The other day on the french public radio website, I was listening to a french scholar named Severine Barthes who suggested that it was a typical french thing to rave about one or two series like Mad Men while rejecting the idea of being into TV series as a whole.
According to her, in America people don’t set cultural (and class) barriers between shows which are considered intelligent and those which are more related to « soap opera » format. This strikes me as I struggle to work out if I should consider my thirst for every new ‘Suits’ episode as a guilty pleasure or not. It’s obvious that there is not much at stake as far as the art of filming is concerned, neither can the characters be considered as particularly deep and profound.
The secret of a young advocate named Mike drives most of the narrative of the show, in a way that sometimes feels a bit over the top. That said, I can’t argue with the fact that the idea simply works for me: a bit of braging, joking, easyness much like Entourage, accompanied with insight about the cases of a lawyer office refered to as « The Firm ». Moreover, as ‘How to make it america’, ‘Mad Men’, ‘Entourage’ and other shows tend to make abusive use of the obvious coolness in the creative industries they are depicting, there is a certain pleasure in watching characters almost entirely dedicated to their work – whilst at the same time struggling with this very idea. A modern and relevant topic to make the show appealing.