This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.
LA is burning. David Lynch is gone. ***** is officially back in office. You don’t need me to point out that things are as bad as they’ve ever been. Normally, in times like these, our instinct is to turn toward art that’s comforting, art that either promotes good vibes or at least reminds you of a time when the vibes were better. Normally. Personally, I don’t always find that constructive. I was feeling depressed recently, and I didn’t feel like watching, say, New Girl—I felt like leaning into it. I felt like watching Mad Men season 6, a collection of episodes that repeatedly posit, through imagery and allegory, that Don Draper is a devil in hell, a season so intrinsically dour that at the time it aired, [some] critics and fans alike accused the show of regressing and wondered if Matthew Weiner had lost his fastball.
Music has a reputation for facilitating bad moods—we all have that playlist or two for when we want to indulge in sad or angry feelings. So why not do the same for what we watch as well? It got me thinking about some of my other favorite infamously great but hardly comforting series across the years. I wound up making this Feel-Bad TV Watchlist for other sickos like me who, in some moments, would rather just see the world’s ugliness reflected back than find fake and fleeting escapism in a sunny sitcom. Let’s call it the Seek Help Series. (There’s nothing too obscure on here, but I’ll try to talk around spoilers still—the world’s a mean enough place already.)
Mad Men season 6
To recap: This season begins with Don pitching a Sheraton ad that evokes suicide, and ends with the infamous Hershey pitch scene. While the Coca-Cola account remained elusive, these episodes instead find Big Dick in full Dirty Sprite 2 mode, on his worst behavior after several seasons of trying to be a better person, against the backdrop of the tumultuous year that was 1968. This is the year of the Don-Peggy schism, Sylvia, Pete’s receding hairline, that weird episode where Jim Cutler’s Dr. Feelgood shoots the whole Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce gang up with speed, way too much Teddy Chaough, and maybe the most crushing Don-Sally moment across the series. It’s hardly the show’s finest moment or its brightest, but underneath the ugliness it’s still a damn good dialogue about our capacity—or lack thereof—for change and growth.
Battlestar Galactica (whole series)
I’ve been watching this lately with my girlfriend (me spinning the block, her first time—rewatching alongside a first-timer is the most optimum way to do it, I’d say), and it’s not as if I’d forgotten how dark it was. But on revisit, years later: Man, is this show hilariously bleak. It starts with, like, 90% of human civilization dying in a nuclear holocaust, and shit just goes downhill for humankind from there, as a ragtag group of 40,000-odd survivors embark on a long, possibly futile search for a mythical planet called “Earth.” That may sound hokey to the sci-fi agnostic, but outside of killer robots, this show is as gritty as it gets—by the time you get to season 3, where we are now, the fleet facing total starvation is just fodder for a standalone episode.