Kill your daddies? TV's obsession with patricide
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What is the significance of patricide in modern TV?
All right, y'all. I promised that I had a big announcement and I'm delivering on it. This is my New Year's gift to you. Starting today, I'm bringing you It's Been a Minute three times a week. That's right. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you'll have new episodes of It's Been a Minute right here in your feed. Starting right now. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. So excited to have y'all on today. This is like a dream TV conversation. It really and truly is. So I'm super hyped. Woo! I have assembled the dream team, y'all. I've got Roxanna Haddadi. She's a TV critic for Vulture Magazine and the New Yorker's Ingu Kang. And we're here to talk about daddy issues. This is the Olympics of patricide. Ha ha ha ha. You thought Oedipus? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. 2024 TV is going to do you one better. Because here's the thing.
When you look at the lists of the best TV shows of the past couple of years, there's a trend that nobody is talking about. A bunch of these shows are offing their patriarchs like the dads are dying. And I will warn you, there are some spoilers ahead. Let's look over at HBO's hit show industry. Its third season was huge this year. People couldn't stop talking about it. And one of the main characters, my girl Yasmin, oh my gosh, she is pretty, she is charming, but she's not the best at her job. But we still love her, okay? In one episode, after an argument on a yacht with her super rich father, he dies under mysterious circumstances. And I wouldn't say she's sad about it. That would be impossible because I killed him. It is brutal out here for the dads.
And then there's the bear on FX. This season, Carmi finally stands up to his old boss and mentor, Chef David Fields.
You gave me ulcers and panic attacks and nightmares. You know that, right? Do you understand that?
And of course, there is the corporate daddy of all corporate daddies, Logan Roy, the billionaire mogul from HBO's Succession, who had to choose which one of his kids would take over the family's media empire. The whole show is literally built on the premise that dad has got to go.
Hey, guess what? I recall my father was a nasty, racist, neglectful individual. What was it that they used to say around here? No Blacks, no Jews, no women above the fourth floor.
All of these shows are giving Oedipus on steroids. In order for the children characters to progress to the next stage of their destiny, they had to kill or cut down the father figures in their lives. And across even more shows, everyone from biological fathers to metaphorical fathers are getting the chop.
A lot of workplaces do still traffic in this language of family. So your boss could still be seen as your dad. It's almost meta that we're grappling with, like, how do we tell stories about fathers and we're stuck there. telling stories about fathers.
Today, Roxanna, Ingo, and I are talking about what historians see as one of the oldest and most taboo crimes across history, patricide, and what this TV trend says about how we think about our own real-life patriarchs. Patricide is an age-old crime. So I wonder, why are patricide narratives still so compelling today?
I have theories about this. I think that there are two main texts. I think if we're talking in a more macro scale, thinking about prestige TV as a whole, for me, it's about the anxiety of the world not changing. Because you have these old narratives destructive men who will not give up their power. And so you're just sort of sitting around waiting for him to die so that something new can happen in the world. My example of this is always Logan Roy.
Everything I've done in my life, I've done for my children. I know I've made mistakes, but I've always tried to do the best by them because they mean everything to me.
And so that's sort of like the more like political, socioeconomic answer. I think the other thing is that we really love looking at monsters. And I think a lot of the time parents are monsters. We are actually in this really weird period right now where people are talking about going no contact with their parents. I think oftentimes very much it's the dads, right?
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