All US television is Trumpy now, even when it's not
In the original SATC era we wanted to join the wealthy and aspirational foursome for a drink, but now the zeitgeist has turned. The television shows that feel most relevant to the moment, and which are the most engaging, are all about the suffering and the immorality of the super-rich.
It feels more comfortable, now, to reassure ourselves that while billionaires and tech-bro oligarchs appear to be running the world, they're living lives of miserable inauthenticity.
It started with Succession, a brilliant and darkly funny exposition of the ways in which inherited wealth can corrupt family relationships. The creator of Succession, Jesse Armstrong, has just released a movie, Mountainhead, about a foursome of tech billionaires who hole up in a mountain mansion in Utah as the world seems to be ending.
More recently we have Your Friends & Neighbours, starring Mad Men's Jon Hamm, a square-jawed hero of all-American good looks but with just enough despair in his face to hint at inner spiritual desolation. Hamm plays Coop, a one-percenter hedge fund manager enraged by his divorce (his wife left him for his good friend), who loses his job after a low-level sexual indiscretion at work.
In order to maintain his lifestyle (which includes $4500 skin treatments for his daughter and $30,000 tables at charity galas), he resorts to stealing from his friends and neighbours.
These people, who live in a fictional, highly manicured wealth conclave outside New York City, are so obscenely rich that they have $200,000 watches and rolls of cash lying around in drawers.
Hamm does what he has to do – he becomes a cat burglar with a cynical philosophy.
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Coop is just a man trying to get by, and if that doesn't involve selling his Maserati, or getting a new (albeit less well paid) job, then it is a testament to the show's good writing that we are still with him, even when we question his attachment to a lifestyle he purports to disdain.
Another new American show, Sirens, stars Julianne Moore as the beautiful philanthropist wife of a billionaire hedge-fund manager, who is summering in her uber-mansion (it has a turret) on an unnamed east-coast big-money island similar to Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard.
She has a creepy, co-dependent relationship with her young personal assistant, who comes from poverty and dysfunction but who is loved in a way her wealthy boss never will be.
Of course, these shows have a buck each way – they seek to satirise the super-rich and expose the underlying emptiness of their lives, while allowing us the vicarious experience of living in their luxury for an hour or so. The Hollywood Reporter calls it 'affluence porn'.
We get access to the calfskin-lined interior of the private jet. We get to enjoy the week-long wedding festivities in Tuscany and gawp at the marvellous outfits, all while judging the protagonists for their materialism. In AJLT the materialism is not there to be judged; it is an integral part of the fun.
Perhaps AJLT feels off because the writing is bad, and the plot lines so tired that dogs must be enlisted to prop up the action. Or maybe it is because in the second Trump administration the US political environment has become so oppressive and so inescapable that no story feels true unless it references it, however obliquely.
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Sydney Morning Herald
9 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
This is what ultrawealth looks like
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The Age
9 hours ago
- The Age
This is what ultrawealth looks like
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Perth Now
a day ago
- Perth Now
Scott Caan and Elizabeth Debicki join Once Upon A Time In Hollywood sequel
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