Death, Religion and the Quest for Goodness: on After Life and Fleabag
Television comedies didn't use to have much truck with altruism. Generally speaking we would watch awful people doing terrible things, and there was a certain catharsis to be found in either cheering them on or witnessing their failure - and this went for Basil Fawlty as much as for Larry David, Homer Simpson, the Bluths from Arrested Development or Nighty Night's Jill Tyrrell. In Britain this tendency appeared blunter, but there was a considerable vein of misanthropy in US television as well. But in recent times we've had a number of programmes chewing on the idea of human kindness, where the comedy of misbehaviour or or social anxiety is counterbalanced by ideas of caring for others and making our lives on earth worthwhile. Why? Why now?
Michael Schur's The Good Place was the first off the mark, making ideas of human goodness central to its very conceit. In the show, we follow four supposedly bad people (note that Schur can't actually bring himself to write terrible humans, merely un-good ones with a few egotistical kinks) who find themselves in a hell dressed up as heaven, all the better to be tortured by their feelings of inadequacy. The four of them nevertheless undertake to study philosophy with a view to bettering themselves, and this quest to become truly good has become the show's defining narrative. A crucial aspect of the programme is that the fact of having died forces the four of them to rethink their lives on earth.
Michael Schur's The Good Place was the first off the mark, making ideas of human goodness central to its very conceit. In the show, we follow four supposedly bad people (note that Schur can't actually bring himself to write terrible humans, merely un-good ones with a few egotistical kinks) who find themselves in a hell dressed up as heaven, all the better to be tortured by their feelings of inadequacy. The four of them nevertheless undertake to study philosophy with a view to bettering themselves, and this quest to become truly good has become the show's defining narrative. A crucial aspect of the programme is that the fact of having died forces the four of them to rethink their lives on earth.
This element is present in spades in Russian Doll, the Netflix show starring and co-written by Natasha Lyonne, in which Nadia and Alan, two souls adrift in New York, keep dying and being reborn over and over again, forcing them to reassess their existence. Finally realising their duty to protect and care for each other, the pair are given a new lease of life in the last episodes, and discover a purpose that had been missing. The programme's bleakness eventually takes on a pulsating fervour not unlike the ecstasy of the last few scenes of It's A Wonderful Life, when everything that had seemed quotidian or even sub-par becomes bathed in all the more wonder for it having been so nearly extinguished. Russian Doll achieves this without ever succumbing to commonplaces or cutesiness.
Now we have two further programmes adventuring onto this terrain, but this time British shows, with varying degrees of acid to offset the self-actualisation. In both Fleabag and After Life, an atheist protagonist comes face to face with the meaninglessness of existence, and struggles to find reasons to continue. This crisis prompts, in Ricky Gervais's weirdly unsuccessful but still somehow compulsive After Life, a decision to become a good person. What's notable in the first few episodes of Gervais's programme, is the way that Gervais gifts himself the opportunity to vent his misanthropic spleen: playing Tony, whose wife has died of breast cancer, permits him to unleash all manner of spew, predominantly against fat people but also bores, religion, and Twitter. (Gervais is so hungry to have a pop at Twitter that he even gives other characters dialogue that criticises it - something which rings hollow) This process is reminiscent to me of the way Quentin Tarantino has recently taken to writing atrocities into his films that justify the bloodthirst for revenge that he has always depicted: the Holocaust, and slavery, licence him to reach new levels of violence. Similarly, Gervais needs something as definitive as the death of a loved one to get away with the bile that he has now been regurgitating for a while. What's interesting about the show is its utter bleakness and misery - including the sheer bleakness of Gervais's hate. This darkness becomes close to pure nihilism - and it's unclear at the finish whether Gervais has much of a worldview with which to replace it. In the end, Tony's change of heart doesn't seem to stem from any great realisation about his purpose, but merely comforts Tony/Gervais in his rightness about everything.
An interesting facet of Fleabag is that Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes doubt into her character: not for her any great certainties about the world, as Tony displays in After Life when Gervais crowbars in a whole scene where Tony lectures his colleagues about the idiocy of religion. On the contrary, the latest episode of Fleabag sees Waller-Bridge's forlorn character seemingly attracted by the guidance that faith can bring. In the programme, the protagonist is trying to make sense of two deaths, those of her mother and of her best friend, Boo - the latter of which she blames herself for. In series 1 of Fleabag, this feeling of culpability, and of being unmoored, prompted a great deal of acting out, as it does in After Life. It's notable here how gendered these behaviours are in both characters: in After Life, Tony's misbehaviour is mostly tolerated, and takes the form of belittling others, as well as suicidal ideation. In Fleabag, Waller-Bridge's character mistreats others but mostly harms herself, and her acting out is often sexual in form; this prompts other people to feel concerned for her, as if she were stepping out of her allotted role.
The second series of Fleabag seems to be opening out its initial premise, to give the protagonist a shot at goodness. We've already seen her help out her sister, Claire, in the first episode, and since then we have seen her paired with a priest who seems to be both an angel and a devil on her shoulder. In his sober form he offers the bonds of kinship (he is the only character who can hear her fourth wall breaks, and even, in a shiver-inducing moment in episode 4, gives a look to camera) and kindness; in his drunk self he acts as the ringmaster for the protagonist's dark urges, someone lured in by misspeaking ("well fuck you then") and fucking. In this character, who like the protagonist goes unnamed by all, Waller-Bridge seems to be giving her own heroine a way out and a path towards doom - and this is freighted further by the fact that we know goodness is within reach.
Death comes for us all - and perhaps laughter, the laughter of meanness and subversion, is a way to cheat it for a while. Perhaps, too, we have grown bored of comedies that detach themselves from life and its finality, cocooning themselves in laughter that sustains itself. In Russian Doll, Alan's first death - his suicide - hits us, and makes everything that has gone before, all the parties, the perverts, the lost cats and the drunkenness, seem both mundane and essential. Death finally recasts all our littleness, the comedy of menial existences, into something great, and prompts the question of whether we need, or even want, anymore, to laugh at everything.
Now we have two further programmes adventuring onto this terrain, but this time British shows, with varying degrees of acid to offset the self-actualisation. In both Fleabag and After Life, an atheist protagonist comes face to face with the meaninglessness of existence, and struggles to find reasons to continue. This crisis prompts, in Ricky Gervais's weirdly unsuccessful but still somehow compulsive After Life, a decision to become a good person. What's notable in the first few episodes of Gervais's programme, is the way that Gervais gifts himself the opportunity to vent his misanthropic spleen: playing Tony, whose wife has died of breast cancer, permits him to unleash all manner of spew, predominantly against fat people but also bores, religion, and Twitter. (Gervais is so hungry to have a pop at Twitter that he even gives other characters dialogue that criticises it - something which rings hollow) This process is reminiscent to me of the way Quentin Tarantino has recently taken to writing atrocities into his films that justify the bloodthirst for revenge that he has always depicted: the Holocaust, and slavery, licence him to reach new levels of violence. Similarly, Gervais needs something as definitive as the death of a loved one to get away with the bile that he has now been regurgitating for a while. What's interesting about the show is its utter bleakness and misery - including the sheer bleakness of Gervais's hate. This darkness becomes close to pure nihilism - and it's unclear at the finish whether Gervais has much of a worldview with which to replace it. In the end, Tony's change of heart doesn't seem to stem from any great realisation about his purpose, but merely comforts Tony/Gervais in his rightness about everything.
An interesting facet of Fleabag is that Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes doubt into her character: not for her any great certainties about the world, as Tony displays in After Life when Gervais crowbars in a whole scene where Tony lectures his colleagues about the idiocy of religion. On the contrary, the latest episode of Fleabag sees Waller-Bridge's forlorn character seemingly attracted by the guidance that faith can bring. In the programme, the protagonist is trying to make sense of two deaths, those of her mother and of her best friend, Boo - the latter of which she blames herself for. In series 1 of Fleabag, this feeling of culpability, and of being unmoored, prompted a great deal of acting out, as it does in After Life. It's notable here how gendered these behaviours are in both characters: in After Life, Tony's misbehaviour is mostly tolerated, and takes the form of belittling others, as well as suicidal ideation. In Fleabag, Waller-Bridge's character mistreats others but mostly harms herself, and her acting out is often sexual in form; this prompts other people to feel concerned for her, as if she were stepping out of her allotted role.
The second series of Fleabag seems to be opening out its initial premise, to give the protagonist a shot at goodness. We've already seen her help out her sister, Claire, in the first episode, and since then we have seen her paired with a priest who seems to be both an angel and a devil on her shoulder. In his sober form he offers the bonds of kinship (he is the only character who can hear her fourth wall breaks, and even, in a shiver-inducing moment in episode 4, gives a look to camera) and kindness; in his drunk self he acts as the ringmaster for the protagonist's dark urges, someone lured in by misspeaking ("well fuck you then") and fucking. In this character, who like the protagonist goes unnamed by all, Waller-Bridge seems to be giving her own heroine a way out and a path towards doom - and this is freighted further by the fact that we know goodness is within reach.
Death comes for us all - and perhaps laughter, the laughter of meanness and subversion, is a way to cheat it for a while. Perhaps, too, we have grown bored of comedies that detach themselves from life and its finality, cocooning themselves in laughter that sustains itself. In Russian Doll, Alan's first death - his suicide - hits us, and makes everything that has gone before, all the parties, the perverts, the lost cats and the drunkenness, seem both mundane and essential. Death finally recasts all our littleness, the comedy of menial existences, into something great, and prompts the question of whether we need, or even want, anymore, to laugh at everything.
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