Lisa Eckstein’s Reviews > I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution > Status Update

Just finished a section called "In Praise of Sex and Violence", in which Nussbaum presents nuanced appreciations of shows that do interesting things with these difficult subjects, such as Hannibal and The Americans.

On "The Leftovers", a weird TV series I dearly loved: "At its eeriest moments, the show manages to feel both intimate and world-historical: It's a fable about a social catastrophe that is also threaded into the story of a lacerating midlife divorce."

In the middle of a long and interesting essay in which Nussbaum grapples with the question of good art by terrible people, particularly men who commit sexual abuse.

"Because such stories [by women] exposed the private lives of male intellectuals, they got critiqued as icky, sticky memoir--score-settling, not art. (In contrast, young men seeking revenge on their exes are generally called 'comedians' or 'novelists' or 'Philip Roth.')"

"So why is the show [Sex and the City] so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It's a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicitly about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior."