When you don't know what you're watching

And a TV show you've got to watch.

We saw Kimberly Akimbo last week, finally. (We’d had tickets in November, but they were cancelled because some of the cast was out, so this was long-awaited.) I expected to like it, because I’d been hearing about it since its off-Broadway run. But I didn’t know anything else.

Which is how, last week, I found myself sitting in the Booth Theater smiling broadly and wondering what exactly I was watching. The show starts with its star, Victoria Clark, in the grunge garb of a 15-year-old in the early 90s, at a roller skating rink in New Jersey.

But the thing is this: Clark is 63 years old. Though she’s got long hair studded with those butterfly clips we all remember and is wearing a baggy flannel shirt, she’s visibly not a teenager. And so you’re suddenly navigating a bunch of questions. Is this a memory piece, where the grown narrator is remembering her youth? Is it like the great TV show Pen15, in which creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play their junior-high selves while everyone around them is played by age-appropriate actors? Is the whole cast going to be much older than their characters?

No, to all of that — I won’t give the whole thing away, but Kimberly Akimbo centers on a main character, played by Clark, who is actually a teenager but has a very rare genetic condition that causes her body to age at approximately four times the normal rate. Few with the condition live past their teen years. Making a musical from such a situation is unexpected, maybe, but it works well; the show is somehow both lighthearted and really deep, about growing up and facing mortality at the same time.

But really, I think, what Kimberly Akimbo did that worked so well was let you slowly put the pieces together, to realize — almost in real time with some of the characters — what kind of a life Kimberly and her family have been living. It doesn’t give everything away at the start. When Kimberly says something to a friend, you realize how her framework for life has colored conversations from earlier in the show.

This is a wonderful way to tell a story, and maybe it’s just me but I feel like it’s increasingly rare. There was a brief period in TV (sometimes called the “Golden Age,” around the aughts) where it was the way a lot of shows worked — you have to pay very close attention to The Sopranos and Mad Men, to pick two, because something might happen in season 2 that doesn’t have any repercussions until season 4, or an inexplicable conversation in one scene suddenly becomes explicable much much later. It is the kind of TV that beckons you to lean in and think and note.

Then the iPhone was released, and it all went sideways. (This is a gross exaggeration but not entirely wrong.) I do think that the distraction we’ve mostly succumbed to, coupled with the rise of streaming and the ease of looking at your second screen while watching whatever content you’ve queued up on the ol’ teevee has made it much harder for a show that requires attention to do well with audiences.

Of course, there’s always been plenty of TV and movies that luxuriate in explicable, linear plots and lots of repetitive expository dialogue to make it easy to follow the story. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

But isn’t it fun to be dropped down into a maze and have to find your way out? Of course it is; that’s why we, collectively, love creepy horror (wait, but what is making that noise?!) and thrillers and mysteries. They don’t just happen to us; they involve us in the story.

It can be harder for people to enjoy this sense of lost-ness, this need to put the pieces together, when it shows up in another genre. Kimberly Akimbo succeeds in part because it’s so lighthearted and fun and funny, and it beckons you in.

But it did make me think about Tár, which is terrific precisely because it does this. I have seen it twice and come away with big questions both times. I cannot really tell you what it is “about,” or what is happening in all the scenes. I can venture guesses, but that’s it. I’m not even sure what genre it is. (Horror? Drama? Satire? Comedy? Yes?)

When I sat down to write about Tár, all I could think about is how it requires your full attention. What struck me is that it’s a movie that begs to be watched backwards, in a sense — you never know what you’re watching till after the fact. Once you realize what you saw, you want to go see it again, to look at the layers that you didn’t know were there but the artist sure did.

I’ve long thought the mark of a masterpiece, at least by my lights, is not how something makes me feel, whether it’s joy or intrigue or discomfort. The mark of a masterpiece is that when it’s over I want to watch it again, or read it again — and that when I do, it doesn’t answer questions and close the loop; it opens more.

An artwork I can master and fully understand is not one that I can love.

Recommended Viewing

This isn’t a movie — it’s a TV show! For All Mankind, three seasons of which have aired on Apple TV+, which is also low-key the best non-niche streamer out there.

Created in part by Ronald Moore, who you may know from the excellent Battlestar Galactica reboot or the Portlandia episode about it (and also a little show called Star Trek), For All Mankind is an alternate history show about space. It takes place in a world very like ours, except the Russians landed on the moon first in 1969, and that sparked decades of concentrated effort at NASA to expand space exploration and research.

The first season is set right after the moon landing. The second leaps forward ten years, and the third does the same. Other shifts mean that history plays out differently in their universe, but in a way that could have in ours. The Equal Rights Amendment, for instance, is ratified, and gender parity is more pervasive far earlier. They get cell phones earlier because moon and space tech helped prompt advances in communication technologies. There’s a lot more than that.

But what I love most about the show is that, over three seasons, it becomes less about how cool space is and more about the long-lasting repercussions of the psychological toll that this work exacts on the astronauts and their families, into a second generation.

Honestly, I don’t watch a ton of TV, but I really do love this show. It’s an easy show to watch, but also very involving. It’s gripping. It stumbles sometimes, but the characters are for the most part very well-written. And it does what I always loved about BSG, which is make the viewer think about philosophical and psychological and humanistic issues by setting them in a world that’s slightly unfamiliar, but where the characters still confront the same things we do.

Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.