Someone on a non-Pitt-related podcast (Blank Check, I think?) referred to it as a "prestigural," and I both love and hate the portmanteau in this case. You're right that it's too serialized to be a pure procedural. But its interest overall is too much in the moment-to-moment specifics of the work for it to feel like a Fargo or some other 10-Hour Movie season.
Loved this discussion, as I always love thoughtful criticism. But as for how I feel about it: probably best to cross-post (and expand) one of my lil essays from under the finale recap:
I said it early in the season, but it was some kind of kismet watching this show as I, along with some friends, started rewatching HOMICIDE LIFE ON THE STREET on Peacock. I think the spirit of that tragicomic NBC cult legend (is there any other kind?) lives on in THE PITT in a lot of ways; HLotS could go more broad with its comedy, but it was a deeply character-focused procedural with an unvarnished sort of feel, half about the work itself and half about the social / economic / political realities it forces the characters to face (though HLotS makes policing out to be less rewarding, which... is good, actually).
It's so nice to have this kind of show without the hagiographic fantasy bent of a Sorkin production.
I'll say, though: I've been aggravated by some of the discourse around THE PITT. Not because people are surprised it's good... or I guess maybe I am, in a way? The show itself does not need any defending. It's getting its due respect, it's going to win some awards, and people are actually watching it (unlike the efforts of our late lamented crew out Ballmer way).
It's more the weird tenor of mourning -- thinking here of the Defector piece about "TV's Silver Age", but it's been widespread. A lot of people seem to cling very tightly to the idea of grand nose-to-tail serialization as the mark of good TV, and for those people it seems like the success of THE PITT, for any or all good qualities, signals a regression.
It's a strange thing to witness, having watched HLotS, which both slaps hard and predates THE SOPRANOS by several years. I don't get it, honestly, this sense that dragging, mid-grade serialized epics like BOARDWALK EMPIRE or WHEEL OF TIME or (the particularly aggravating) YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, or whatever Craig Mazin is scripting in a given year, mark a healthier and more fulfilling ecosystem for expression than the emergence of an all-cylinder character procedural.
What made Peak TV Peak was not its quality or even its ambition to make TV a newly novelistic medium, it was the money being blasted out of cannons at anyone who wanted to do anything. That's what made it an interesting era. It had such capacity that it took a lot of risks.
The network-friendly forms of storytelling were only a limiting constraint from one angle, even when THE SOPRANOS was breaking through, even as basic cable prestige identified itself by its long form storytelling. I feel like so much of this neurotic dialogue about the Pitt is implicitly built on a premise that we should have “advanced” beyond network TV forms, leaving them rightfully irrelevant.
It’s true that those forms COULD be creatively limiting, but only when pursuing particular goals from particular angles. You could still do a lot with them, had you a mind to — a limitation in one case can be a *constraint* in another. Quite often, if not always, art suffers when it *lacks* constraints (see, again: YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS). But somehow we feel obligated to hang apologies on our love for form-forward art.
I’m reading, in all this sublimated terror re: the collapse of endless industrial demand for TV, a sort of echo of what’s happened to literary discourse over the last 50-60 years: endless arguments about whether the survival of lit with a lack of strict form or artifice (literary fiction / “novelistic” serial TV) is threatened by lit that more closely observes form and embraces artifice (genre lit / “episodic” TV). The assumption always underlying those debates is that only one of the two creates a culture of progress or sophistication. It’s such a boring debate, and it never ends.
(I’d be remiss not to point out how funny it is that while it moved away from procedural / incremental form in conceiving its highbrow self, prestige TV had 0 reservations about the genre trappings that so vex its cousins in printed literature. It actually makes highbrow TV the more obnoxious of the two, in many ways.)
This is an interesting discussion and something I think about a lot. TV that is “novelistic” (good description) is often viewed as more important or serious. But it’s actually really hard to pull off. So most of it is middling. Meanwhile, true procedurals are viewed as less than, for the masses. I really like Elsbeth (CBS) and Ludwig (BritBox) and feel like they shouldn’t be handicapped as mere procedurals that are too easy. I just think they are straight up great shows. I agree that The Pitt is a hybrid. It definitely has some procedural beats but you’re right. It’s something else.
Getting into the aesthetics of it all, I think this dialogue falls into a trap of assuming a coherent narrative formalism -- a means of understanding art by its adherence to structures and patterns -- *must* exist, even if we don't see evidence of it.
To differentiate the prestige era as a meaningfully distinct and productive reaction to what came before it (and we seem to! We seem to want to say that TV couldn't possibly have been better before / until this change in form), we have to be able to define what that preceding work was, how its form was different, such that it couldn't achieve what new forms made uniquely possible.
It seems to me that this consternation about what THE PITT is -- Prestige? Procedural? -- is a nervous reaction to the fundamental precarity of that demand.
As Newman points out, if we go back in time we see that what we thought of as "procedural TV" didn't adhere so zealously to the rules we define that term by: it could contain continuity, even as you could ingest its parts outside chronology, in syndication or whatever.* Newman says that serialization wouldn't have existed in the 90's but again, I must cite HOMICIDE, which had explicitly serialized elements, especially early on (imagine starting with "Three Men and Adena"! Even as the early dialogue establishes the basic context), but also directly prefigured the classic FX-typed basic cable format of "episodic A-plot, serial B-plot".
Serial TV of the post-SOPRANOS landscape might have committed harder to chronology, both in requirements of *how* you watched and (in the best cases) permanence of cause-effect development, but chronology was never actually verboten to the medium prior to that point. The "reset" to a golden mean premise after a serial plot ends, which is obviously identified here as the sitcom form whether the reset happens per-episode or seasonally, is (imo) made out to be a disqualifying feature of narrative. It isn't, and it shouldn't be.
There's a real parallel here with form in literature! When we talk about differing form in storytelling, we're really talking about how time is conceived inside it, and the (supposed) differences between the modern novel and previous forms rhyme with the (supposed) difference between prestige TV and regular degular TV.
For example, We can very easily map sitcoms and soap operas to oral storytelling and even mythic forms of lit (Barthes very cannily pegged pro wrestling as both soap operatic and mythic). In a mythic mode, a story is chosen from a set of known elements, but it takes place *outside of time* in a real, relative sense. It would be as pointless to try and compile a meaningful chronology of every plot in The Young and the Restless, or the Simpsons, as it would be to try and compile a meaningful chronology of every Greek myth in which Zeus figures. You might have a beginning story and an ending story, but everything else is basically fungible.
The modern novel form, by contrast, is very specifically bound in time, and it meaningfully relates to all other stories featuring the same elements, reflecting and informing everything that comes before or after; it takes place in a "second world" that operates under the same rules of cause, effect, and time as our own. LOST is a novelistic show even though it's also episodic in most respects, because every plot and character beat shown informs a broader, developing tapestry (even as time travel enters the picture!)
All of this is worth pointing out because we actually have good reasons to question the artistic superiority of the novel / prestige form over the oral / sitcom form, and the fact that we don't is unflattering when we tacitly seek to rate THE PITT's success by how successful it is in escaping the latter.
There's no reason to fear the lack of a grand, swiss-watch edifice behind the beginning of a story. It's not productive to sweat detail or chronological inconsistencies between stories featuring the same elements, if they start from an oral tradition. Elements of story in an oral mode are erector set pieces to be picked up or ignored as needed. Tales don't have to relate to one another as chapters in a whole -- in many cases, the same characters, places, and concepts can themselves differ radically between tellings, and not necessarily in ways contextualized by some other story (see: Loki as actual mythic figure, as evil or sympathetic as needed, as mindful of the past or future as needed). The storyteller is under no obligation to honor anything that's been said before and is under no obligation to consider what might be said after.
I think that there's evident value in both forms, and that one is not cheaper, easier, or less substantive than the other. The modernists intensely wanted the novel to be imbued with special, exceptional meaning. But as the post-modernists recognized, there's no pretense of the novel that escapes into being real. A complete 800-page tome is no more true than some shit your grandma told you when you were 4. They are the same thing extruded into different shapes. We call memorable characters in one "developed", we call memorable characters in the other "iconic" or "timeless".
That there's been so much ink spilled over what tradition lays claim to such an evidently enjoyable show as THE PITT speaks, in my view, to a sense of needless competition, and a presumption that a certain type of good, truer story relies on the marginalization of a certain bad, frivolous story. It's here also that we see a parallel, alluded to in Newman's mention of soap operas, in how these differing forms of storytelling are gendered, and how that gendering informs their presumed worth: Oral storytelling and soap opera are typed feminine -- unreliable, indefinite, ephemeral and unworthy of focus. The novel and the serial epic are masculine -- authoritative, deep, meaningful, clearly legible and worthy of study.
Downstream of this acknowledgment, a sort of crisis of confusion starts to bubble up, because our notions of what differentiates the golden age from its bedrock, or the Eiffel monument of weighty drama from the factory of pillowy readymade laughs, become watery. When and where did the new and better genome emerge, really? When does good TV emerge from the primordial soup of mere diversion? What if there's not as much difference as we'd like?
Also I really appreciate the povided audio version for the post, I love an accessibility feature. If it’s a real person (sucks that we have to lead with that caveat) great work! If not… AIgen voices have come a long, long way.
As someone who can have trouble reading plain text, good text-to-speech is a bittersweet thing, bc you don't want AI opportunism encroaching on real voices, but at the same time the economics of paying people what they're worth to provide audio for text just isn't there in almost every case. You can ask ppl to use their time and do it for free, at a significant delay, or you could just plug it into a robot.
When it comes to providing access, I don't think there's an ethical valence to that choice, tbqh. It's like adding an ethical element to providing electric scooters at the entrance vs. hiring ppl to push wheelchairs through a store. Whatever works, works.
To me procedurals are shows where the focus is on solving a series of problems and where most of the drama comes from the twists and turns of the problem solving process rather than from the characters' relationships and feelings. By that standard I think a strong case can be made for calling The Pitt a procedural, though I acknowledge that lumping it in a category with Law and Order feels wrong. To me the label doesn't matter as long as they keep the competence porn front and center.
Changing the subject: I've seen it several times and I'm going to push back on the idea that the Santos / Langdon stuff was some kind of trap to catch viewers in their own sexist assumptions. No, it was just a sloppily executed plot line. A doctor's ongoing and evolving drug use doesn't make sense as a story to tell in one 15 hour shift, and it makes even less sense to make an intern on their first day the Sherlock who cracks the case. To quote Benoit Blanc: "It's just dumb".
Changing the subject even more: Myles, any chance of getting at least reactions for Your Friends and Neighbors? While The Pitt pretty quickly outgrew it, it does seem like a good compromise on coverage for mildly buzzy shows.
So I guess that's a no then? I guess I see what you mean about it being generic - I'm sure the casting notes for Amanda Peet's character called for "an Amanda Peet type" - but I think it's stylish and fun. And I do think there is something unique about the milieu. There are a lot of rich people on TV but most shows don't put numbers to their obscene spending habits. Your Friends and Neighbors does.
Speaking of a literary / genre divide, I think a lot of the weird vibes in YFAN are actually explained, or maybe just prefigured, by the fact that while this is a very litfic type of serial prestige show* conceived and written by Jon Tropper, whose major credits are the two (2) most beloved lowbrow confections of Cinemax's brief tenure in the streaming wars -- principally, BANSHEE.
The thing that ruled, or seemed to rule, about BANSHEE was that it knew precisely how ridiculous it was; what would have otherwise been unbearably pretentious in, say, the figure of Kai Procter, the tragic Shakespearean former Amish crime lord with back tattoos and a stone cold right hand eunuch who looked like Jon Favreau, was immense fun, because it reveled in the corniness. The sugar rush of overblown spectacle and wild turns of plot were the whole point. It was not artful in the BREAKING BAD mold, and it wasn't trying to be.
What YFAN presupposes is: What if all of that was actually serious? What if BANSHEE, but with something to say about America and the human condition? What if you took that serious BANSHEE and additionally excised all the celebrated (and desperately missed) practical stunt-work, to the point where there's no action at all? What if Michael Bay put a real effort into making a Paul Thomas Anderson movie?
I think the weird diet aftertaste of YFAN comes from the feeling that this is the work of a bubblegum entertainer doing his best impression of a Don DeLillo novel. You can feel it in every inch of the thing. It can't be what it wants to be, and it doesn't want to be what its best version is. And the crazy thing is, I think the show could actually work best if it got rid of all its pulpy crime novel elements! Just let it be about Don Draper 2!
* I groaned out loud when in the first 3 minutes of the show, Coop fell into an upstate NY swimming pool and pointed it out as a metaphor for his ennui; yes, writers, I am aware of the only John Cheever story anybody has ever read! "The Swimmer" was also a reference point for MAD MEN! The Drapers in that specific upstate town because Cheever lived there!
Goes to the Hamm factor, imo. He was poised to have a Clooney-esque launch into the A-list but, as gossip would have it, dealt with depression and mental health and kind of disappeared for awhile as opposed to squandering on bad bets (between MAD MEN and his meatier turns in MORNING SHOW / FARGO, his most high profile appearances were, what, support roles in TOP GUN and BABY DRIVER?) Getting him on as the lead for a multi-season drama is a kind of event.
But yeah, OFAN really feels to me like an early Amazon streaming show in a bad way -- intense SNEAKY PETE vibes -- in that it's not even a problem of the whole coming to less than a sum of its parts, it's that aside from a great (really great!) cast, everything else is about 70% of where it needs to be. The dialogue is just on this side of too-showy, and the character archetypes have to vacillate between deep-enough to make the relationship drama work while also being shallow enough to capably serve the withering ("") satire of wealth.
It really doesn't help that they front-loaded all the worst elements into the first episode. Watching the three they've released, there are glimmers of interesting drama (mostly down to the performances). But you can absolutely tell, especially given the third episode, that the arc of this show is going to be a subduction-by-degrees of the domestic elements into the crime elements; critically, *everything that works about the character drama depends on ignorance of the criminal desperation*. I will be absolutely amazed if the show creatively survives Coop's secret getting out to his wife and/or girlfriend. Because the crime stuff isn't the shot of vigor the program seems to think it is.
When the fence shows up at his house there's 0 tension, none. It put a clock on everything about the show that's working. Personally, I'm going to watch it the way I would a Showtime program: rubbernecking for its coming collapse.
Someone on a non-Pitt-related podcast (Blank Check, I think?) referred to it as a "prestigural," and I both love and hate the portmanteau in this case. You're right that it's too serialized to be a pure procedural. But its interest overall is too much in the moment-to-moment specifics of the work for it to feel like a Fargo or some other 10-Hour Movie season.
Oooh, I see why you hate it but prestigural is just too good.
I love it more than hate it. I think it's the right term. The sound of it just makes me cringe.
It just reads too much as vestigial tale.
Loved this discussion, as I always love thoughtful criticism. But as for how I feel about it: probably best to cross-post (and expand) one of my lil essays from under the finale recap:
I said it early in the season, but it was some kind of kismet watching this show as I, along with some friends, started rewatching HOMICIDE LIFE ON THE STREET on Peacock. I think the spirit of that tragicomic NBC cult legend (is there any other kind?) lives on in THE PITT in a lot of ways; HLotS could go more broad with its comedy, but it was a deeply character-focused procedural with an unvarnished sort of feel, half about the work itself and half about the social / economic / political realities it forces the characters to face (though HLotS makes policing out to be less rewarding, which... is good, actually).
It's so nice to have this kind of show without the hagiographic fantasy bent of a Sorkin production.
I'll say, though: I've been aggravated by some of the discourse around THE PITT. Not because people are surprised it's good... or I guess maybe I am, in a way? The show itself does not need any defending. It's getting its due respect, it's going to win some awards, and people are actually watching it (unlike the efforts of our late lamented crew out Ballmer way).
It's more the weird tenor of mourning -- thinking here of the Defector piece about "TV's Silver Age", but it's been widespread. A lot of people seem to cling very tightly to the idea of grand nose-to-tail serialization as the mark of good TV, and for those people it seems like the success of THE PITT, for any or all good qualities, signals a regression.
It's a strange thing to witness, having watched HLotS, which both slaps hard and predates THE SOPRANOS by several years. I don't get it, honestly, this sense that dragging, mid-grade serialized epics like BOARDWALK EMPIRE or WHEEL OF TIME or (the particularly aggravating) YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, or whatever Craig Mazin is scripting in a given year, mark a healthier and more fulfilling ecosystem for expression than the emergence of an all-cylinder character procedural.
What made Peak TV Peak was not its quality or even its ambition to make TV a newly novelistic medium, it was the money being blasted out of cannons at anyone who wanted to do anything. That's what made it an interesting era. It had such capacity that it took a lot of risks.
The network-friendly forms of storytelling were only a limiting constraint from one angle, even when THE SOPRANOS was breaking through, even as basic cable prestige identified itself by its long form storytelling. I feel like so much of this neurotic dialogue about the Pitt is implicitly built on a premise that we should have “advanced” beyond network TV forms, leaving them rightfully irrelevant.
It’s true that those forms COULD be creatively limiting, but only when pursuing particular goals from particular angles. You could still do a lot with them, had you a mind to — a limitation in one case can be a *constraint* in another. Quite often, if not always, art suffers when it *lacks* constraints (see, again: YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS). But somehow we feel obligated to hang apologies on our love for form-forward art.
I’m reading, in all this sublimated terror re: the collapse of endless industrial demand for TV, a sort of echo of what’s happened to literary discourse over the last 50-60 years: endless arguments about whether the survival of lit with a lack of strict form or artifice (literary fiction / “novelistic” serial TV) is threatened by lit that more closely observes form and embraces artifice (genre lit / “episodic” TV). The assumption always underlying those debates is that only one of the two creates a culture of progress or sophistication. It’s such a boring debate, and it never ends.
(I’d be remiss not to point out how funny it is that while it moved away from procedural / incremental form in conceiving its highbrow self, prestige TV had 0 reservations about the genre trappings that so vex its cousins in printed literature. It actually makes highbrow TV the more obnoxious of the two, in many ways.)
This is an interesting discussion and something I think about a lot. TV that is “novelistic” (good description) is often viewed as more important or serious. But it’s actually really hard to pull off. So most of it is middling. Meanwhile, true procedurals are viewed as less than, for the masses. I really like Elsbeth (CBS) and Ludwig (BritBox) and feel like they shouldn’t be handicapped as mere procedurals that are too easy. I just think they are straight up great shows. I agree that The Pitt is a hybrid. It definitely has some procedural beats but you’re right. It’s something else.
Getting into the aesthetics of it all, I think this dialogue falls into a trap of assuming a coherent narrative formalism -- a means of understanding art by its adherence to structures and patterns -- *must* exist, even if we don't see evidence of it.
To differentiate the prestige era as a meaningfully distinct and productive reaction to what came before it (and we seem to! We seem to want to say that TV couldn't possibly have been better before / until this change in form), we have to be able to define what that preceding work was, how its form was different, such that it couldn't achieve what new forms made uniquely possible.
It seems to me that this consternation about what THE PITT is -- Prestige? Procedural? -- is a nervous reaction to the fundamental precarity of that demand.
As Newman points out, if we go back in time we see that what we thought of as "procedural TV" didn't adhere so zealously to the rules we define that term by: it could contain continuity, even as you could ingest its parts outside chronology, in syndication or whatever.* Newman says that serialization wouldn't have existed in the 90's but again, I must cite HOMICIDE, which had explicitly serialized elements, especially early on (imagine starting with "Three Men and Adena"! Even as the early dialogue establishes the basic context), but also directly prefigured the classic FX-typed basic cable format of "episodic A-plot, serial B-plot".
Serial TV of the post-SOPRANOS landscape might have committed harder to chronology, both in requirements of *how* you watched and (in the best cases) permanence of cause-effect development, but chronology was never actually verboten to the medium prior to that point. The "reset" to a golden mean premise after a serial plot ends, which is obviously identified here as the sitcom form whether the reset happens per-episode or seasonally, is (imo) made out to be a disqualifying feature of narrative. It isn't, and it shouldn't be.
There's a real parallel here with form in literature! When we talk about differing form in storytelling, we're really talking about how time is conceived inside it, and the (supposed) differences between the modern novel and previous forms rhyme with the (supposed) difference between prestige TV and regular degular TV.
For example, We can very easily map sitcoms and soap operas to oral storytelling and even mythic forms of lit (Barthes very cannily pegged pro wrestling as both soap operatic and mythic). In a mythic mode, a story is chosen from a set of known elements, but it takes place *outside of time* in a real, relative sense. It would be as pointless to try and compile a meaningful chronology of every plot in The Young and the Restless, or the Simpsons, as it would be to try and compile a meaningful chronology of every Greek myth in which Zeus figures. You might have a beginning story and an ending story, but everything else is basically fungible.
The modern novel form, by contrast, is very specifically bound in time, and it meaningfully relates to all other stories featuring the same elements, reflecting and informing everything that comes before or after; it takes place in a "second world" that operates under the same rules of cause, effect, and time as our own. LOST is a novelistic show even though it's also episodic in most respects, because every plot and character beat shown informs a broader, developing tapestry (even as time travel enters the picture!)
All of this is worth pointing out because we actually have good reasons to question the artistic superiority of the novel / prestige form over the oral / sitcom form, and the fact that we don't is unflattering when we tacitly seek to rate THE PITT's success by how successful it is in escaping the latter.
There's no reason to fear the lack of a grand, swiss-watch edifice behind the beginning of a story. It's not productive to sweat detail or chronological inconsistencies between stories featuring the same elements, if they start from an oral tradition. Elements of story in an oral mode are erector set pieces to be picked up or ignored as needed. Tales don't have to relate to one another as chapters in a whole -- in many cases, the same characters, places, and concepts can themselves differ radically between tellings, and not necessarily in ways contextualized by some other story (see: Loki as actual mythic figure, as evil or sympathetic as needed, as mindful of the past or future as needed). The storyteller is under no obligation to honor anything that's been said before and is under no obligation to consider what might be said after.
I think that there's evident value in both forms, and that one is not cheaper, easier, or less substantive than the other. The modernists intensely wanted the novel to be imbued with special, exceptional meaning. But as the post-modernists recognized, there's no pretense of the novel that escapes into being real. A complete 800-page tome is no more true than some shit your grandma told you when you were 4. They are the same thing extruded into different shapes. We call memorable characters in one "developed", we call memorable characters in the other "iconic" or "timeless".
That there's been so much ink spilled over what tradition lays claim to such an evidently enjoyable show as THE PITT speaks, in my view, to a sense of needless competition, and a presumption that a certain type of good, truer story relies on the marginalization of a certain bad, frivolous story. It's here also that we see a parallel, alluded to in Newman's mention of soap operas, in how these differing forms of storytelling are gendered, and how that gendering informs their presumed worth: Oral storytelling and soap opera are typed feminine -- unreliable, indefinite, ephemeral and unworthy of focus. The novel and the serial epic are masculine -- authoritative, deep, meaningful, clearly legible and worthy of study.
Downstream of this acknowledgment, a sort of crisis of confusion starts to bubble up, because our notions of what differentiates the golden age from its bedrock, or the Eiffel monument of weighty drama from the factory of pillowy readymade laughs, become watery. When and where did the new and better genome emerge, really? When does good TV emerge from the primordial soup of mere diversion? What if there's not as much difference as we'd like?
Also I really appreciate the povided audio version for the post, I love an accessibility feature. If it’s a real person (sucks that we have to lead with that caveat) great work! If not… AIgen voices have come a long, long way.
Definitely AI.
Ah! Well. Nevertheless.
As someone who can have trouble reading plain text, good text-to-speech is a bittersweet thing, bc you don't want AI opportunism encroaching on real voices, but at the same time the economics of paying people what they're worth to provide audio for text just isn't there in almost every case. You can ask ppl to use their time and do it for free, at a significant delay, or you could just plug it into a robot.
When it comes to providing access, I don't think there's an ethical valence to that choice, tbqh. It's like adding an ethical element to providing electric scooters at the entrance vs. hiring ppl to push wheelchairs through a store. Whatever works, works.
To me procedurals are shows where the focus is on solving a series of problems and where most of the drama comes from the twists and turns of the problem solving process rather than from the characters' relationships and feelings. By that standard I think a strong case can be made for calling The Pitt a procedural, though I acknowledge that lumping it in a category with Law and Order feels wrong. To me the label doesn't matter as long as they keep the competence porn front and center.
Changing the subject: I've seen it several times and I'm going to push back on the idea that the Santos / Langdon stuff was some kind of trap to catch viewers in their own sexist assumptions. No, it was just a sloppily executed plot line. A doctor's ongoing and evolving drug use doesn't make sense as a story to tell in one 15 hour shift, and it makes even less sense to make an intern on their first day the Sherlock who cracks the case. To quote Benoit Blanc: "It's just dumb".
Changing the subject even more: Myles, any chance of getting at least reactions for Your Friends and Neighbors? While The Pitt pretty quickly outgrew it, it does seem like a good compromise on coverage for mildly buzzy shows.
I watched the first two episodes and cannot fathom a world where something so generic generates buzz, tbh.
So I guess that's a no then? I guess I see what you mean about it being generic - I'm sure the casting notes for Amanda Peet's character called for "an Amanda Peet type" - but I think it's stylish and fun. And I do think there is something unique about the milieu. There are a lot of rich people on TV but most shows don't put numbers to their obscene spending habits. Your Friends and Neighbors does.
Speaking of a literary / genre divide, I think a lot of the weird vibes in YFAN are actually explained, or maybe just prefigured, by the fact that while this is a very litfic type of serial prestige show* conceived and written by Jon Tropper, whose major credits are the two (2) most beloved lowbrow confections of Cinemax's brief tenure in the streaming wars -- principally, BANSHEE.
The thing that ruled, or seemed to rule, about BANSHEE was that it knew precisely how ridiculous it was; what would have otherwise been unbearably pretentious in, say, the figure of Kai Procter, the tragic Shakespearean former Amish crime lord with back tattoos and a stone cold right hand eunuch who looked like Jon Favreau, was immense fun, because it reveled in the corniness. The sugar rush of overblown spectacle and wild turns of plot were the whole point. It was not artful in the BREAKING BAD mold, and it wasn't trying to be.
What YFAN presupposes is: What if all of that was actually serious? What if BANSHEE, but with something to say about America and the human condition? What if you took that serious BANSHEE and additionally excised all the celebrated (and desperately missed) practical stunt-work, to the point where there's no action at all? What if Michael Bay put a real effort into making a Paul Thomas Anderson movie?
I think the weird diet aftertaste of YFAN comes from the feeling that this is the work of a bubblegum entertainer doing his best impression of a Don DeLillo novel. You can feel it in every inch of the thing. It can't be what it wants to be, and it doesn't want to be what its best version is. And the crazy thing is, I think the show could actually work best if it got rid of all its pulpy crime novel elements! Just let it be about Don Draper 2!
* I groaned out loud when in the first 3 minutes of the show, Coop fell into an upstate NY swimming pool and pointed it out as a metaphor for his ennui; yes, writers, I am aware of the only John Cheever story anybody has ever read! "The Swimmer" was also a reference point for MAD MEN! The Drapers in that specific upstate town because Cheever lived there!
Goes to the Hamm factor, imo. He was poised to have a Clooney-esque launch into the A-list but, as gossip would have it, dealt with depression and mental health and kind of disappeared for awhile as opposed to squandering on bad bets (between MAD MEN and his meatier turns in MORNING SHOW / FARGO, his most high profile appearances were, what, support roles in TOP GUN and BABY DRIVER?) Getting him on as the lead for a multi-season drama is a kind of event.
But yeah, OFAN really feels to me like an early Amazon streaming show in a bad way -- intense SNEAKY PETE vibes -- in that it's not even a problem of the whole coming to less than a sum of its parts, it's that aside from a great (really great!) cast, everything else is about 70% of where it needs to be. The dialogue is just on this side of too-showy, and the character archetypes have to vacillate between deep-enough to make the relationship drama work while also being shallow enough to capably serve the withering ("") satire of wealth.
It really doesn't help that they front-loaded all the worst elements into the first episode. Watching the three they've released, there are glimmers of interesting drama (mostly down to the performances). But you can absolutely tell, especially given the third episode, that the arc of this show is going to be a subduction-by-degrees of the domestic elements into the crime elements; critically, *everything that works about the character drama depends on ignorance of the criminal desperation*. I will be absolutely amazed if the show creatively survives Coop's secret getting out to his wife and/or girlfriend. Because the crime stuff isn't the shot of vigor the program seems to think it is.
When the fence shows up at his house there's 0 tension, none. It put a clock on everything about the show that's working. Personally, I'm going to watch it the way I would a Showtime program: rubbernecking for its coming collapse.