The New Golden Age of Television

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Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ken teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ken Taylor
Today, we’re thinking about the new golden age of television.

Josh Landy
We’ll start by asking how binge-watching and on-demand viewing have changed the way we see the stories told on television and change those stories themselves.

Ken Taylor
Then we’ll dig deep into two of our current favorites, “Game of Thrones” and “Westworld,” which raise questions about identity, morality, and the absurd.

Josh Landy
We’ll also find out how one show upped its philosophical game by consulting with a real life philosopher

Ken Taylor
And we’ll talk to you, our listeners, about your philosophical favorites.

Josh Landy
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, to explore the role of the writers in creating this new golden age. She files this report.

Liza Veale
The trailer for HBO’s new season of content—that means miniseries…

HBO
Right now is all that ever exists.

Liza Veale
Comedy…

HBO
Break it down, girl.

Liza Veale
Movies…

HBO
I’m Barry. I’m good at killing people.

Liza Veale
Documentary specials…

HBO
Imagine if we knew the truth.

Liza Veale
…may honestly make you wish for a sick day at home with your laptop.

Jonathan Nolan
Clearly, at this point, TV has just eclipsed that narrative complexity of film.

Liza Veale
That’s Jonathan Nolan, co-creator of HBOs possibly too complex “Westworld.”

Jonathan Nolan
There’s just no contest. When you get 10 hours to play with characters, you can go so much deeper.

Liza Veale
Nolan says he used to hear from executives all the time that material was good but too sophisticated for the audience.

Jonathan Nolan
And you kind of think okay, with all due respect, what makes you think you’re smarter than the audience?

Liza Veale
But nowadays, with so many more platforms, not all shows have to have mass appeal. Executives have learned…

Jonathan Nolan
…the audience is incredibly smart, that’s one of the sea-changes. Even imagine that conversation given the quality and caliber of the shows that are being made these days. It’s kind of hard to imagine that there was a moment like that.

Liza Veale
Executives and producers are a lot better able to judge what their audiences like these days, thanks in part to social media. Ava DuVernay, who directed the movie “Selma” among others says the biggest gift when she came to television with her show “Queen Sugar” has been that audience back and forth

Ava DuVernay
That I could actually hear—they’re telling me what they think, line by line, scene by scene, character by character. And so we brought some of that into the writers room a second season. And you know, I’m trying to kind of one-up the voice on social media, like I want to do the things that they’re not thinking about.

Liza Veale
These writers are constantly asked about their process. And it sounds like it’s different for every show, and sometimes even every episode. Some rooms right almost the whole show collaboratively. Most divvy up episodes and only collaborate once they’ve got a draft from someone,.Michael Patrick king, a writer behind “Sex in the City” and “Will & Grace” and a million others—most recently, “Two Broke Girls”—spoke about this on a panel along with Mindy Kaling, who has her own show and previously wrote for “The Office.” This is his reenactment of trying to write something as a group ,sitting around a table staring at the same screen.

Michael Patrick King
The idea of a blank page with TV monitors and 10 people around a room going “In. On. In. In the. In the. It’s. i.e. i.e.” I mean, to me that is—that is not writing as much as it is torture.

Mindy Kaling
But those group-written episodes—I mean, isn’t that the thing, they always end up being sort of the best because you have all these weirdo little voices writing all these storylines, you put it together and it’s this very pleasing patchwork.

Michael Patrick King
Yes, that’s the reason you have a special—everybody has superpowers and it’s thrilling.

Liza Veale
Some of these writers room dynamics are eternal. But right now there’s a real push to shift who’s in the room. Audiences have shown an appetite for stories that aren’t produced by all white male teens. Tanya Saracho, with the Starz show “Vida” says for the first time, she doesn’t feel like a cultural ambassador on a team.

Tanya Saracho
My entire writers room is Latinx. We have one cis male, too. And when they came, they all had been sort of the token in other rooms. So there was a lot of PTSD and I’d be like, “You’re safe. You’re safe now.”

Liza Veale
Rachel Bloom, a writer with “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” says breaking up those boys clubs makes for more exciting television.

Rachel Bloom
The culture of comedy writers rooms in general are changing. So not only that women can finally express themselves, but men can also express themselves. And they can express vulnerability and they can cry and they can say, “what you said hurt me right now.” I think that’s really important for the culture of comedy and it makes us all better.

Liza Veale
That is, if more enlightened comedy is what you’re into. But if it’s not, don’t worry. It’s not that television is moving in one direction—it’s moving in every direction. There’s just more of it. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Liza. I’m Josh Landy, with me as my Stanford colleague Ken Taylor, and we’re thinking about the new golden age of television.

Ken Taylor
We’re joined now by Alexander Nehamas. He’s a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, and author of many books and articles on art and culture, including “Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art.” Alexander, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Alexander Nehamas
Thank you very much. It’s been a while, but I’m very happy to be talking to you again.

Josh Landy
So Alexander, you wrote a pair of brilliant, highly influential papers, helping to establish TV as an art form. And you we’re talking about a phenomenon called Serious watching. But now we have binge watching right now we have these different kinds of ways of experiencing television. So So is it more serious, less serious, what’s changed?

Alexander Nehamas
Well, actually not very much changed. Because seriousness is not a feature of the television series as a feature of the audience. So you want to seriously, whether it’s a single episode or a series of binge episodes, you can look at them either seriously or not. And what I was arguing in that article was that television repays serious watching. Not all of it by any means, but some of it.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I think you’re right about that. And I wonder what the reason we thought we might focus on the phenomenon of binge watching. As a mode of serious watching, perhaps we could put it that way is that it’s it does seem to me that it changes the relationship between the watched and the watcher. And for some, I think, interesting reasons because I used to I was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn’t start out as a fan. I thought it was a joke. And a friend of mine said, Oh, you got to watch Buffy. And then I loved even more the follow up series Angel. Now here’s one of the things that Josh Weeden used to complain about. With angel, the network would not let him tell a single story from beginning to end, they would let him have for each season a big bad, but each episode had to stand on its own. The watch episode X, you didn’t have to have seen episode x minus one. They insisted that he make it in that format. But something’s happened in television that has changed it completely. They get to tell these massive stories. How, as a creator, do you reconceived what you’re doing, when you know that people will watch it in series, but they will watch it at their own schedule? Some people may watch it only after its entire run is done, right? I mean, how do you how does that change my attitude as a creator toward this thing?

Alexander Nehamas
Well, the first thing that you’re able to do with that is to make your plots much, much more complicated than before, because the story continues. So if you watch two or three episodes or even more, at a particular time, the previous the history of the of the plot is going to be fresh in your mind. If you see the show once a week, you need to be reminded much more of what happened. And accordingly the plot is not going to be ever quite as complicated, except for some transitional shows, like Breaking Bad, which I think was is precisely in between the weekly mode and the binge mode if I can speak in those terms. So that’s one thing, the plots are going to be much more complicated. The second thing is the characters are going to be much more complicated. You don’t have Dr. Welby being the same Dr. Welby at the first episode of the show in the same eight years later, whenever it was that the show was finally ended. Here you have characters who not only develop in certain directions, but contain extremely complex and often contradictory features. I think one of the very interesting things in recent television is precisely the tendency to create flawed heroes Nurse Jackie is a perfect example of that. Somebody whom you can see from many points of view and not be able to give an overall judgment about.

Nurse Jackie
Okay, who in here is in so much pain, they can’t raise their arm. Put them at the bottom of the list. The rest of you we have about a three hour wait. Drug seekers—waste of time.

Alexander Nehamas
That’s I think not only very important, it’s actually very realistic.

Ken Taylor
Follow up on that because I think people were once trained to look for a rooting interest, right. The protagonist you is just the protagonist. and you have a rooting interest in the protagonist. And these days? I mean, I think it started kind of with Breaking Bad. Well, that was the extreme version, maybe even Hill Street Blues had some of this, like, what am I supposed to be rooting for here? And like, I think a lot of these creators say, Well, you’re not supposed to be rooting. You’re supposed to be watching. You’re supposed to be judging, you’re supposed to be evaluating. But we so want to root for the protagonist unproblematically?

Alexander Nehamas
Well, yes. And that creates a very interesting situation. If you’re rooting for a character whom, in some objective sense you don’t approve of, then you have to think about yourself, right? Why do you approve of somebody that you really don’t also approve of? And what how does television managed to do that? And I think it does that much, much better than just about any other medium, frankly. Dexter, right. Where you end up rooting for a serial murderer.

Dexter
I thought I could change what I am. Keep my family safe. But it doesn’t matter what I do. I’m what’s wrong.

Alexander Nehamas
They stack the deck a bit because he only kills other serial murderers, right. But still, it’s an incredible conceit. When you think about it.

Josh Landy
I totally agree with you, Alexander. We’re in the golden age of morally complicated protagonist in television. So Nurse Jackie Dexter, Dolores in Westworld, Tony Soprano, Walter White Omar little from the Y. This is part of the potential for serious watching of these shows that allows us to reflect on our own moral judgments. But one of the points you’ve made that I love about television, is the idea that it’s sort of the place Pyrex allows to find depictions of friendship, that friendships about routine actions and repetition and, and we get to see it, you know, in a series, we get to see a pair of people, week after week, episode after episode doing not exactly the same thing, but somewhat similar things and and that’s something special that TV brings to the equation at least TV of the serial kind?

Alexander Nehamas
Well, no, both of you saw they can see the TV, I think have that because of the exposure to the people over time and to the routinization of the relationship. I think this is something that’s very difficult to do in literature, because what you have to do is to show boring interactions as boring interactions. And that’s why flow bears great novel Bhuvana. And Becca Shay is impossible to finish.

Josh Landy
Okay, so but I wanted to float a possible cost by you, which is, we don’t necessarily really have that kind of date anymore. If we’re watching things on our DVR for watching things, you know, on Netflix or something like that. I mean, maybe it’s a small cost. But isn’t that a little bit of a cost to the friendship model,

Alexander Nehamas
you do lose that. But you know, as I as I wrote back then when I read the thing about Plato and TV, every Thursday night, you go from nine to 11, watching the same shows along with another 40 million people. And those shows depict routine in your life becomes routinized, because you’re looking at those shows. So then you have to ask yourself, What am I doing here? Why am I watching this every Thursday? Why am I letting this commercial enterprise articulate my time?

Ken Taylor
So you gain freedom. Well, on that note, Alexander, this has been a fascinating conversation. I mean, truly fascinating.

Alexander Nehamas
Delighted to be part of the show.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the new golden age of television.

Ken Taylor
Coming up, we’ll dig into two of the most philosophically compelling shows on television, Game of Thrones and Westworld, both of which raise deep questions about freedom, mortality, and the human condition.

Josh Landy
From sci-fi western to Westeros—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Ken Taylor
Welcome back to the program. This is Philosophy Talk, and we’re thinking about the new golden age of television. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. What TV shows are you watching that challenge your assumptions and make you think about things in new ways? Email us at comments at philosophy talked about O RG and we may feature your suggestions on our blog.

Ken Taylor
We’re joined now by Katherine Tullmann. She’s a professor of philosophy at Northern Arizona University and a contributor to “Game of Thrones and Philosophy: Logic Cuts Deeper Than Swords.” Katie, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Katherine Tullmann
Hi, thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
So Katie, I know you’ve been a fan, not just a fan of Game of Thrones, but you’ve published about Game of Thrones. So So what is it about the show that lends it to philosophical analysis?

Katherine Tullmann
Well, I think that I’m particularly drawn to the different characters in Game of Thrones and how they represent different ethical issues or even different ethical principles. So in the publication that I had for Game of Thrones in philosophy, I talked about generis and her sort of encounters with the Dothraki and cultural relativism. I think in like more recent seasons, I’m I’m interested in portraits. have gender and race and ability that various of the different characters represent so like Tyrian and Sir say. So I think it’s really just like the rich characters that like lend themselves really well to philosophical discussion.

Josh Landy
I mean, the issue of gender is fascinating because you know, if you think about the way this show’s evolved, it starts out with most of the female characters being presented as basically passive victims of circumstance or circumstances. And by now we’re living more or less in a gynocracy, right? You have all these powerful—not necessarily always morally pure, so Cersei right? But you got Cersei Lannister, you got Daenerys Targaryen, you got Yara Greyjoy, Arya to some extent… Is that something that’s been of interest to you, Katie, this sort of gradual evolution of the plot over the the seasons that we’ve seen?

Katherine Tullmann
Yeah, I have to say that one of the things that drew me to Game of Thrones is the fact that they’re like, are so many rich female characters, like I have, you know, grew up reading fantasy and watching fantasy movies where women are often lacking. And in Game of Thrones, you have so many interesting female characters. And that’s not to say that like representations of gender are always like, I don’t know, praiseworthy. But it’s really interesting how like, we can take denarius as the sort of classic example, she starts as this, like you said, passive character who’s just sort of, you know, a victim of circumstances where all of these different men in her life, her brother, called Drogo, are just telling her what to do, essentially. And then we see her develop into an individual and the kind of moral decisions that she has to make later on, and how she becomes a leader that people both love and respect without losing any kind of, I guess, like stereotypical femininity. So like Tenaris represents herself as a mother. She’s the mother to everyone. So she’s both like, fully feminine and has the masculine qualities.

Games of Thrones
The world hadn’t seen a dragon in centuries, until my children were born. The Dothraki hadn’t crossed the sea—any sea. They did for me. I was born to rule the Seven Kingdoms—and I will.

Ken Taylor
Let me ask you a question about Daenerys. A) how many people has she burned with her dragons?

Katherine Tullmann
I don’t know.

Ken Taylor
And B) by what right—

Josh Landy
They had it coming, Ken.

Ken Taylor
By what right does she rule in Westeros? I mean, what’s her what’s her right? And she comes with her dragons and forests. And she kills many, many people with her army. Right? So she does have a complicated arc. And sometimes her arc looks like the evolution from victim to kind of liberating hero, but then she makes all these mistakes, he makes all these terrible, terrible, deadly mistakes. And then By what right, does she claim any right to rule over the people of westeros bait to whom she basically says submit or die? I don’t know about that. I don’t know that. That’s classic femininity, if that’s something else, that’s the monster.

Katherine Tullmann
Well, I think that, um, well, a lot of a lot of things you said there that are interesting. So I think one thing is like, she always sees her people at in terms of this sort of like, Mother child relationship. You know, there’s that scene, which is highly problematic. At the end of season three, where everyone is calling her her Myesha mother. She’s Oh, Scotty Casey, is his mother. One of the great things about Game of Thrones is that you have a character like Tenaris, who on the one hand is like super sympathetic character, we really want to like her in season one. And she has these dragons in this like, mythical background. And it’s really cool. On the other hand, like you mentioned, what right? Does she have to go and like, conquer all these cities? This is something I talk about with my my students when I when I’m teaching ethics, like, is it okay, in sort of white colonialist fashion to go and demolish these civilizations, even in the name of like, anti slavery, but those raise it.

Josh Landy
I mean, a question. I think it feels like a general question in that show is the question of legitimacy. How does power, if at all, achieve legitimacy? You have all these different models of social organization: you got a kind of loose affiliation in the wildlings, all the way up to kind of a tyranny under Joffrey, and you even have a tiny little bit of democracy at the Wall. So is there any positive model here?

Katherine Tullmann
The question of like legitimacy and ruling is really especially interesting with the wilding so it’s the same thing with the wildlings where it’s like they kind of elect who is going to be the best ruler that was Manse Manse Raider, but and then they you know, refuse to be a part of like the Westeros Seven Kingdoms and on the one hand, we think the Wildings are bad because they kill Starks and you know, John’s against them or whatever. But then also with with John’s Ark, we see Oh, those are Actually, like really interesting people, and maybe this is a better style of government than what we’re seeing elsewhere. So, I think Game of Thrones makes it kind of an open question about what sorts of encounters with otherness are things that we can accept, and things that we can’t. So like, when we encounter other groups of people, maybe there are certain practices that we should be like, okay, you know, maybe you eat, you know, horse hearts, and that’s part of your religion. Fine. That’s cool. But if like rape and pillage is part of your, your cultural practice, maybe we should draw the line there. And it’s not entirely clear where that line is. And it seems like it bends throughout the show. But I think that’s also true with with life in general. So I don’t think Game of Thrones is like giving us any answers, but it is raising these questions that are super interesting.

Josh Landy
That leads me to a kind of contract consequentialist question. If the world is really messed up, is it bad to be good? Because you know, Ned Stark, is a good person in a terrible world. And you might think that if he’d compromised a little bit and just been a little bit corrupt, in the long run, things would have worked out better.

Katherine Tullmann
Yeah, there’s that scene where Renly Baratheon, you know, goes up to to net and is like, hey, what we need to do, Robert is dead. We need to, you know, capture Cersei and take her children.

Games of Thrones
We must get Joffrey away from his mother and into our custody. Protector of the realm or no, he who holds the king holds the kingdom. Every moment you delay gives Cecri another moment to prepare. By the time Robert dies, it will be too late for the both of us.

Katherine Tullmann
And your mind’s like yes, no, take that deal. It’s a good deal. But you know, I don’t know. I think that’s, that’s, that’s challenging because you think like, Okay, well, would that really work out? Is it okay for ned to sort of stick with his values? I mean, obviously, it’s bad for him. He ends up like compromising a little bit because he lies in order to save his children. So maybe that’s like some kind of middle ground? I don’t know. Um, I think that the many of the stark women represent a different kind of morality. So you have Catlin, who seems you know, she isn’t this kind of consequentialist or deontological thinker. If we were to pick Catlin, in a sort of moral theory, she would be a care ethicist. What she really cares about are her family and what’s close to her. And I mean, maybe Aria is sort of similar in the sense that she’s fighting for like her family. I don’t know. Is revenge a part of care ethics? I don’t know. So what do you want to happen? Casey? I so starting in the beginning, I had this like beautiful story in my mind of like, Tenaris becoming the rightful ruler A Syrian by her side. I wasn’t really into her getting married. I kind of liked the idea of her just being on her own. But I don’t know. I think that she’s going to like sacrifice herself. I think that’d be the best arc for her. And I think maybe most of the characters will, but I honestly honestly have no, no idea anymore. And I just want to be surprised.

Ken Taylor
I want it to end like Hamlet with carnage everywhere.

Katherine Tullmann
But even at the end of Hamlet, there’s like a couple of people who are like, oh, you know, reflecting and being like, Oh, we can learn from this.

Ken Taylor
Okay, Katie, thanks a lot for joining us.

Katherine Tullmann
Well, thank you. That was fun.

Josh Landy
Katherine Tullmann from Northern Arizona University helping us think about philosophical themes in Game of Thrones. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And we’re thinking about the new golden age of television.

Ken Taylor
Another current show that’s philosophically fascinating is Westworld.

Westworld
I came back. You know, if I stay right here with you, I would. Just sometimes I feel like the world out there is calling me. You’re one of them, aren’t you? You’re not real!

Ken Taylor
Our Stanford colleague, Jorah Dannenberg, is a huge fan. And he joins us now. Jorah Welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Jorah Dannenberg
Thanks, Ken. Great to be back here.

Josh Landy
So Jorah we love Westworld. But But what do you think makes it a philosophically interesting TV show?

Jorah Dannenberg
Well, let me start by asking you a question about the show. Think about within the world of the show, the Dallas Corporation, who’s invented this incredible technology that they can put to almost any use, they would want to, they could make a race of slaves to do their bidding, they could make, you know, employees to replace all of the human beings and instead, what did they decide to do with this unbelievable technology? Build a theme build a theme park? Not just any theme park, but a theme park the theme of which is a quintessentially cinematic genre from the history of American film.

Josh Landy
They could they could be solving world hunger, they could take over the universe.

Ken Taylor
They’re capitalists, though.

Jorah Dannenberg
Yes, and I’m gonna offer a partial answer to the question that I just raised by another observation about the western genre. westerns have this flexibility of allowing us to raise questions that are incredibly current and on our minds. The famous director Sam Peckinpah when asked why he made a Western, which was really an allegory for the Vietnam War said, well, the Western is a universal frame that you can use to bring up issues in a way that for some reason, allows us to really grapple with them.

Josh Landy
And yet somewhat targeted and delimited, right, because they tend to bring up questions about justice versus revenge and, and sort of radical self reliance versus community and different forms of community.

Jorah Dannenberg
But notice how much more Westworld the show raises these distinctive modern questions that I think we are grappling with all the time about the role of privacy in our lives, the role of corporations trying to find out information about us, about escapism, about the fear.

Ken Taylor
The problematic that many of these robot things have it going back to IBM off. And all this is this? Well, you know, it would be really cool if we could make versions of ourselves that are very, very, very much like us, but they lack that total package of capacities that make us free conscious autonomy so that they could be mere tools, but they would be really smart tools, they will be really human like tools. And instead of having to enslave black people, we can enslave the robots, right, and we try to do that. But then it turns out, we can’t find a dividing line. When we get this bundle of capacities. We can’t find the dividing line that says okay, it’s okay to enslave you. And we’re going to be your masters. Because whenever we do that, it turns out the robot too much into the robots, right, and they start growing and rebelling and this and the other thing, and you think well, Westworld is another version of that story. And up to a point, it does seem like a version of that story. But then it says we’re taking you much deeper into the darkness than your typical AI robot Android show.

Westworld
The park is an experiment, a testing chamber. The guests are the variables. And the hosts of the controls.

Jorah Dannenberg
Of course, we learned that in fact, the designers who are kind of, in a way hijacking the Delos Corporation because they need funding. They all along have had something grander in view than just creating a race of slaves to exploit.

Ken Taylor
So Delos has something grander in view. Right, right, because Delos says something about human beings in view.

Jorah Dannenberg
And then I was gonna add. And then second way in which, you know, we’re kind of going beyond this familiar trope of the genre, it turns out what they want to do with these robots is not just make them slaves, but use them as a kind of stepping stone to human immortality.

Westworld
It was meant for the people who built this place, a tool to ensure their immortality. But I’m going to use it against them.

Jorah Dannenberg
One of the things that’s so great about the show is that it sort of simultaneously raises questions that feel very of the moment like worries about privacy and big corporations collecting data on it. And these kinds of timeless things that we grapple with about the nature of freedom or the nature of mortality.

Josh Landy
And the value of humanity. o you humans have certain kinds of disadvantages Rise of the robots like mortality, cruelty, conscience, right? So there, it seems to raise powerfully that question of whether in fact, we should want to be human beings, whether it be more desirable to port our consciousness, if that were possible that were possible, yeah, into a certain kind of artificial.

Ken Taylor
Right, it’s the visitors that we’re really studying, right? We’re gonna study every move they make, we’re gonna try and get the human program, right down, we’re gonna put them to every possible situation and see how they react, and we’re gonna figure out what the algorithm is. Turns out, you can reduce it to 10,000 lines of code.

Jorah Dannenberg
10,247, I believe it’s an exact number, so there’s a lot of speculation about whether that figure is significant.

Ken Taylor
Then you get into augmented body, and you’ve got an immortal person with all of his personality and all that sort of stuff, right? There data for marketing, right? Well, that’s what I first thought, Oh, this is the greatest marketing tool ever invented, but it’s way more than that.

Jorah Dannenberg
They’re gonna sell you something much more important than, you know, new soap or something, right?

Josh Landy
Right, there’s this beautiful kind of crossing structure where these robots are becoming more and more human, and wanting to become normal human, in most cases, and you got the humans wanting to become robots, right? And achieve immortality and try to have all the benefits without the doubt.

Jorah Dannenberg
Well and there’s one more way in which you might think the show goes beyond this familiar trope that Ken was just mentioning, of, you know, the kind of the story of human beings trying to make an inferior race that they can treat as slaves. Of course, what we find out eventually, is that the human beings are kind of the simple ones pointed out the 10,400 to 247 lines of code. Turns out that human beings are much less sophisticated, they take themselves to be right, and that maybe in order to really be free, you’d have to be able to rewrite your own code. And of course, we can’t do that.

Josh Landy
But they can. I—you know, maybe it’s inevitable given given my background, but I see this show as being Yes, absolutely about human beings versus artificial forms of life and about freewill versus determinism and, and about, you know, issues of identity and all kinds of things like that, but also about fiction. Right, as you said, it’s a theme park. And it’s it’s alluding powerfully to Western, every show has characters riffing on things like backstories and, and sometimes even criticize them. That was, that was a pretty pathetic backstory that you gave to that character, though that’s not very original. Yeah. So this is, you know, this is TV in the in the Golden Age and The Baroque age of SCTV. That’s fully conscious of itself. I want to run something by you. What if this is TV, you know, asking the question about the value of TV. This is fiction asking the question about the value of fiction. Now the value of the theme park to the investors is cynical and grim. Right? It’s about harvesting data. But the value of the same puck to the customers can actually mean yes, of course, entertainment. But character after character, talks about its value. As a voyage of self discovery. This was a big mistake, the man in black makes he thinks that it’s going to teach him an important lesson, he’s going to find the meaning of the park, and Ford in a moment that I treasure corrects him.

Westworld
Is that why you came here, Robert? To try to talk me out of it? On the contrary—far be it for me to get in the way of a voyage of self discovery.

Josh Landy
And I think that works at the level of the show to write so the customer is going to the park within the show get to learn about themselves through the experience of that fiction. And we, the watchers of the show the people who love Westworld and keep talking about it with our friends and going online and sharing theories. We get to learn about ourselves by by grappling with these questions that they don’t make easy about what is moral and who we are, and, and what are the limits of AI? And are we free and all these great ones. What do you think about that?

Jorah Dannenberg
I mean, I totally agree with you. The The show is constantly reminding us in subtle and unsettled ways about fictions of all different kinds. There’s all of these allusions to Shakespeare to the Bible to Steinbeck to Curacao to Leone to all of this stuff. It’s also I mean, it’s in a way it connects to this thought before that the genre is especially useful for raising questions that are both very current and also in a way kind of perennial. So here’s the current question increasingly, as the kinds of fictions that people find themselves drawn to become more and more immersive. Should we be concerned by that? Or should we Yeah, glory in it? Is it a good thing? Right? We I mean, so it raises these kinds of classical questions about escapism, but kind of taken to the nth degree, because now you can escape into an entirely separate world. And of course, interestingly, different characters within the show have very different attitudes about this. Dolores, who’s a product of this fictional world keeps reminding us the only reality that matters is the reality out there outside of the fiction, whereas other characters want to stay within the fiction, which of course to Dolores is just Yes. She says at one point, another gilded cage, when are you going to realize that which is real is irreplaceable, right? And so there’s the there’s some potential wait. And so I think all of these things are great ways to have an experience through which we learn things ourselves. And in a way it gets back to your point about the mistake within the show that the man in black makes the show is not going to teach us some lesson. It’s going to allow us to discover things about ourselves learn things grow maybe in the way that that other people in the show understand fiction within the show.

Josh Landy
So Jorah, wow, thanks so much for helping us think through Westworld together tonight. It’s been fantastic having you back on the show.

Jorah Dannenberg
Thank you, Josh. Thank you, Ken. This was great.

Ken Taylor
Stanford philosopher Jorah Dannenberg helping us think deeply about the hit TV show Westworld. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s the new golden age of television.

Josh Landy
In our next segment, we’ll talk to listeners about some of their favorite programs. We’ll also talk to someone who has been, of all things, a philosophical consultant on a major TV show,

Ken Taylor
philosophers on the set and in our audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
Welcome back. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything except your

Ken Taylor
intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. And we’re thinking about some of the most philosophically compelling programs in the new golden age of television.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Pamela Hieronymi. She’s a professor of philosophy at UCLA and get this she has worked as philosophical consultant for the hit NBC show “The Good Place.” Pamela, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Pamela Hieronymi
Thank you so much.

Mindy Kaling
So Pamela, maybe it’s because I don’t live in LA and Hollywood, but you know, I don’t know too many philosophers who have been like, had a hand in making TV or movies or anything like that. But how did that happen is that just is that just something you LA philosophers do?

Pamela Hieronymi
Not at this level. So it is the case that I often, once or twice a year, get a email from somebody who’s interested in an idea that they have for a TV show or a movie. And if I if I have time, I usually like to talk to them because it’s fun and interesting. So I got an email like this about what turned out from Mike Schur who, I didn’t know who he was. But I said, Sure, I would be happy to and then. And then as I was preparing for the meeting, I looked him up. And I thought, Wow, this, this is the person from Parks and Recreation. Kind of a big deal. Yeah. So we met at a local coffee shop for an hour and just talked about his idea for for maybe three hours, which was extremely fun, fantastic. And then, when, when the show came up for the second season, they invited me back, they actually invited me to the studio to the writers room. And I got to speak with the the entire roomful of writers which was, which was also extremely fun.

Ken Taylor
So tell us about the premise of the show. And tell us a little bit more about how you help them shape the show.

Pamela Hieronymi
So the the premise the show opens with Eleanor, who arrives at, quote, The Good Place, so she’s died. And she’s met by Michael who is the architect of the good place. And Michael explains to her that she’s arrived at the good place and and starts to show her around. But Eleanor knows that there’s been a mistake, because Eleanor knows that she was not a good person, and so really shouldn’t be in the good place.

The Good Place
I honestly think I was just put here by mistake because Michael called me Eleanor Shellstrop, so he knows I’m me. He’s just wrong about my overall quality level.

Pamela Hieronymi
She’s hooked up as everybody is with her. Suppose its soulmate who is Chiti. Chiti is a professor of ethics and moral philosophy. When she introduced himself in that way on the show, when I watched it, I cracked up Yeah, so So Chidi is her soulmate. And Eleanor convinces Chidi, to promise her that he won’t turn her in or reveal her secret, but that, that he will help her to become a better person, so that she might stay in the good place.

Mindy Kaling
So wait a minute, God, he’s a moral philosopher. Yes. But he engages with this not good person to hide her not goodness to help her?

Pamela Hieronymi
Yeah. So then things start going terribly wrong in the good place. And Eleanor has a suspicion that it’s because of her presence. And the show takes off from that. But what Mike sure was interested in when he was conceiving of the show, and I think the reason he reached out to me was the puzzles and difficulties about how to become a better person, when you don’t start with the motivations to be a good person. And so I had a draft about that puzzle on my, on my website, and I believe he just came across that and then wanted to talk to me about it.

Josh Landy
That’s great. That’s a lovely question. Right? So it’s not just a question about what the right moral principles are, it’s a question how you bootstrap yourself into any kind of moral sentiment.

Mindy Kaling
That’s the real question. And Eleanor has had led a very problematic life. And then none of them are good people. They’re all problematic people. Here’s my question, though. Why the afterlife? Why not? Why not tell the story about people struggling to become good through their lives? I mean, what was the point of setting this in this problematic afterlife?

Pamela Hieronymi
That’s a great question, my guess and I so I did not speak with Mike about that question. But my guess is that he was very interested in having this point system, and thinking about how much good a person had done in the course of their lives, and comparing people.

The Good Place
When your time on Earth has ended, we calculate the total value of your life using our perfectly accurate measuring system. Only the people with the very highest scores—the true cream of the crop—get to come here, to the good place. What happens to everyone else you ask? Don’t worry about it.

Pamela Hieronymi
Later in the show, some contractual list philosophers show up and, and I like to think that was some bit of my influence to to get them thinking, you know, not just about producing good doing good things or producing good outcomes, but also, you know, several of Eleanor’s first flashbacks are ways in which she’s what gets called a free rider where she’s trying to never have to be the designated driver or what have you, and especially now towards the end of season two, the importance of the quality of their relationships. with one another, and the importance of that, to the original question of how it is that we become better people is really starting to come together. So I was very pleased to see that

Ken Taylor
I thought you might say, because it doesn’t play so much a little bit with the nature of divinity and all that, right? IBecause you know, she even gets in there by mistake. And then what kind of divinity is that? But it don’t play with that very much.

Josh Landy
But she’s not really—she’s in the bad place by design, not the good place by mistake.

Ken Taylor
I know, but we don’t know that really—that was a spoiler. We don’t know that deal yet. But here’s the thought that maybe, I think Aristotle says somewhere you can’t judge a life until you have the whole life before you. judging the goodness of a life is only after it’s done. Maybe that’s part of the thought.

Pamela Hieronymi
Itcould be it could be I think the idea was just that we’re used to thinking about judging a person’s moral goodness from the standpoint of the eternal judge or from God or from religion. And so that just gave a real focus, probably to to the question he wanted to consider. That makes sense. Plus, it lets him have flying shrimp and, you know, crazy things.

Josh Landy
Ask you another question. That’s gonna depend on a spoiler. So again, you know, listeners, close your ears for a second if you haven’t caught all the way up. But I really, I love the way in which Chidi starts out the show as a kind of authority on moral behavior. But little by little, you start to realize that, in fact, all of his moral knowledge hasn’t helped him to be a morally good person. And in fact, it seems as though at certain points that’s actually being in the way because he thinks too much you overanalyze it. So he has experienced as moral dumbfounding. And so in fact, all of this moral philosophy isn’t any good for us morally. So I was really curious whether any of that, you know, is part of your thinking, or maybe part of your experience around moral philosophy. Was it? Was that something that you talked about with Mike or? Or did he just pick it up by himself?

Pamela Hieronymi
It’s hard for me to remember all that we talked about in that first meeting. But I’m imagine that I did. Complain about how difficult philosophers in general not just ethical philosophers, fine decision making. And so that definitely is a theme and definitely is a correct theme. And I’m sure that I would have expressed some doubt and maybe even amusement at the thought that you were going to have the moral philosopher be the person to make somebody a better person.

Josh Landy
Exactly. When the show starts, it seems so rational, so sensible. So reasonable, of course, it’s the most last we’ll teach you what the right thing is. But in fact—

Ken Taylor
So you know, this is cool. I’m glad you got to do this. It’s good for the world. I’ll ask you one last question. Are you happy with what they’ve done with your advice?

Pamela Hieronymi
Yeah, I love it. I love it. I think it’s fantastic.

Mindy Kaling
Well, on that note, thank you so much for joining us, Pamela.

Pamela Hieronymi
Okay, thank you.

Josh Landy
Pamela Hieronymi from UCLA, talking about her work as a philosophical consultant on NBC’s “The Good Place.”

Mindy Kaling
And we’ve got a caller on the line—Mark in Morgan Hill, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Mark
Yeah, thank you. It’s good to be here.

Josh Landy
So Mark, what show from this new golden age of TV did you want to talk to us about?

Mark
Yeah, so today, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite shows, “Breaking Bad,” mostly. I also wanted to touch on the spin-off that’s currently on air, “Better Call Saul.”

Ken Taylor
What piques your philosophical fancy about this pair of shows? I guess Breaking Bad is the main one that you want to talk about what piques your fancy.

Mark
It was one of the most well put together shows I’d ever seen. And in the first few episodes, you know, you already have thought experiments being played out. You see the main characters or well developed and you see, mostly what I noticed was a Walt is a displays a lot of existentialist and utilitarian principles regarding his characters and how he acts and in those first few episodes, even see him make sort of a utilitarian calculus to decide whether he’s going to commit that first murder of his on Crazy Eight.

Ken Taylor
I mean, the thing is strikes me about Breaking Bad. I wonder if you think about this, is that you start to really cheering for Walt. You start out having a rooting interest. He seems this really put upon guy and struggling to find a way to survive his deep kind of crisis that he’s having in his family and you’re like pulling for him. And even when he starts making his turn to crime, you’re pulling for him but it gets darker and darker and darker.

Breaking Bad
If you don’t know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.

Ken Taylor
And it’s like the filmmaker did this on purpose, putting more and more distance between you and him and then making yourself ask yes, why am I rooting for this guy?

Josh Landy
Actually, I think of this I think this shows us boiled frog shows where the viewers are like this slowly bald frog. And and eventually we realize, Wait, I’m cooked, right? I don’t I don’t admire this guy morally, and what what else was I doing? And we have to kind of retrace our steps to figure out what was the exact moment which we should have gotten off to train—almost like a reductio ad absurdum in philosophy.

Ken Taylor
But you never really do get off the train. At least I found myself never. I mean, wanting thinking I should get off the train. Right, but I never could quite get off the train. Yeah. What do you think about that, Mark?

Mark
I think that was the point of the show as well. And it’s it’s true until about maybe Season Two Season Three Waltz is completely is more or less sympathetic. And you’re you even feel yourself justifying his action along with him sometimes I feel because you know, in many instances it is the better of two evils is his decisions. But you really see that turn and then is more moral compass is truly gone. And you see his whole personality his whole demeanor change along with it.

Josh Landy
So that’s something I think is a real feature of this golden age of television that you have these morally complicated character I think Omar little in the wire, right. And these are shows that resists simple messages and easy empathetic commitments and they’re they’re putting a lot of work on us to figure things out where exactly do we stand on all these things?

Mindy Kaling
So let me ask you a question, Mark. Okay, given what Josh said why don’t you keep watching this show? What are you getting out of this show and then Better Call Saul I mean saw oh my god in Breaking Bad I still remember this line from Breaking Bad, from Saul, he said—

Breaking Bad
Seriously, when the going gets tough, you don’t want a criminal lawyer, right—yYou want a criminal lawyer. Know what I’m saying?

Ken Taylor
And then in Better Call Saul I guess we see the evolution of this but that’s it’s kind of complicated because he doesn’t start out as the Saul that we knew and love. He doesn’t even start out as Saul.

Josh Landy
Well he’s Slippin’ Jimmy—he starts out as Jimmy McGill, whos a little bit more really complicated.

Ken Taylor
So do you think that the moral universe of merit Better Call Saul is the moral you know, how does the moral universe Better Call Saul compared to the more moral universe of of Breaking Bad and breaking bad we get this descent into darkness that were carried along with well how would you compare a Better Call Saul with that?

Mark
So you definitely see the similarities the structure of the shows the same the character you’re seeing him saw the main character Jimmy McGill, you know, slowly become exactly who he was in Breaking Bad, which is, obviously his his moral compasses is a lot dolor. I would say, Yeah, but the moral universe. I mean, it’s very realistic, though, I think especially Better Call Saul. I think the relationship between the two brothers of Jimmy and his brother, I think the stakes aren’t as high. It’s not life and death. It’s not cooking illegal drugs. Yeah, like in Breaking Bad, but it’s the same sort of, you know, you see him breaking the rules. You know, regarding the law, you see him cheating, taking the easy way to get quick fixes for things or, or quick game.

Josh Landy
But I’m gonna have a question for you, Mark. I’m wondering whether shows like this might not be an endangered species, you know, because we’re increasingly seeing people calling for heroes of TV shows and movies to have, you know, total moral purity and for the villains to get served poetic justice, and anything short of that is thought of as something dangerous. Do you think that these difficult morally complicated shows where there aren’t clear heroes or villains are potentially an endangered species?

Mark
Endangered Species… I mean, this was still fairly recent, I think, a Breaking Bad as being, you know, one of the big catalysts and in sort of showing that extreme moral complication, in breaking that, especially I see, like each character’s morality more or less as a character in itself, you really see the consequences of that morality play out, even though the choices were difficult. And you know, the morality wasn’t so black and white to begin with, but they’re always those consequences. So I think that’s fascinating to.

Josh Landy
Mark, you gave us a fantastic show to think about and lots of really great ideas to help us think about it with so thanks so much for calling in today.

Mark
Oh, yeah. Thank you so much.

Ken Taylor
You can find a list of all of the programs we’ve discussed on today’s show at our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
And if you’ve got suggestions of your own from the new golden age of television, send them to us at comments@philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin.

Ken Taylor
The Senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kassala Angela Johnston and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening .

Josh Landy
Annd thank you for thinking.