For the past few months I've been more fatigued than usual thanks to the CAR-T treatment. So I've been drowsily watching lots of prestige TV on HBO, which I accidentally subscribed to just before I went to City of Hope.
First I watched five seasons of The Wire. Then three seasons of Deadwood. Then eight seasons of Game of Thrones. Then five seasons of Boardwalk Empire. And now, for some reason, I've started watching a series called Warrior.
For a while now I've been trying to figure out what annoying trait ties them all together, and I think I finally have. It's not violence. Sure, a whole lot of people suffer a whole lot of bloody deaths in all of them, but that's because I chose violent shows in the first place. It comes with the territory.
No, the answer is: whorehouses. Endless, constant whorehouses and endless, constant, meaningless fucking in whorehouses and like environs. It's tiresome as hell, and it doesn't come with the territory. There's no special reason that just because a show is edgy and brutal it needs to feature whorehouses at all, let alone three or four times an hour.
Am I just being naive? Obviously lots of people enjoy sex and nudity on TV, and whorehouses are a handy way of getting it on screen. But that doesn't seem like the whole story. The sheer volume of whorehouse-mongering belies it. The showrunners want ten times more of it than any reasonable script can handle.
So go ahead. School me. What's up with this?
Right now the random picture at the top of Kevin's blog is the Bradford House in Placenta. Two story Queen Ann Victorian (lower white, upper gray-blue), all by itself, surrounded by grass.
https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/blog_oc_header_bradford_house-1.jpg
And right below it, the blog post title in bold:
HBO sure does like whorehouses
So for a moment, I thought it *was* a whorehouse!
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Ever since I saw the Game of Throne sketch on SNL, in which they suggest the co-writer was a thirteen year old boy, I haven't been able to take any of those scenes on an HBO show seriously.
But it's the same thing with vomiting. A lot of the tactics they would use in the past to shock the audience has gone, which is why in every show has a vomiting scene in it. So it's the same with nudity. An excuse to put it up on the screen without having to explain why.
In coming months, I'm expecting scenes of vomiting while nude. Never been done before! That's how you capture the eyeballs. Transgressive!
Lol!
Not so! I have done it before, my very own self (I forgot to make a selfie video of it, though, so maybe it doesn't count).
There's a genre of Japanese porn for that.
It's been a while since I watched "The Wire" but I don't remember a lot of whorehouses.
Me neither. Season 1 has a strip club, and Season 2 centers on trafficked women, but nothing as blatant as Game of Thrones.
Season 2 is probably the best of the series, and it had a trafficked women theme as you say, but other than that I don't remember prostitution as being a particular theme of any of the other seasons.
As for Deadwood, frontier prostitution would certainly go with the territory, but I don't remember it being a key thematic point.
I came here to make The Wire comment as well. But I didn't think Season 2 was the best.
There is one section of a season 2 episode in which McNulty visits a brothel in an undercover capacity and much humor is extracted from his dedication to pretending to be a John.
That's all I recall about prostitution in "The Wire".
I go back and forth about which is the best season. Seasons 1, 2, and 4 are equally great for different reasons. I was less enthusiastic about seasons 3 and 5.
Isn't this exactly Kevin's point? Sex scenes EVEN THOUGH they have no relevance to the story.
yeah, i came to post the same comment. the others (exluding warriors which i haven't seen) are pretty gratuitous about it. and i assume the answer is pretty simple: lots of people like nudity and hbo can get away with it in their "prestige" dramas without being called trashy. it's serious art!
Me too. Loved it Btw.
Don’t forget season 1 of WestWorld. They’ve got one too.
It's a crime against humanity they cancelled Westworld at just the point I was really genuinely interested to see what the next part was going to be like.
My guess they had no idea where to go with it.
I was absolutely anticipating the whole thing would end with Anthony Hopkins taking off a headset revealing the whole thing to be a simulation and saying, Well, I guess I won't do that.
Well, I loved Boardwalk Empire and The Wire.
Saw one episode of Deadwood and felt fucking mental.
Can't watch Game of Thrones because I've read all the books and I know what it's supposed to look like and the pictures I've seen don't look like that. Same for the Lord of the Rings movies. I know I'm right, I know they're wrong, can't watch them.
No whorehouses in The Righteous Gemstones.
Or Nora from Queens. (Awkwafina got the Oscar for Shang Chi, but they gave it to her for Nora From Queens).
No hookers at all in Crikey It's the Irwins! Probably. Never actually seen it.
Just saw Kung Fu Panda is leaving, and if you haven't seen it I really do recommend it.
Does Avatar the Way of Water improve after the first half hour? Because that's as far as I got. I didn't like the main character in the first movie, he's worse in this one.
The first couple seasons of Game of Thrones do seem to spend more time in the Whorehouses than really necessary, they were part of the plot but there were definitely some unnecessary scenes. I don’t remember Whorehouses featuring in The Wire.
In Deadwood and Warrior Whorehouses definitely are period accurate. They are set in roughly the same era in places with a lot of single men and few women. The early episodes of Warrior are a little more gratuitous than is necessary. But the thing to remember is it started as a show on Cinemax so its very on brand, it was basically picking up after Banshee and Strike Back in their run of that type of show.
Sometimes sex is a crucial plot element. Cersei and Jaime's incest was central to everything that went down in GOT. But the unending whorehouse scenes were not, and the books had nothing like that beyond a vague acknowledgement that the character Littlefinger owned the main brothel, probably noted to show readers he was a sleazy guy before we got to know him.
avatar does not improve. it is a very bad movie.
Read all the GoT books too. The first 2 or maybe 3 seasons were excellent portrayals. After that it went south hard. Read all the LoTs and loved the movies. Very faithful.
I hadn't yet watched any of the LotR episodes yet, but your comment is encouraging. I agree with you on GoT/ASOIAF. The diversions from the books' storyline became increasingly radical and, in my opinion, didn't do much good. Roz, the careerist 'ho who moved to The Big City? No. Just no.
No whorehouses in the Righteous Gemstones? The whole damn thing is about whoring and debauchery. Just whoring and debauchery in the NAME OF OUR LORD JEBUS!
Watched a couple of seasons of Boardwalk Empire, then it ran out of gas.
Watched a couple of seasons of GoT, then it ran out of gas.
Watched and loved all of the White Lotus. Yes, it has whores, if not whorehouses.
But actual brothels aren't the Gemstone style, unless they went in with tv cameras to make a special about saving the fallen and turning it into a church and fallen woman theme park.
Well considering the settings of 3 of those 4 shows (I haven't seen The Wire and can't speak to it, but it doesn't seem like it would have whorehouses... and somebody else mentioned they don't remember any either)...
It shouldn't be surprising to you.
Deadwood is set in a time/place where brothels were definitely a significant thing.
Game of Thrones is set in a time/place that's based on a real time/place where brothels were a thing.
Boardwalk Empire is the only one where maybe it's a bit out there, but it's about mob stuff done by guy(s) who run bars during the 1920s and 1930s, so it's not really a stretch and may be historical for all I know. This is the era that gave us the height of nudity in the burlesque dancing scene, after all. This was Josephine Baker's time.
I don't recall one brothel from the Game of Thrones books, though there is plenty of sex otherwise.
(and if there is a brothel in there somewhere it's really incidental).
Yes. Little finger owned one.
There were lots of brothels in ASOIAF. Chatayas, all of Littlefinger's vast brothel network, the many brothels frequented by Tyrion in Essos, the courtesans and brothels of Braavos where Arya knew the women who plied their trade, ditto for Meereen, ... the list goes on and on. And do not forget all the brothels where Robert Baratheon "recreated" and often, hid out during "Robert's Rebellion" and the offspring that resulted.
The books made the HBO series look chaste. I'm surprised you missed all of that. It was integral to the plotlines, not just titillation.
That's right, you're completely right about that.
Now I have to worry about my memory.
King's Landing has Littlefinger's brothel and Chattaya's, the latter of which is a significant plot point, as it provides the secret passage that Tyrion uses to get to his own lady of the night, Shae.
Stoney Sept has the Peach, where Gendry likely encountered his half-sister, though they didn't recognize each other.
Braavos has dozens of brothels. Sam Tarly gets into a fight with a deserter in one of them, and the deserter is later killed by Arya.
I could go on. Brothels are everywhere in the GoT books, and some of them are important to the plot. You might want to read the books more closely - you are missing a lot.
You and Salamander are right and I don't know why my mind completely elided all that until you reminded me.
Is it because they're not made a big deal out of as brothels but are there as settings for other kinds of plot development?
Or I may just have found my own rose colored beer goggles.
The brothels are there, but as a background-- we don't really spend a lot of time in them.
As opposed to the main characters...
but the fact that brothels are a real and common thing in a time/place that doesn't require them to be featured in a tv show set there. there are lots of supermakets and firehouses but most movies don't have supermarket or firehouse scenes.
Except that they're also part of the plot? The supermarkets and firehouses (or their Deadwood or Game of Thrones equivalents) aren't part of the plot, although I suppose you could argue that some other commerce is integral to the Deadwood plot and it does actually show up in the show.
Not a whole lot of whore houses in "Six Feet Under", a really great show with an actual outstanding series ending episode. A few whore houses in the Sopranos, but a whole lot of strip joint footage, since the "Bada Bing" is one of their hangouts. An outstanding show, the one that launched prestige TV on Cable.
8 seasons of GOT? Great through season 6, spotty to downright lousy in season 7-8, with some real great moments (too few).
I don't know that it's so much to tickle the pruriemce of the writers so much as it is a
cheapass get-out-of jail-for-free card for underpaid scriptwriters
"Hey, what just happened does not make sense on any level."
"Yeah, but check the set of cans on that babe."
It's depressing how many time the audience falls for that bit. More depressing is the number of times the audience has fallen for it, even after the pattern has been pointed out to them, repeatedly, umlypty-odd times already, and they still don't give a damn.
Someone trying to figure out "The Phantom Menace" reasoned that the only thing that George Lucas knew anymore was meetings, and so the movie was full of meetings and negotiations.
Likewise HBO, except all they must seem to do is hang around with whores.
In the writers room.
What's up is that you binged two decades worth of TV in a week and a half. Everything looks like there's a lot of it.
Didn’t HBO have a show called “The Deuce” that was pretty much set in a whorehouse?
It was actually a decent look at the humanity in the NYC sex working scene in the 1970s, I thought.
Yes, and it's an excellent show. Every one of the prostitutes is a 3-dimensional character with interesting motivations. One of them commits suicide late in the show, and I had to hit "pause" for a moment to compose myself. Understand, I'm an enginerd and not the most sensitive guy in most respects.
The Deuce has the same superpower that The Wire had, that of making you care about and understand a wide array of characters.
Theory:
1) HBO thinks that female nudity sells. In Felix Gilette's book, he mentioned that they have codewords to tell creators, "more boobs" - I forgot the specific term but it was something like "cable tv edge."
2) HBO's female stars rarely want to do nude scenes.
3) HBO can find extras to do nude scenes in orgy/brothel/background scenes.
Dead on, I think.
Adding 4) the writers for these shows are mostly male, and thus boobs, sex, and violence.
5) the producers and execs a HBO are also mostly male.
This also happens to be the reason I don't watch HBO. Prestige television is an oxymoron, it's just big budget television without "sensitive" advertisers.
I can only speak for the first two on your list Kevin since I haven't seen the others but, with that:
The Wire: I don't actually recall a whorehouse being a significant mise en scène for any important action. Diners, cribs both dingy & high end, po-lice stations, dive bars, school rooms, docks & containers, stash houses, newsrooms, drug corners, storefront businesses, city hall, law offices, courtrooms, jails, churches, drug dens, projects & their courtyards--pretty much every urban setting imaginable, yes.
But whorehouses? Not so much. I'm sure there were a few scattered here and there. But relative to, say, The Sopranos (the daddy of "prestige" cable shows), there's nothing that, as it were, sticks out in memory.
Deadwood: Well, yes, the entire thing is practically set in one or two whorehouses. So far as I can tell, these are a very central part of Deadwood's definition of the State of Nature, out of which the "civilization" of the Western frontier, um, laboriously sprang (I know how that sounds, for those who remember Ian McShane's Shakespearean monlogues). To expect otherwise would be like expecting Greek tragedy or comedy not to be set in the public precincts of a polis.
The term that's used for it is "sexposition". This was especially true in the first couple seasons of "Game of Thrones" -- you can have long monologues laying out detailed plot points that the audience would otherwise get bored with if you have naked women in the background. Or at least that's the theory I've heard more than one TV critic expound.
The audience you reference is male. Women can watch endless hours of exposition and plot development without needing a car chase, explosion, or naked woman every 15 minutes.
Men are more likely to be paying the cable bill and choosing the service, so the content caters to them.
Huh. I guess I was the only one who found it offensive to call it anything other than a brothel.
But to your point, it's always been sex, drugs, and violence.
I don't recall any houses of ill repute in "Breaking Bad" but maybe I was high on meth.
It was a drive -thru.
https://youtu.be/7Rw0A8jE18s
What this conversation is missing is the fact that the writers have spent many (happy?) hours in whorehouses...as the truism dictates, "Write about what you know!"
Of course, in contemporary America this can not even be said in jest...true though it may be. (in the 50's and 60's in the deep South there were whore houses and...whores. I do not see this as the deep insult that most people now append to it. It was an occupation....(with a time limit to be certain, but so did carpenters and other heavy lift trades of that period).
I thought I might add an adult edge to the commentary...(heck, I am certain there are whorehouses in LA at this moment...not that many to be sure, everything is freelance...but certainly they must exist...they do most places. I don't do much criminal work but while waiting for my minor this or that being called...I've seen this being prosecuted). Best Wishes, Traveller
For what it's worth, one of the popular songs of the 1970s was ZZ Top's "LaGrange", which was all about "the best little whorehouse in Texas." Which also was celebrated as a musical.
Americans seemed to love brothels ... at arm's length.
Random sex is a lazy way for a show to seem edgy. Just like saying 'fuck'. It's how writers from the upper middle class show that they are 'street'. Deadwood was ridiculous. 'The Great' has devolved into a fuck-fest both in use of the word and the act. The only interesting thing about it is when you think of some ivy school graduate with a BA writing this garbage in so that they seem edgy and cool, or to just fill in space between plot points.
As someone who has worked among ex-convicts, even the street does not talk like this.
They are not trying to "seem edgy" but to get lots of men to watch them. Notice that there are almost no women in this comments thread either.
Exactly. Men drive the purchase of cable/steaming services so the content caters to them.
Are you entirely sure about that?
Thank you for bringing up the eff thing. I have grown so tired of it; variations on the word have to appear multiple times in every sentence, it seems. As far as I can tell, only PBS has been immune.
But then again, PBS is known for showing the real thing. We've got to watch birds, alligators, whales, insects, deer, goats, even elephants, "doing it." (Believe me, once you've seen a bull elephant in musth...
Massively cringe inducing when Jean-Luc Picard said 'fuck' a couple times in Picard on Paramount.
I haven't seen the reboot, bit if New Picard is anything like Old Picard, that's not just cringeworthy, but also an insult to the character. I'll aver that Spock (Waaaay more sophisticated and all-round cooler) used the word in Star Trek IV, but, well, dammit, he's _Spock_. Look how he pulled off his evil beard. Nobody's beard ever beat Evil Spocks beard. Even though it's obviously a gum appliance.
Like +10. (I can't help it.)
I watched new Picard and I'm watching Strange Worlds now and I only realized the other day what the vibe of these shows is --there are scenes that really work and scenes that I'm not really there for and it's all deeply intermeshed, --they're fan fiction.
They're really good fan fiction, but fan fiction. But really good fan fiction. A lot of people really love these shows.
If you like Star Trek you should watch them. The very last scene of the last season of Picard I did not see coming at all, though I should have!, and it just killed me.
And I loved Lower Decks, the show Star Trek has needed for decades.
The only interesting thing about it is when you think of some ivy school graduate with a BA writing this garbage in so that they seem edgy and cool, or to just fill in space between plot points.
This is exactly what is wrong with most tv and tv advertising. It's written by people with no connection to the ordinary trying to imagine what appeals to the ordinary, and then to find a way to make producers, the worst people on the planet, think it's interesting.
David Milch said that visitors to the frontier were overwhelmed by the vulgarity of the language used--but it was things like "hell" and "damn." Call a man a "son of a bitch" and pistols were drawn. Now middle school kids say it on TV.
Milch claimed that his usage was the only way to deliver that impact.
(Don't know about convicts, but I worked in a high school, and Deadwood was mild.)
I'm clearly watching an entirely different subset of shows on HBO Max. I dont remember any brothels on The Other Two, Curb, or Hacks, and Hacks is even set in Vegas. Also none in The Great Pottery Throwdown.
I've even watched Klute and Jeanne Dielman on HBO, which both have sex workers as main characters, and neither of those had brothels in them!
Brothels full of naked women is how you make sure your audience knows it's a prestige drama for men. Other types of shows either have limited nudity, or have to include naked men at similar rates as the naked women. Those shows are clearly for women. Chalk it up to the influence of incel culture.
Hookers or football, choose your poison.
I think it's true that the brothels are there for background (female) sex and nudity, and I think it's true that those items are deemed necessary to attract male viewers.
That said, clearly "Not All Men"; it does leave Kevin cold, after all.
So, one thing that I think also plays a part - that hasn't been mentioned yet - is the ubiquity of internet pornography. GoT started filming in 2009. The pornography glut was fairly well into the zeitgeist by then. It would make sense if men who grew up in that environment are the ones whose attention can wander when there's no full-on naked banging going on.