2017—Present: The Hate Watch

Originally published February 8, 2019

TV Recap of 2017—Present 

Season 3, Episode 1 

The Hate Watch 

Season Three (also known as 2019) is not off to a great start. While the Trump administration continues its reign of incompetence that causes harm and racist leaders in Virginia refuse to take their offenses seriously, scammers and gaslighters abound in our entertainment. I recently watched (and thoroughly enjoyed) the competing “Fyre Festival” documentaries (each journalistically compromised in their own way) that caused a flurry across the internet. I would never want to suggest that we shouldn’t be paying attention to Trump’s ridiculous show because we have to be able to respond when he shuts down the government or introduces a new hateful platform. And I would certainly never suggest that we shouldn’t watch so much television, even the stuff in which we can indulge our more basic impulses. But reading the news and consuming entertainment has begun, in some troubling ways, to feel like the same thing. 

The other night I was feeling burnt-out and anxious and so I spent all evening watching all ten awful episodes of the second season of the Netflix show Friends From College. This show is bad. It is not bad in a way that makes it fun to talk about, it is simply bad. The characters are unlikeable (which would not be an issue if they were not also boring), the jokes rarely land, and the plot is a contrived mess. Worst of all it made me like the usually very dreamy Keegan Micheal-Key less than I used to, and for that I can never forgive it. 

My brain is like a hungry cat clawing for content. Why couldn’t I have simply gone to sleep instead of angrily typing notes to myself on my phone as I watched Friends From College long into the night? (For example this show is so weird about animals. Please don’t murder that skunk.) I’ve been going for walks in the morning recently because I am slowly but surely becoming my mother. For the first ten minutes I am itchy and anxious—I feel like I’m moving too slowly, I want to look at my phone, I am uncomfortable with the lack of stimulation. I live in a beautiful place. There’s a spot in the road where the trees open up and I can see the hill below me, a wide swath of the shimmering bay, mountains in the distance and a sky that is a different color every day. The colors do not really show up in pictures on my phone. 

My obsession with cataloging all of my complaints about a bad show makes me question my integrity as a consumer of entertainment. I know, I want to talk about ethical media consumption, which makes me the worst. After all, things are a fucking mess right now, and  can’t we just have stuff? Can’t I just watch television as a way to step out of the universe where Donald Trump is “President” and nothing means anything? Can’t we live in that alternate universe in the last season of Parks and Recreation where Leslie Knope definitely became President? 

Trump’s presidency is like watching a terrible TV show in that I hate every second of it and yet I can’t look away. (Even when I do for a while I always come back.) There is humor in it—not so much in the parodies (sorry, SNL), but in the actual content Trump is giving us himself (you can’t really make fun of someone who has no shame.) It is a normal human reaction to laugh at a dangerous buffoon. And of course, laughing is not the only way to respond: people have been organizing, voting and protesting before and since Trump appeared. Trump is, of course, not the illness but the symptom. But I am troubled by the show Trump is conducting, by the media obsession with every absurd thing he does, says or tweets. Something feels off. I sometimes wonder if we are reacting to this presidency as if it were entertainment, because it feels more like a surreal production than a Presidency. Meanwhile, people are suffering and dying because of Trump’s policies and the way he plays into the worst racist/sexist/homophobic/xenophobic/transphobic tendencies of his base. 

The “Fyre Festival” documentaries tell the story of Billy McFarland, a con-man with an “I really like cocaine and money” vibe who created a nonsense company designed to rip-off wealthy millennials and then attempted to put on a music festival that was actually part scam, part delusion. He is now in prison for six years for fraud. He’s also pretty famous and getting paid to do interviews about his bullshit (way to go, Hulu.) So he’s fine. 

For the majority of us, the way into the “Fyre Festival” story was schadenfreude, but one good thing the documentaries did for us was to give us context for how many people McFarland and his band of enablers hurt. It wasn’t just rich investors and kids who got cheated out their trust funds: hundreds of people who worked to set up the festival in the Bahamas were never paid. A restaurant owner and caterer on the island lost $140,000 and had to use her own money to pay her employees who worked around the clock for the festival. And because many people are good and compassionate, a Go-Fund-Me campaign has already earned her back over $170,000. This seems like the best outcome: action as well as reaction. 

The Hulu doc posits that McFarland profited off millennial narcism—that he catered to our worst impulses: FOMO, instagram obsession with “influencers”, selfies and materialism. This is a pretty boring way to paint millennials, as if we are somehow fundamentally worse than other generations: “instagram and avocado toast will doom us all” is not an original concept. Of course we want to “live our best lives,” and go to music festivals in the Bahamas (if we can afford it.) Of course we want to document our lives, watch television, try to find “positivity.” And when disaster strikes—of course we want a front row seat. 

We have no good options! Nothing means anything anymore. They say that to be taken in by a cult, con-man or extremism you have to be both vulnerable and exposed to it. Everyday we walk around in debt with very few good job options knowing that the country is being run by a egomaniacal racist propped up by a band of misogynist old white men, climate change means the end of the world as we know it will come in the next twelve years, and a Russian dictator interfered in one election and will probably do it again. If I were to get sucked in to a cult, it would be one that offered me a way out of this mess. Instagram is not the illness, it’s the symptom. 

What watching the Fyre Festival disaster and the Trump disaster teach us is how to spot a con-man. Ja-Rule, who worked closely with Billy McFarland on the Fyre Festival, infamously tweeted “I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, lead astray!!!” Everybody laughed at him because yeah, man, we live in the world too. Haven’t you been paying attention? 

I suppose the question is what do we do with our attention? Can we consume entertainment and news at the same time? Can we make room in our brains for critique and amusement—when it comes to TV and Trump? Or might we be better off to just take a minute to stare at the sky—to watch the snow glaze the trees—and think about what we’re going do to fix this?  I have no good answers.