Spoiler Alert: Article contains spoilers for Good Girls, Dead To Me, and Weeds.
When television shows and films excuse criminality, they often do so through a lens of white privilege. The crimes of those who are celebrated for breaking the law are committed to protect their quality of life, not life itself. There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few days about protecting Black lives from racist police abuse, and protecting buildings from the violence of destruction. As I’ve argued to many a Twitter troll, the value of a building does not equate to the value of a life. The protection of property is not worth the death of an actual human being. And no matter how much the networks would like us to believe it, the upper-middle-class lifestyle of a white suburbanite-turned-criminal is not worth a bloodbath.
I know, I know, not everything deserves a comparison to the Nazis, but bear with me here: Nazis, like any other colonialist power, believed that their quality of life trumped the rights of others to any life at all. That’s what the concept of “lebensraum” means—literally translating to “living space,” this was the watchword for the Nazi claim to eastward expansion; they felt deprived of the creature comforts gained by their neighbors through the exploitation and genocide of colonialism, and believed they were entitled to their own sources of stolen wealth. There’s a strong argument to be made that the main difference between the Nazis’ goals and that of older colonial powers was that the Nazis’ victims were white. All that to say, when you read a few WWII books, you start to realize that, when someone takes a stand for their quality of life that puts other people’s actual lives in danger, it isn’t a legitimate stand at all.
Take the hit NBC show Good Girls, for example. Good Girls (created by Jenna Bans) features three suburbanite women who take up a life in crime after various life circumstances leave them desperate for money. Elizabeth “Beth” Boland (Christina Hendricks) has a cheating husband (played, to hilarious excess, by Matthew Lillard) who’s spent the family’s money on his mistress; the family is about to lose their house by the time Beth discovers his philandering ways, and she convinces her sister and best friend to join her in a plan to rob a big box store in order to secure the funds to pay her mortgage.
Her sister, Annie Marks (Mae Whitman), doesn’t need too much convincing, as she’s frustrated with her minimum wage job and sexually harassing manager, and needs extra money to hire a lawyer so she can fight her ex in court for custody of their preternaturally mature child, Sadie. Urgency is lent to Annie’s quest because she fears her ex-husband won’t understand Sadie’s needs—Sadie comes out as transgender later in the show, but at the start, is already mostly male-presenting. However, Sadie’s dad is shown as able to provide a high quality of life in other ways; his wealthy family wants to send Sadie to a private school, and it later turns out that the private academy is much less transphobic than Sadie’s public school, where bullies have been taunting the child by pulling down Sadie’s pants for the purposes of gendered humiliation. Ruby Hill (Retta) is the only character motivated by an immediate life or death scenario; her daughter suffers from kidney disease, and the experimental treatment that’s dramatically improving her health is as costly as can be, especially for two loving parents employed in minimum wage jobs that do not provide health care (Ruby works as a waitress, and her husband begins the series as a mall security guard).
The fact that the two white female protagonists commit crimes to uphold their standard of living—Beth wants to make the mortgage payment on her house, while her sister wants to retain custody despite the better life her ex could provide to their child—while the one Black protagonist does so to save her daughter’s life, is no accident. The burden of sympathy for Black characters on television is high. For the presumed white suburban viewers most network television shows aim to reach and to whom most advertisements are targeted, sympathy is easily lent to a white family that may lose their home. After all, there is no greater fear for white America than losing their standard of living. The American dream is built on the illusion that hard work leads to home ownership, decent cars, and the ability to provide children with expensive toys and (more sympathetically) to let children dream big and be who they are.
The rise of Trump is often attributed to the loss of status perceived by angry white America, and in particular, the white suburban women who came out in force to vote the worst president in history into office in 2016. Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, grounds itself in the perceived loss of status by white people used to either more money, or at least more status, than people of color. This is a legacy of a long history of using racism to divide–white people had less incentive to unite with people of color to demand economic justice when they enjoyed preferential treatment at all levels of society. But it also speaks to the basic fact that America privileges the loss of status over the struggle for life, which itself has its roots in the post-Civil War cultural framework that claimed more sympathy for white slaveowners for their loss of human chattel than for those who had been enslaved. As Roxane Gay has written about, in order to earn sympathy from white audiences, on the page or on screen, black bodies must endure unimaginable traumas. White people must only be at risk of losing their homes, or of ceding custody to a wealthy relative.
Good Girls may begin on unequal premises, but it only gets worse from there. The big box store that the women rob turns out to be one of many locations wherein a gang stashes counterfeit money; when the gang discovers the money is missing, they track down the thieves. Budding criminal mastermind Beth makes a bargain with Rio, the leader of the gang—the women will serve as unsuspicious money launderers, purchasing high-ticket items at stores with counterfeit money, then returning the items for “clean” cash. Beth’s housewife skills come in handy for her new career, as she uses her scheduling skills and shopping prowess to figure out where to send the women to not draw suspicion with their frequent returns. Why these skills couldn’t have gotten her an actual job is difficult to determine, but also why she ended up with a sleazebag car salesman in the first place is truly the biggest mystery in the show.
The gang is composed primarily of Latino men, but their country of origin is never specified, nor are their reasons for committing crimes. They are coded as “bad guys” early on through their willingness to terrorize *gasp* suburban housewives, and through their brutal slaying of a police informant, never mind that the women stole from their businesslike operation, and the police sealed the man’s doom by forcibly recruiting him as an informant. Rio is also the object of erotic exploitation by Beth, whose attraction to him is portrayed as symbolic of her descent into the criminal underworld. Beth, in turn, is portrayed as a fetishized housewife to the gang members, who are both amused and entranced by her transformation from innocent to mastermind.
The women are shown as corrupted by the gang members (with Beth’s increasingly willing participation). When they in turn corrupt Ruby’s law-abiding husband, who becomes a police officer only to end up covering up his wife’s crimes, it is portrayed as unintentional—they would never ask him to betray his ideals, the show claims, they simply benefit from his personal choice to do so. The women of Good Girls also gain sympathy through their commitment to the white-collar side of the business and their reluctance to kill, although that reluctance soon becomes a willingness to have others kill for them. The only willing police informant in the series is a wannabe rapist, adding even more credence to the women’s claim to sympathy. When they refuse to destroy evidence against them after realizing that the evidence van also carries rape kits, the audience’s sympathy is sealed—these women are thieves, but they can do no wrong.
Even Beth’s absurdly expensive birthday party thrown for her son is portrayed not as the wasteful and decadent enterprise it is, but as the desperate act of a mother to please her child. Any woman would do the same, the show hastens to emphasize, time and time again; although of course the woman of the show’s assumptions is like the woman of the 19th century sphere of domesticity—one whom is allowed by society to pamper her children and to be pampered, not the hard-working degendered woman of the lower classes who would be condemned for spending her few dollars on any extravagance.
The closest we get to condemnation thus far is when Ruby considers helping the FBI, although she changes her mind last minute, but it’s again part of the uneasy attitude of TV towards characters of color; the white women would never betray a friend, the show asks us to believe, and only a Black woman would get close to turning her friend in. The show’s portrayal of police is also an uneasy set of racialized tropes. It’s long been known that white America is most comfortable with a black character in uniform, hence Retta’s waitressing togs and her husband’s security guard outfit and later police uniform. A report from Color of Change issued in January of this year also pointed out that those characters who are punished for police misconduct in television shows are most often women and people of color; white men who commit actions inconsistent with the expectations of their uniform are praised for doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, while people of color are granted fewer excuses for their infractions, even if they are not caught in the act. If they are doing the wrong thing for the right reason, it is almost always in either direct or indirect aid of white characters that are seen as drawn into criminality by circumstance, rather than the characters of color, who are portrayed as hardened and somehow more willing participants in their own crimes.
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Good Girls is not the first show to argue that white criminality is excusable when performed in defense of a high standard of living. Take Weeds (created by Jenji Kohan), the ur-show of white suburban ladies involved in criminal hijinks. Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise-Parker) is a stay-at-home mom who takes up weed dealing to support her family at their accustomed level after her high-earning husband drops dead of a heart attack in the middle of a jog. Through eight seasons, Botwin becomes a pitiless mastermind, then falls victim to her criminal lifestyle, even losing her children’s futures in the bargain as they become semi-willing participants in her drug-fueled empire. She also seduces, then frames, a Latino drug lord, who, like the gang leader in Good Girls, is both a fetishized object and a less-than-human criminal to be cast away whenever expedience calls for it.
Botwin is just an ordinary housewife as long as she deals to white people, and even a hero when she shuts down drug trafficking in the playground, but the minute a drug dealer who’s a minority comes in, the show seems to say, she’s truly descended into the realm of professional criminality (symbolized by a scene where she fucks the dealer on top of a car in an alleyway, a smirk on her face as she revels in her new power). The fact that Nancy Botwin’s life eventually falls apart does nothing to counter the initial sympathy she gains for participating in criminality in order to keep up a middle-class lifestyle—it even adds to our sympathy, for her version of losing everything is based in middle-class assumptions of what “everything” is; she loses her house and her children’s college-educated futures, but none lose their lives.
The fact that Weeds is a comedy (like Good Girls) adds to its offenses—were it to feature a family of color, it would certainly be framed as a tragedy, and the family would begin on a much lower tier of society’s rungs, and suffer a far higher body count. Just think of the suffering communities of Baltimore in The Wire, where characters suffer unimaginable torment, or use their criminality against other criminals, in order to be excused in their roles as killers, although Donald Glover’s show Atlanta offers a new path forward for comedy when it comes to portraying a character of color engaging in small, and not particularly disturbing, criminal actions. After all, society is at fault for criminalizing marijuana, and governments do far more to aid the victims of the white-coded addiction to opioids than to black-coded crack-cocaine epidemic.
Dead To Me begins with a similar premise, although it takes longer to reach the point at which criminality is excused and even celebrated. Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) is a newly widowed struggling mother, working as a real estate agent for her insufferable mother-in-law and mourning the death of her husband in a hit-and-run. She joins a grief support group where she meets Judy Hale (Linda Cardenelli), who quickly befriends Jen by claiming to have lost her own partner. Judy is hiding a terrible secret, however—her partner isn’t dead, and the two broke up after her partner caused the hit-and-run that killed Jen’s husband. By the end of the season, Judy’s partner is lying dead in a swimming pool, and it’s up to Jen and Judy to spend the second season covering up the crime. Challenges to their efforts include a nosy neighbor, a prying twin brother, and their own consciences, although the show comes out firmly in favor of their actions through the decision of a sympathetic police officer to let Jen off the hook after she confesses to the crime. The police officer is a woman of color, and it’s hard to believe that in reverse, a TV show would portray a white police officer letting a character of color off after hearing a confession. The officer is also more willing to let Jen off scott-free because Judy brings evidence of the corruption of police higher-ups to another character of color who works in the department (partially as atonement, since Judy had slept with and exploited this character in the first season after meeting him at a grieving retreat).
The worst aspect of the show, however, comes when Judy attempts to make amends with her incarcerated mother, only to tell her mother she deserves to be in jail after she begins to suspect that her mother only wants to renew their relationship in order to get a solid character witness at her parole hearing. A woman who’s suffered from drug abuse is apparently more in need of incarceration than her daughter, who is guilty of committing one murder and helping to cover up another. Key in this disparity is the attitude of each to motherhood. White women (and white characters in general) can get away with anything in the name of their children, but once a character abandons her role as a mother, condemnation quickly ensues. Judy has suffered from several miscarriages and desperately wants a child, even joining Jen in coparenting Jen’s children. Judy’s mother, in contrast, neglected her child and refused to sober up (never mind that addiction is a disease, and Judy could have tried to adopt at any time).
We see this in a smaller, but no less instructive way, in the show Younger (created by Darren Star and based on the novel by Pamela Redmond Satran). Liza Miller (Sutton Foster), like Beth Boland, thought she had a comfortable life as a stay-at-home mother, until her husband’s irresponsible actions send the family down the tube. In this case, it’s a gambling problem that precipitates their divorce, and Liza’s need to find both a job and a new place to live. She quickly moves in with her boho artist friend, but finds it more difficult to secure a job as a 40-year-old divorced mother; after being mistaken for 25 in the dim lighting of a bar, she decides to pull of the ultimate deception, and gets herself hired as a “25-year-old” marketing assistant for a mid-size publishing company, where much hilarity ensues. At no point does the show answer why she decided to be a stay-at-home mother in the first place (perhaps the message of this article is really, don’t stay at home with your kids unless you’re a very, very good liar), nor does the age of her child ever quite line up with the date she left the workforce, but one thing’s for sure: Liza isn’t lying her way into publishing because it’s her only option. She’s doing it for personal fulfillment, and to support her daughter’s dreams (specifically, the dream of traveling around India spending a ton of money while “studying” abroad).
If sacrifice means moving into an artist’s studio and getting one of the most coveted jobs in the world while fucking a 26-year-tattoo artist, then hell yeah, I’ll sacrifice! Liza gets away with her deception in the eyes of the audience and fellow characters because a)workplace age discrimination is a real struggle, b)she’s lying not for scraps but for the American dream, and c)she’s doing it all in the name of motherhood. Her boss’ wife, on the other hand, is roundly condemned for “abandoning” the family by taking off for a year to write a book and making her husband do some childcare for once (which he quickly passes on to Liza, then, as all rich men do, goes after the babysitter). I haven’t mentioned any characters of color in this series because there literally are none (the one exception is an editor at a rival publishing house, who flits in and out stealing authors and sleeping around).
Comedies justifying harmful white actions in the name of middle-class consumerism are just as in need of change as any police show, no matter how entertaining they may be.While all these shows excuse various levels of criminality by privileged middle-class white people, Breaking Bad goes farthest in its heinous acts undertaken in the name of family. Chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is dying of lung cancer and can’t see a path forward to securing his family’s legacy. When he runs into a meth-dealing former student, he hatches a plan to cook the purest form of the drug ever seen in the Southwest and earn enough money to support his wife and disabled son long after his death. As the series progresses, Cranston morphs from small-town family guy to monstrous kingpin, but his ticking death clock always secures at least some form of sympathy for him, as does the constant presence of those more monstrous than he, who are usually men of color who make up for in violence what they lack in back stories.
Much has been written about how police shows perpetuate harmful lies when it comes to our perceptions of the effectiveness of law-enforcement. A character may die of disease in Grey’s Anatomy, but you won’t find a single case unsolved in NCIS. Cop shows give backstories to their law enforcement characters, and fill their episodes with one-dimensional black and brown criminals who are often the victims of police brutality, excused over and over again as the only way to secure justice (just as torture is excused over and over again by the military, despite decades of proof that torture doesn’t work as an interrogation device). Behind this attitude lies the slave-holding origins of police as overseers and posses dedicated to the brutal physical control of the bodies of Black men, women, and children, a violence still seen in the streets today.
But just as pervasive on our screens is the commitment to justifying white criminality, a justification also rooted in the 19th century, when the confidence man was king, and Americans living in an unstable society glorified the con artist over the hard-working debtor. Comedies justifying harmful white actions in the name of middle-class consumerism are just as in need of change as any police show, no matter how entertaining they may be.
