Television, no matter how luxe its trappings may become, will never shake off its boob-tube, second-class entertainment rap. There was a brief moment in the aughts when prestige television was actually prestigious: The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Wire all told artfully layered stories that made use of television’s unique episodic nature to formally experiment and enrich plot-lines.1 The first couple seasons of both Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad fit into this tradition before they decided to lean more into hammy plot theatrics to stay in the zeitgeist; that shift into “smart for dumb people” plotting (nods at deeper philosophy, narrative cliffhangers, mysteries to keep the internet guessing, and big action set-pieces every couple of episodes) essentially set the tone for the television of the 2010s and beyond. Once the streaming industry blew up, more and more shows got produced on quicker timetables and smaller budgets (for everyone except the cast) and we get to the current TV landscape: too much to watch and nothing good on. Six different Star Wars shows. Buckets of Marvel slop. Ted friggin’ Lasso! Ten other shows on Apple + you’ve never heard of but starring Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell among other big-name actors. Another season of those wacky kids on Stranger Things. Six episode seasons that try to be ‘six hour films’ rather than, you know, a series of 13-21 solid television episodes. Everyone’s got a new Netflix show and it’s gonna get cancelled before you even get to check it out. It’s all just absolutely fine.
Still, as disposable as television as become, the dollars it brings in are real, and those dollars certainly dwarf whatever pittance literary fiction brings home, and more people are watching whatever third-rate crap is streaming on Peacock than are reading novels. Even with my jaundiced view of most contemporary fiction, the cream of the crop in new books is artistically streets ahead of what’s on the small screen; unfortunately for fiction writers, dollars don’t follow quality. For those writers facing down how to actually live in the world, the simplified choice is: write good novels and accept a teaching gig and a middle class kind of life, or dumb yourself down and get that Hollywood money. If it feels like selling out your artistic principles, well, as Don Draper would say:
The conflict between art and making a living, specifically between writing fiction and making television, is at the center of Danzy Senna’s new novel Colored Television, which is a pretty fun romp of an industry satire. Jane, the novel’s protagonist, is a mildly successful writer with a non-tenured gig at USC; her husband, Lenny, is an abstract painter with a similarly mild level of acclaim and a similarly tenuous teaching job. Jane and Lenny and their two kids, Finn and Ruby, live an itinerant life, jumping from sublet to sublet, credit cards maxed out and on the outside looking in to home ownership. Ensconced in a relatively stable home for the year – Jane and co. are longterm house sitting in the hills for her wealthy old friend Brett, who’s made it big as a Hollywood showrunner – Jane plans to finish her long-gestating second novel, a “manspreading American novel” of America’s biracial history, and Lenny is finishing a series of paintings for a career retrospective in Japan, where audiences appreciate his work for its formal quality rather than asking what it says about Black experience. Jane’s novel turns out to be a gigantic mess – as many second novels are – and, strapped for cash and hoping to move on up a bit in the world, she maneuvers herself into a sitdown with Hampton Ford, a Hollywood prestige TV showrunner du jour, and pitches him on “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” a show that will take everything that’s tragic about biracial life and play it for laughs. Somewhat miraculously, Hampton is hooked by the pitch, and Jane descends into the surreal world of making teevee – drug fueled late night pitch meetings, ambiguous business agreements, and the process of polishing turds into Emmy winning, culturally relevant peak television. It’s gotta be smart, but not too smart, and push some boundaries, but not push them so far as to rankle studio execs or the audience.
Normally, I despise autobiographical readings; every author puts some of themselves into a book, but it’s very reductive to try and connect the dots between a novel and someone’s life from A to A and B to B. The novelist’s job, at their best, is to transform their life into something more universal and outside themselves, and Senna has certainly done that in Colored Television. That being said, it was hard to read the novel and not think of Danzy Senna and her real-life husband, Percival Everett, who share quite a few similarities with Jane and Lenny. All four teach at USC and have reached the same low plateau of commercial success from their art; sure, Everett’s not a painter in real life, but it’s an easy move to transpose writing onto painting, and Lenny, like Everett has been throughout his career, is criticized for not directly addressing race in his rigorously dense and thorny work. Everett and his work are now being subsumed into the machine of Hollywood after decades of flying under the radar; his 2001 novel Erasure was strip-mined for parts to make Cord Jefferson’s 2023 film American Fiction, and the film rights to his latest and most accessible novel, James, were just snapped up by executive producer Steven Spielberg. Taika Waititi is set to direct – the horror! the horror! And so one can easily read this novel as Senna working through the sudden change in her family’s standing; though Everett had almost no input on American Fiction, and probably won’t have much to do with the film version of James, Colored Television explores just how degrading it might feel to actually sell oneself out. There’s even a small bit near the end that points to the turn Everett’s career has taken: Lenny draws “a tiny Black man’s face, mouth open, screaming, in the corner of each” of his paintings, a move away from the abstract and into the thudding obviousness of Art About Race. With that comes just a bit more attention and a lot more money.
But oh, the things you can get with money! Colored Television is awash with brands and signifiers of wealth, expensive things that people can’t afford but know they should want, “things [Jane] would like to have in her life, or at least in her vocabulary.” Jane dreams of having a “dwell-magazine house in the hills” and makes “herself dizzy swiveling circles in [Brett’s] Herman Miller Aeron Chair” before cracking open a can of his La Croix. (Later in the day, she and Lenny get into his nice wines.) Jane’s splurge gift to Ruby, an American Girl doll, isn’t good enough because it’s only one doll rather than a future collection. Even beyond brands and objects, Jane desires a kind of unthinking wealth; as she tours a prospective house with her family, she articulates this feeling:
Jane watched Ruby play now, her mouth filled with the bitter taste of want. She hungered for this house, but it was bigger than that, this want. Mulatto children of peripatetic artistic hippies did not want to age into being peripatetic mulatto adults with children. It was an endless loop. She wanted a real middle-class home the way only a half-caste child of seventies-era artistic squalor wants a home. She wanted her children to know what it felt like to be bored and listless in a house whose corners they knew as well as their own faces.
Wealth isn’t just nice things – it’s also the freedom of not thinking about money, not moving every couple years, not having to worry all the time about where the next check is coming from, the ability to even be “bored and listless.” While there’s a certain moral satisfaction to living the life of a principled artist, that life also wears one down: chasing after freelance checks, trying to get decent healthcare, moving from precarious university job to precarious university job. How about some television money, then? As Brett’s agent explains to Jane, television and books have a symbiotic relationship:
‘Books are still alive, hugely important. Where do you think we get our IP? Lit is vital to what we do. We need each other.’ She webbed her hands together to show the relationship between novels and television, smiling reassuringly.
Trade offer: you get our money, we get your ‘intellectual property,’ no matter what we do to it in the end. Is that a deal? To Jane, it seems easy enough, making a quick buck before returning to the artist’s life – “whatever she wrote now was only supposed to entertain” – but there’s nothing clean in giving yourself away. At first, her pitch is a rip-off of Brett’s long-buried passion project, and thus divorced from Jane’s own work – the whole thing feels like a lark, nothing “real enough to matter,” but as the stakes get higher, Jane begins to bring in her own life’s work – and her life and work – into the proceedings. What emerges in development is a kind of wish-fulfillment for Jane, a sanitized simulacra of her own life:
In the comedy she and Hampton had drummed up that morning … the main character would be named Sally, as in Hemmings. She would be a writer of novels, like Jane, and she would teach writing at a college. She would be married to Kyle, a Black comic-book artist who, unlike Lenny, made money from his art. And together they would have two children, a boy and a girl. Only the kids in the show would be older than Jane’s real ones because Hampton had said there was more drama to mine with the advent of puberty – even a possible spin-off. Who knew? The daughter, Schuyler, would be popular, pretty, and spoiled, a teenager who was secretly becoming a famous influencer from her bedroom. The boy, Chester, would be a middle schooler who, sort of like Finn, would know everything there was to know about the history of Godzilla films going all the way back to 1954. Only, unlike in Finn’s case, all his oddities would be depicted as charming and remarkable rather than symptoms of a disorder. The family would not, of course, e called the Hemmingses. They’d be the Bunches, and they’d live in a renovated Craftsman in Multicultural Mayberry, with a kitchen that had a Wolf stove and Carrara marble counters … They would be a family just like Jane’s, only this family would be the stuff not of struggle and strife – and want, so much want – but of jubilant, knee-snapping comedy.
The Wolf stove, the craftsman house, more signifiers; Senna is working with an expanded version of the K-Mart minimalist realism that was the vanguard of American fiction in the 80s, a class-aspirational update to DeLillo’s seamless registers of products. Later on, as Jane looks at one of LA’s more famous malls, the Americana, she is taunted by “the lights and sounds of bottomless shopping.” If there’s a bit of a lack of suspense throughout the novel – no one ingenuously enters Hollywood without a scratch, and, like a horror film, the question is when something will go wrong and not if, and most of the novel is just waiting for that other shoe to drop – Senna suffuses such a tangible want throughout the novel to give it a kind of tension. Perhaps the whole central problem of the book – the bone deep issue at hand for the author – is that damnit, it’s nice to have nice things! It’s nice to have money! Save me from what I want! That problem makes for an entertaining enough book, but it is also not quite enough to sustain an entire novel.
Senna is a funny and keen observer of the world – there’s a sharp line on almost every other page, which makes the book positively zip by – and yes, Hollywood sure is stuffed with banal middlebrow tastemakers, but Colored Television doesn’t push much beyond its premise. It becomes a repetitive cycle of someone doing something bad for mainly material reasons, with some detours into family drama. The novel is one long setup to get to a predictable punchline – a final twist of the knife that can be seen coming from miles away – before a qualified but optimistic ending. There’s no good way to square the tension between art and making a living; any bow put on it will be just a little too neat, just like any TV finale inevitably leaves people dissatisfied in its finality. If the book ends up positing that everything that makes a novel bad actually makes for ideal awards-bait television, well, a perfectly fine novel like this one must be about as good as Scenes from a Marriage. The math doesn’t quite add up, but it never does, not when there’s art involved.
You can get Colored Television at your local bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where purchases support independent bookstores around the country. (Buying from that link also supports this newsletter.)
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Some honorable mentions of the post-peak-TV era: Halt and Catch Fire; Lodge 49; The Americans; Twin Peaks: The Return; season 1 of Friday Night Lights.
Just read a quick synopsis of James and the idea of Taika Waititi directing that (or anything really) is bone-chilling indeed.
I never got Ted Lasso. I thought I was alone.