unlikely glue keeping the friends together through it all: abortions, STDs, breakups, joblessness, OCD – the whole Gen Y shebang. However, as the series progressed, the Girls’ friendships did quite the opposite. Everyone seemed locked in a cycle of pain, whinging and self-sabotage, without a SATC-style unity to bring them back together. Despite this, I hold out hope that there could be a bigger message about my generation, or friendship, still to come. Hannah J Davies
Fortitude
We had the most expensive British drama in history. We had a cast boasting Michael Gambon, Christopher Eccleston, Sofie Gråbøl and the mighty Stanley Tucci. And we had a setting – oh, that setting – of the howling, desolately beautiful Norwegian tundra. It looked phenomenal. It felt stifling. And its brutal mystery kept you guessing right until … wasps.
That’s right. The whole thing – the murders, the truly shocking violence – was because of some wasps. Really old, frozen wasps, which made people act like zombies to breed further wasps. In the second series, which is showing now, the atmosphere and setting remain. But can it recover? Probably not. If it can live up to even half its promise, though, and give a more satisfying ending than “some wasps did it”, it will be worth the slog. Luke Holland
Prison Break
Like Homeland or Broadchurch, Prison Break really should have ended after one series. Its first outing, while hardly The Wire, was a watchable piece of primetime TV, with a strong premise – man has to break his wrongly incarcerated brother out of a state penitentiary before he gets the chair – some decent set pieces and a satisfying conclusion (decade-old spoiler alert: they break out). Great job, everyone. Now pack up and move on.
Not quite. Prison Break ran for three more seasons. In the second, the brothers were on the run, then in the third the brother who originally did the prison-breaking was locked up in a completely different prison, with the other brother on the outside this time. By season four the plot had become utterly incoherent – something about a dead mum who wasn’t dead after all, a memory card with some compromising information on it and a dead girlfriend who also wasn’t dead after all, despite the fact that we had seen her severed head in a box, Seven-style, one season earlier.
And like a complete sap, I watched every second. But I certainly won’t be tuning in when the show returns for a surprise fifth season in April, that’s for sur … ah, who am I kidding – I’m going to watch every last second, dead mums, USB sticks and all. Welcome back, Prison Break, you terrible, terrible show. Gwilym Mumford
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