Snappy as it sounded, the term “streaming wars,” in retrospect, was an overblown way to describe the competition between the companies that hoped to monopolize TV streaming. Little about the rollouts of the major subscription services this year has seemed grand or strategic. A better martial allusion? Clusterfuck. Teasers promise portals to unprecedented ways of viewing programs new and old, but so much curation soon starts to look like clutter. Subscribe to Apple TV+, Disney+ and Hulu, Netflix, the ill-fated Quibi, and now HBO Max—the latest of the big-deal bundles to première, in late May—and find yourself participating in a bitter joke: we have invented cable.
HBO, the tentpole of WarnerMedia, is still a symbol of prestige television, and a lingering fidelity to the network will, I suspect, draw many people to HBO Max, even though the network has done a poor job of explaining what the new service actually is, or how it differs from the video-on-demand fixture that predates it, HBO Now. Subscribers, paying up to fifteen dollars a month, will get access to all HBO series, more than two thousand feature films, other WarnerMedia television properties, and attractive extras like the works of the Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. The library is nowhere near as deep as Netflix’s, but that lends HBO Max a veneer of the bespoke. Still, as economic depression looms, what seemed like a necessity a few months ago may now be, for many people, an unjustifiable luxury.
HBO Max meant to celebrate its inauguration with a newly shot “Friends” special. The series, which WarnerMedia grabbed from Netflix, along with “The Big Bang Theory,” is its biggest syndication coup. But the novel coronavirus doesn’t like reunions. Several original series were also put on pause mid-development, which is fine, since the real draw is WarnerMedia’s archive.
The new shows that came into being just before the shutdown are plastic simulacra of shows of yore—the kind of pretty, algorithmic television that pleasantly empties a quarantined mind. “The Sopranos” is in no danger of being surpassed by any of them. “Love Life,” from the newcomer Sam Boyd, starring the fizzy Anna Kendrick as a twentysomething struggling to find romance in New York City, is like “Girls” on low-battery mode. “Legendary,” a competition between houses in the ballroom community, has an irksome superficiality; you can always tell when producers forget that reality TV is a craft. It dazzles because of its contestants but is cavalier in its shiny corporatizing of a queer art. The best of the new shows is “The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo,” on which Cookie Monster serves as co-host and guests include such child-friendly celebrities as John Mulaney, who made a quirky and moving children’s special last year for Netflix, and a giggling Jimmy Fallon. Elmo is a conscientious interviewer and an icon for our homebound time; like all of us, he is perpetually pantsless and very hairy. I asked Xavier, my five-year-old nephew, what he thought of “Not-Too-Late,” and he said it was “the best thing in the world!”
An anomaly on this cutesy slate is “On the Record,” a wrenching film about sexual assault in hip-hop. It was directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, who, in the documentaries “The Invisible War” and “The Hunting Ground,” about sexual assault in the U.S. military and on college campuses, respectively, have forged an empathetic style of muckraking. More than a dozen women have accused Russell Simmons, the mogul co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, of sexual misconduct, from the eighties to 2014. Journalists such as Melena Ryzik and Joe Coscarelli, at the Times, have found the accusers credible, but Simmons, despite being forced to leave his companies in 2017, has suffered relatively few legal ramifications. Years ago, he reinvented himself as a mild-mannered yogi; recently, he moved to Bali. He and other pioneers of the scene have been accorded a complicated veneration in the black-music space. In some ways, this esteem is more intractable than that given to any individual artist. Cancel R. Kelly, and R. & B. endures. But how to excommunicate a forefather who successfully pitched hip-hop to the world as valuable, in every sense of the word? Cancel Russell Simmons, and the house falls.
How “On the Record” came to HBO Max is a lesson in power and its caprices. In January, shortly before the film was to première at Sundance, Oprah Winfrey, who had signed on as an executive producer, pulled out. Apple TV+, working with Oprah, dropped out, too. Speaking to Gayle King on CBS, Winfrey framed her decision in terms of journalistic caution: “I just care about getting it right, and I think there are some inconsistencies in the stories.” She has also said that Simmons pressured her to drop the project but that his efforts did not influence her decision. Regardless, the commotion overshadowed the film before it was widely seen.
“On the Record,” which HBO Max picked up in February, follows Drew Dixon, the daughter of Sharon Pratt, the first black female mayor of Washington, D.C. Dixon grew up a music obsessive in D.C. and, after graduating from Stanford, came to New York in 1992, to make a name for herself in the industry; early in the film, we watch as she walks down the Bedford-Stuyvesant blocks where, a generation ago, she befriended the Notorious B.I.G. When Dixon, a phenomenal speaker and a true believer, was working in A. & R. at Def Jam in 1994, she recalls, one of Simmons’s handlers warned her to make herself invisible, because he didn’t have time for any of Simmons’s “tall, skinny bitches.” (In the film, Dixon, transported by the memory, imitates the handler’s accent, her eyes flickering.) Dixon details her sustained sexual harassment by Simmons, who, she alleges, exposed himself to her at work and lured her to his apartment in 1995 and raped her. (Simmons said in a statement to the filmmakers, “I have issued countless denials of the false allegations against me. . . . I have lived my life honorably as an open book for decades, devoid of any kind of violence against anyone.”)
The title is a double entendre; the directors watch as Dixon, in 2017, goes to the Times with her story, and then takes calls from Coscarelli, who tells her that other women have accused Simmons of misconduct as well. The intimate portrait soon seamlessly expands to include testimonies from the activist and former model Sil Lai Abrams, the rapper Sherri Hines, and the screenwriter Jenny Lumet, who described her alleged assault by Simmons in an open letter published in the Hollywood Reporter.
“On the Record” is an alternative history, a version of VH1’s “Behind the Music” narrated not by the male victors but from a black feminist perspective that sees hip-hop as the enterprise of ingenious yet wounded men. The underdog status accorded to the genre, the film suggests, permitted unchecked decadence and unchecked power. “I didn’t want to let the culture down,” Dixon says. “I love the culture.” After leaving Def Jam, Dixon worked for the record executive L. A. Reid, who she alleges harassed her, and then left the music industry. (Reid denies having harassed Dixon.)
No emergent hip-hop fanatics can claim their education complete without hearing the sociological analyses delivered in the film by the music journalist and theorist Joan Morgan, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Kierna Mayo, the longtime steward of Ebony. The film’s buzziest line of inquiry is its audit of #MeToo, which did not make space for the experiences of black women. The mixture of rage and resignation I felt after watching was compounded by the suspicion that “On the Record” may get lost in the shuffle. ♦
