N and I tried to watch Parenthood because everybody I know loves it. But N says he can’t watch it because everybody in the show is weird and creepy.
“In this show?” I ask. “In House of Cards, 24, Blacklist, The Killing, Prison Break, Breaking Bad, The Bandits of St. Petersburg, etc people are not weird and creepy but this show about normal, regular folks is weird and creepy?”
Soviet legacy, people. It warps your mind in a major way.
I haven’t seen the show (I’ll try to catch an episode or two now, but don’t expect to last long). And seeing frog-eyed Peter Krause in the cast makes me skeptical, I’m enjoying the Catch a lot (like an 80’s music video masquerading as a tv drama) but I’m not sure if I could take him in more earnest fare….
Anyhoo, it’s my understanding that both you and N underwent severe childhood trauma (a situation as common as dirt in the USSR) and you’ve both done remarkable jobs in dealing with it successfully.
My guess is that N finds something therapeutic and/or cathartic in shows about dysfunctional personalities in extreme situations.* Therefore, more mundane shows about (highly idealized) everyday people will be weird and alien (when they’re not simply boring).
This is not just a Soviet thing, I’ve known many Americans who were alienated and/or repulsed by heartwarming shows about idealized families, from ‘Father Knows Best’ through ‘the Waltons’ and ‘the Cosby show”.
I could only enjoy the Waltons ironically. The closest to that kind of show I could stand was Family, which I found to be profoundly weird in the way that the family members interacted with each other (like skilled social workers or therapists).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_(1976_TV_series)
*In times of stress I used to find cheap horror movies to be strangely relaxing, the advent of VHS rentals and the vast numbers of forgotten cheap horror movies that found their way to new life helped save my sanity back in the 1980s
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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