This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends!

This week, I’ve got another exciting interview for you. Michel Ghanem is also known as tvscholar on Instagram, he’s a writer-researcher based in Vancouver, Canada, who unceremoniously dropped out of his PhD to focus on writing about television for his Substack newsletter. He holds a Master of Arts in fashion from Ryerson University, and a Bachelor of Arts in art history from the University of Victoria. His writing has been published in W magazine, TVGuide, Fashionista, and elsewhere. Naturally, Michel loves television.

I first discovered Michel via Instagram, where he posts his thoughts on all of the television shows he watches. He frequently highlights shows with interesting queer characters – especially queer women – and gives great recommendations. He also posts great screenshots (see above). Like me, he transitioned from academia into pop culture writing, so I was excited to get the chance to speak with him about his work. Read on for our discussion about the perils of academia, loving television, quantity over quality, and which shows have the coolest queer characters.

What made you choose to pursue publicly facing writing on a platform like Substack as opposed to continuing to write within the academy? Have you found writing in this fashion to be rewarding/difficult/interesting?

I was in the first year of my PhD program in communication & culture when I ran into a total academic writing block. I tried writing in my office, at home, and eventually at my parents’ house during the early holiday season, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t understand why I was still writing academic essays to be able to write more academic essays, and the whole process felt exhausting and draining. I was getting to that place in grad school where grades stopped really mattering (save for applying for federal Canadian grants).  I felt very disillusioned and burnt out, but I’m not sure I even realized it, in the moment. At one point, every time I tried to write I’d feel nauseous and have to run out of my office to throw up. It’s like my body was physically rejecting academia.

I had actually started a Patreon during grad school when my Instagram started gaining more followers who seemed interested in what I had to say about television—it quickly became one of the few writing spaces I had that felt “safe” and rewarding. I felt almost as liberated writing there as I did in my personal journaling. And people were willing to pay me to subscribe! Who knew! Mid-way through 2021, after thirty issues on Patreon, I switched to Substack which is obviously more newsletter-friendly. It feels like a gift to be able to write about exactly what I want without a grade, editor, or expectations getting in the way. Every newsletter I publish feels like a gift. I love that I’m basically blogging about TV.

I’m not closing the door on academia forever, but if I can make a living writing in a less rigid, constrained way, that’s probably where I belong.

How has your time in academia influenced your work as a tv critic/expert/fan?

At one point I actually thought I was going to be a fashion critic. My undergraduate degree was in art history with a minor in journalism, and I wrote almost every paper on some sort of fashion history-adjacent topic. I applied to my MA thinking I would study Prada and communism (Miuccia Prada went to grad school to study Italian communism, and I found that to be ironic and hilarious). I wrote a ton for student newspapers and freelanced about fashion, too. But a few months in, my head buried in critical theory, I realized not only had my enthusiasm for the fashion industry had waned, but I knew too damn much about how destructive and toxic the industry was to continue on. I had already started writing and researching TV at that point, realizing it was a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry. It also just made sense, given television was the one medium I had always gravitated towards, above others.

So as grad students do, I wrote a panicked email to my program director asking for “permission” to shift my research toward television (and costume design/fashion on TV), which I dove into enthusiastically. I then took courses in television studies and popular culture and did a fair amount of independent research on TV, realizing the breadth of the field and the endless possibilities. If it hadn’t been for that academic experience, I doubt I would have gotten here, now. 

I also have a Master of Arts degree, so I’m glad to get the chance to speak with another former academic, current Substack writer. Would you mind telling me a little about your Master’s thesis? I love hearing about people’s graduate work, especially since these projects often don’t get the recognition they deserve outside of (or inside) the academy.

Master of Arts graduates have a certain mutual understanding, don’t we? A shared commonality for sure. 

I sought out to understand the relationship between mental health, women protagonists, and costume design for my master’s thesis. I basically wanted to understand how costume design plays a role in constructing mad identities on television, and how it could thus be used as a tool to subvert tropes and hegemonic representations of women and madness—just like how fashion can be used to do so in real life. I initially intended to look at Girls, How to Get Away With Murder, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as case studies, but ended up focusing on the latter due to the scope of my research questions. I was able to interview Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s costume designer, Melina Root, who was super generous and gave me like two hours of her time to go over specific looks and scenes. The title ended up being Fashioning the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Costume Design as Mad Resistance in the Post-Network Era, which gives you an idea of what I explored. I was particularly interested in Mad Studies at the time, which is grounded in Disability Studies and brilliant ideas around how systemic issues make people mad, rather than just biochemical imbalances in the brain or “stigma.” 

It was so challenging, though! I remember being very depressed during the writing period, it was lonely and isolating, an aspect of academic writing that has always bothered me. The whole experience was so difficult that I haven’t been able to look at it since I wrote it—I had it lined up to publish in an open source journal and I just couldn’t bring myself to go back and edit/compress it for publication, knowing there was so much I wanted to change about it and areas I wish I had dug deeper in. I was recently thinking I should at least publish the interview on my Substack. 

Why are you drawn to writing about television as a form of media? (As opposed to movies, music, etc.)

I often wonder if I wouldn’t be as into television as I am if I hadn’t spent most of my 20s single, in and out of depression, and more introverted. Television is where I find familiarity and comfort, the experience of returning to characters again and again. Sometimes it’s hard to grapple with the idea that we’re all going to some day disappear from this earth without having experienced most of the things we could have experienced—television gives me the cathartic satisfaction of spending a few years in the shoes of a doctor, a KGB operative, a lesbian assassin, a spaceship captain, a Manhattan newspaper columnist—not that I’m hoping to be any of these people, but I love getting to follow them for more than through highlights of a 1.5 hour movie.

I like films but I guess I always want more: more length, more depth. It’s rewarding to watch, and I love all the in-between stuff that gets cut out of films. I would say since I watched Avatar the Last Airbender on Nickelodeon back in elementary school, I’ve been captivated by the possibilities of serial television storytelling, and the medium is constantly surprising me but how it’s evolving and exploring new facets of itself and its characters. I was just telling someone recently that it’s been a long time since a film really blew my wig off—but my wig blows off weekly watching what’s out on television. I mean, are you watching Yellowjackets? The ambition on television right now is absolutely wild and awe-inspiring. 

What makes you love a TV show? Are there certain elements that you find often draw you in, or is it different for every show?

I often say that I believe TV shows choose you, rather than the other way around. Shows come into your life the same way books, films, and art do—right when you need them to. We just don’t think about it that way because television’s history as a feminized, domestic object and the way it hasn’t been framed as artful for decades (that’s changing now, obviously). That’s my spiritually grounded answer. Practically, if you follow my Instagram you know I gravitate toward women and queer characters (I feel like I’ve gained a significant lesbian following on Instagram from posting about the queer characters I love on TV—I love it so much) rather than the same-old cis male protagonist anti-hero stories, and I don’t watch much reality television except for the occasional docu-series and The Hills: New Beginnings (haha). I’ve realized I also really love sci-fi, probably since I was raised watching Star Trek and Stargate, but also because there’s serious ambition and production value in those projects right now. But a quieter show, like Halt and Catch Fire, can really hit the spot for me and can be something of a meditation to watch. Oh and I’ll watch a million shows about millennials figuring out their lives, in any genre—give me ten seasons of Good Trouble or Broad City.

A lot has been written in the last decade or so about the rise of “Prestige TV” – which has often focused on shows broadcast on networks such as HBO and Showtime – but I was wondering if you think this term still has any meaning. Is the era of Prestige TV over? Are we in a new era? What do you think defines the current television moment we are in?

Hmmm. This has definitely been hotly contested since The Sopranos era of television, so really when television and film started to look more like each other and the medium started to grow beyond the confines of broadcast standards. I think television is such a liminal genre that it’s hard to pin down its exact moment—and COVID has added to that confusion. We were definitely in a peak television era right before COVID, in terms of sheer output of shows. But for every solid, good series, there are twenty horrendous shows. We’re in our plethora era, our endless list of shows to watch era.

I once heard NYT TV critic Margaret Lyons compare peak television to a library—you don’t walk into a library and exclaim “there are so many books, I’m never going to read every book!” Instead, you browse by recommendation, you check out what’s popular, you find hidden gems and tell your friends. That’s sort of what television is turning into, which takes the pressure off having to watch every show. Shows are getting more condensed, too—the 24-episode season is nearly extinct, and wasn’t a particularly sustainable model to begin with. 

That said, as far as we’ve come from Nielsen ratings being the end-all-be-all, Netflix is obviously operating on an eyeballs-to-show business model. They want more subscribers. So if that means pumping out dozens of bad reality shows that seem to soothe its viewers and canceling shows that were just finding their footing after two to three seasons, that is what they will do. Just because the industry is producing quality content, it doesn’t mean they will be commercially successful—this is true of a lot of critically acclaimed films and television projects. I always love to point out that Succession has a smaller viewership than a show called Ghosts on CBS, which is doing exceptionally well. But we don’t necessarily know that because Succession watchers are way louder than watchers of Ghosts on Twitter. 

I think I’m more interested in how television is finally, in the last decade or so, telling stories that haven’t already been repeated a million times in Hollywood. A few weeks ago I watched Sort Of, a CBC Original, and marveled at how I’ve never watched a show with a queer, non-binary person of colour as the lead. More of that, please. I want more Reservation Dogs, Special, Queen Sugar, Run the World. More stories about folks not traditionally represented on television, marginalized folks. I want more messy stories about them, too, not necessarily always the Shondaland/everything wrapped up in a bow storylines. That’s our current era, space being created for these experiences, some of them never before seen in earnest on TV. I could survive without seeing another white straight male antihero drama series for the next decade.

The folks who have a better idea or broad understanding of our current moment are probably publishing meta-analyses and quantitative data in Television & New Media, or something. For myself, being out of academia, I’m increasingly interested in shows that end up on my radar organically, the ones that “choose me” as I was saying before. I think at the very least, the bar for quality television has been set really high, which to me just gives me hope I won’t run out of good shows to watch. 

What have been your favorite recent shows that feature queer characters?

Work in Progress

Anne+

It’s A Sin

Young Royals

Star Trek: Discovery

Harlem

Sort Of

The Morning Show

Sex Education

The Other Two

Pose

Feel Good

Special

Everything’s Gonna Be Okay

Hacks

Do you find that certain streaming platforms are putting out better tv content than others right now? Are there any shows or platforms you think are particularly underrated? (I recently watched the Cinemax series Jett – which is streaming on HBO Max – based on your recommendation and I was absolutely obsessed with it.)

Jett was so underrated! Who doesn’t want to watch Carla Gugino pull off heists and play an antihero? But yeah, it’s gone under the radar because it aired on Cinemax which not many people had access to and then didn’t get much buzz after being added to HBO Max.

In regards to your question—I think it’s safe to say at this point that the “big three” (ABC/NBC/CBS) are lagging behind in sheer volume of content. Not to say everything coming out of those networks is bad—I think Evil and The Good Fight are some of the two best dramas on television, but they’re technically now considered Paramount+ originals. I’m finding these networks are sticking generally to what they know best: procedurals and big flashy dramas like Grey’s Anatomy and The Good Doctor that don’t necessarily pander to more cinematic television being made elsewhere.

I definitely noticed how broadcast shows tend to still get reviewed more favourably than streaming shows. Take, for example, ABC’s Queens getting an averaged rating of 75 on Metacritic—4 points higher than the first season of Ted Lasso, 6 points higher than Squid Game. Queens is not a good show. The pilot was promising with a solid cast but five episodes in, it’s laughable how melodramatic and awful it is, relying on all these ultra-dramatic twists. Apple TV+ shows (speaking of underrated streaming platforms), in comparison, are ripped apart by critics—given low ratings despite being more polished than the typical broadcast drama. The fact that most of the shows on there aren’t hits is probably due solely to the fact that they’re not on Netflix, which has the advantage of a near-monopoly on streaming eyeballs. So to answer your question—Apple TV+ is my platform to watch for 2022.

Follow Michel on Instagram and subscribe to his newsletter here.

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