‘You wonder ever if you’re a bad man?’: Toxic masculinity, paratexts and think pieces circulating around season one of HBO’sTrue Detective

Abstract

When it premiered in 2014, the first season of HBO’s True Detective received rave critical reviews. Featuring two A-list Hollywood actors, and a writer/director team who were rising stars in the industry, the show had all of the key ingredients to earn the label ‘prestige TV’. However, alongside the critical claim were concomitant critiques of the show for its apparent misogyny. The season features depictions of violent crimes against women and girls and is told almost entirely from the perspective of two middle-aged men. The salient question was whether the show was misogynist or whether it was a show about misogyny. Many of these debates transpired in think pieces of online magazines and blogs such as Salon, Vulture, Jezebel, The New Yorker and The A.V. Club. In this article, I examine the ways in which these discourses of misogyny and masculinity circulate in these paratexts. Ultimately, I suggest that the question of whether the show is misogynist is less important than the fact that nuanced discussions about gender and power found a platform and an audience with a broad circulation.

Provocation, II: Not another article on the Wire: How hierarchies of gender undermine TV scholarship and lead to abuse

“…However, the primetime soaps were part of a much larger shift, discussed by Jane Feuer (1984) in relation to MTM Television serials, towards the middle classes as specific and specifically valuable audience groups. In addition to their adoption of serial narratives in traditional seasons, inflation of budgets and filmic production values (Weissmann, 2012), the primetime serials are also predecessors of the current glut of must-see, ‘complex’ (Mittel, 2015) or ‘quality television’ (McCabe and Akass, 2007) which continue – perhaps to the extreme – the masculinisation of television (Albrecht, 2020; Weissmann, 2012) as well as its shift towards middle-class tastes. As a result, some television no longer appears as the unworthy object and can be studied widely and without shame, particularly when differentiated from other television (Leverette et al, 2009; Newman and Levine, 2012), or brought into relation with film (Andrews, 2014; Watts, 2019) and/or technology (Jenner, 2018; Weissmann, 2012).…”