Taboo, I Have No Use For You.
My girlfriend and I have very different tastes in television. I’m an informed citizen of the Peak TV world, constantly haunted by the fear that I haven’t seen all the shows I need to see to qualify as a real person in today’s culture. She, on the other hand, didn’t watch much TV before we met, save for her slavish devotion to the domestic carnage of Investigation Discovery— there’s no more enthralling entertainment than terrible actors trying to convey the greatest human extremes of terror, anguish, and despair with a single take.
We’ve met each other in the middle, to an extent. For my part, I’ve immersed myself in enough Crime ID programming to develop a lengthy, Chris Collinsworth-esque exposition on how retired Det. Joe Kenda of Homicide Hunter is the least charismatic person in the history of broadcasting, or at least he would be, if not for the actor who plays him in the reenactments; furthermore, I’ve osmotically absorbed enough episodes of Your Worst Nightmare and Wives With Knives to see the same actress on three different shows, as a terrified innocent bystander, a conniving bitch who wanted her husband out of the way, and a sweet-faced college girl cut down in her prime by a psycho boyfriend.
On the other hand, my lady has made strides towards being a serious consumer of the medium: we watched The Wire together (the seventh time through is the best), and we’ve bonded over Silicon Valley, Stranger Things, You’re the Worst, The Night Of, Atlanta, Insecure, and Westworld. She rarely likes any given show as much as I do, an impasse that is usually resolved by her falling asleep on top of me whilst I binge away at my stories. Sometimes, she dislikes a show too acutely for me to watch it around her, thus I’m forced to enjoy The Expanse alone and girlfriend-less, as all SyFy programming is meant to be.
This dynamic depends on give-and-take from both sides, lest it devolve into the sort of tense domestic power struggle that makes your home life a living hell. I accede to the spousal murder porn and local news [ugh] whenever I can, and in exchange, I try not to dominate our shared couch time with shows I know she hates, or is merely tolerating at best. If I pushed every show I wanted to watch, her reaction would be to sit in silence and ruin them all with seething, passive-aggressive un-enjoyment, effectively girlfriending my own viewing experience to death. No one wants that.
However, my vanity about my own tastes (and obvious contempt for hers) sometimes leads me to ignore her complaints about a show I feel she should enjoy. Like a medieval witch trial, if she can’t get into a show of obvious merit, her boredom is God’s righteous punishment on her for failing to enjoy such momentous, important television — she would be engaged in the story if she were pure of heart. I tell myself that it’s totally justified to ignore her agonized wails of indifference, because we’re watching a Good Show™ that demands to be appreciated as art, for all of its texture and multifaceted perspective on humanity. It was for this reason that, for seven weeks, I insisted that Taboo was worth watching, and forced it upon our household.
As the credits rolled on the penultimate episode last night, I realized that this media sadism was actually masochism. After I turned the TV off, I took a long, hard look at my reflection in the screen, and I admitted what I’d known all along in my heart: Taboo is a massive waste of my time.
SPOILERS LIKE WOAH
The show kept the wool over my eyes for as long as it did because it has all that it needs to be great: a Hollywood star backed by a murderer’s row of great character actors, the lush setting/hats of Georgian London (70% of all British TV shows and movies are set during the Regency for a reason), and a plot hewn from the fascinating history of Napoleonic geopolitics. Its creative team had a pedigree, its production was sharp and competent, and I went into this show desperate to love it.
Looking back on it now, it’s all just so empty. What promised to be a rich portrait of 1814 London quickly felt like four sets with St. Paul’s painted into the background, Red Keep-style (where the hell is that beach supposed to be?). The multi-ethnic, world-dominating metropolis we were fixing to explore is just a city of dirty white people with the occasional nonwhite character as a prop. The visual texture and sumptuous mise-en-scene starts to feel like one big blur of grime and cum, which goes doubly for the cast. Between the disgusting Prince Regent, the foul hooker, the horny nitrous-dispensing chemist, the cypher of a sister-lover, and the brother-in-law who’s a dour, puritanical version of the female lead’s dick boyfriend in every romantic comedy, there’s no emotional purchase to be found among this crowd, even from Brace’s whining Scots ass. “Everyone is awful” may describe real life pretty well at times, but onscreen, the absence of anyone worth rooting for creates a vacuum that takes a show down with it.
Speaking of narrative vacuums, it doesn’t exactly build up the dramatic tension when your protagonist is immortal. Walter White was constantly screwed with no easy solutions available, Tony Soprano was under siege from within and without, and Omar Little was hunted by half of Baltimore: Taboo’s attempt to join that pantheon of vulnerable antiheroes takes the form of an invincible killing machine with ill-defined dark powers. After he took out his second assassin, I realized that Delaney is basically Hobbs from Fast & Furious, if Hobbs was also an Yoruba-Chinook sex necromancer. Unless Jonathan Pryce’s character is actually Merlin’s heir and he’s only saying “fuck” every third word as an incantation to bring forth his ancient and powerful magicks against his rival sorcerer, there’s no one who can credibly threaten Delaney, thus no conflict that can credibly interest us.
Tom Hardy is the show’s greatest strength for the same reason he’s its most glaring weakness: he’s such a magnetic screen presence, with such a proven track record of making inscrutable, difficult, taciturn men compelling, that he and his fellow creators thought he could make a compelling character out of the most inscrutable asshole imaginable. Needless to say, his reach exceeded his grasp. Tommy was kinda pulling it off it for awhile, at least until the bill came due for his mysterious backstory. If the plot goes no deeper than the relatively pedestrian dealings with the East India and the War of 1812, then what is the point of his hallucinations? If the visions of his mother were just his own memories of being drowned, then why are we being force-fed that mystical red herring? If his African misadventures consisted of crewing a slave ship and ripping someone off, then what do we care about all the magic? [Sidenote: Chichester would be a great character if not for the fact that his presence brings the narrative motivation of half the show into question] Why did James suddenly stop giving a shit about his sister? What’s up with the actress? Are we supposed to care about Winter? Are we supposed to scorn his late father’s memory or not?
The whole mess is so muddled that I can’t even bring myself to care about the racial politics. As a Celt, I consider Tom Hardy one of the finest specimens of my people, but being so thoroughly Celtic, he could not possibly look less Native American if he tried. They also made him some kind of animist, off-the-reservation cannibal witch doctor at the same time, making him both a white Indian as well as the first white magical Negro in screen history. He only came to the witch doctor lifestyle out of guilt for being a privileged white murderer of slaves. They really tried to have their antihero cake and eat it too with this one.
Ultimately, the show is a mere imitation of proper prestige TV. It has all the ingredients, all the talent, and a budget and cast that deceive the viewer into believing they’re watching something as complex and enriching as the shows that do it right; however, this collection of loose plot threads, pointlessly wasted screen time, and unlovable assholes engaging in needless cruelty is as empty as it is tedious. I wanted to believe in this one, and convinced myself it was a winner for a time, but my better half called it from the beginning — this particular emperor has no clothes.
