Between the two poles of entertainment experience – mindless fun and serious engagement – is a category that used to be thought of as so-bad-it’s-good. But it now has its own prefix: the hate-watch (or hate-read or, more rarely, the hate-listen – although music, at its most abstract, is less vulnerable to mockery and the kind of heated debate that follows a truly stirring contribution to the hate genre).
It is with joy, therefore, that we received news this week of an NBC follow-up to last year’s hate-watch par excellence the Sound of Music Live – in the form of Allison Williams, from the HBO show Girls. She’ll be taking the lead in Peter Pan Live, which will air later this year, and – god-willing! – treat us to more of her singing.
The truly successful hate-product, one suspects, is one that the producer is well aware will stoke audience disparagement but that the performer executes in absolute innocence.
Some recent examples include: the TV series Smash; anything written by James Franco (but particularly his poetry); that movie Labor Day, in which Kate Winslet lovingly bakes her kidnapper a pie; everything written by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen; young Tal Fortgang’s essay for his Princeton magazine about the burden of privilege; and, most stunningly, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s insane piece in New York magazine last year, which a lot of people speculated was let through by her editors specifically with the hate-read in mind. (It was, duly, hated and discussed at length everywhere.)
It’s a kind of trolling, of course – and, as with all things in the world today, comes down to the internet providing a venue for disseminating supporting material and creating spontaneous communities wherein people can be funny and vicious while confirming their shared prejudices.
And so we come to NBC, which gave us an outstanding contribution to the genre with Carrie Underwood’s role as Maria in Sound of Music, which was rapturously hate-watched by millions. (It is a feature of successful hate-watching that a small, uncritical section of the audience must straightforwardly love what they’re seeing, and unhinge themselves hating the haters. After writing a skeptical piece about Underwood at the time, I can confirm her fans rose to this challenge.)
The choice of Pan is a daring one on the part of NBC, since it is not a terribly well known musical. The best known song, performed by Mary Martin in the 1954 Broadway original, is probably Never Never Land – which has the sort of mopey, wistful air to it that, as a teen volunteer on my local hospital radio station, we used to call Music To Die To.
But to qualify as a hate-watch, it is not enough for a piece of entertainment merely to be bad, nor should it be confused with straightforward camp – which is of course a form as aware of the joke as the audience. Sharknado 2, which aired Wednesday – and which a lot of people gathered around their second screens to laugh their way through – is a franchise so confident that it’s in control of the joke that it may well have killed it. (Mark McGrath actually uttered the words “jumped the shark”.) Snakes on a Plane, likewise, doesn’t qualify as a hate-watch because, from the title alone, it is apparent that everyone on board is too aware of being a joke.
Anaconda, on the other hand, in which Jon Voight – as the deranged leader of a doomed jungle expedition – acts his little socks off as if he’s in Apocalypse Now is an enjoyable hate-watch. (The worst CGI snake in film history is just a bonus.)
Likewise, America’s morning television shows – in which a quartet of presenters sit around a desk or a coffee chuckling at things so aggressively unfunny that it becomes a sort of performance art. Marveling at the inner life of Matt Lauer, for instance – is he screaming inside? – and the rest of the team never ceases to inspire dread and amazement. (Neither, for that matter, did Lauer impaling a shark with an umbrella during Sharknado 2.)
There is, finally, the complex category of the inadvertent hate-watch, in which the performer thinks he’s in on the joke, but isn’t quite – by which one means the entire post-Baywatch career of David Hasselhoff and to a lesser degree, Shatner (see his seminal Horror at 37,000 Feet).
That’s the tricky thing about hate-watching; to succeed, a tiny, delusional part of those responsible must cling to the hope that they’ve made something good.
So, high hopes for Allison Williams in her newest role. She might not have Underwood’s nuclear brightness, but there is something about her that provokes a certain optimism: the mad gleam and keening sincerity of someone desperate to be recognized as a musical star. Let the hollow laughter begin.