Are all TV millennials getting married?
Are all TV millennials getting married?
TV shows love equating growth with marriage and/or babies. Let's discuss.
It recently struck me that ever since Girls ended with Hannah Horvath nursing a baby in 2017, the flurry of shows about millennials that followed have fallen into the trap of ending its character arcs with two specific conclusions: marriage and/or babies. It's complicated to consider when a lot of millennials I know in real life are getting married and/or having babies. But it was especially grating when recently, HBO's Insecure ended with even its most unlikely characters—Natasha Rothwell's Kelli, specifically—pregnant, and its other characters married. For some reason it tipped me over the edge and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It all feels tangled in my mind with my 30s approaching (too quickly), spending most of January with COVID alone in my apartment, and what I’ve been watching lately.
I was surprised to see Search Party, a show significantly invested in satirizing millennial self-obsession, end with a wedding between Dory and Drew—despite spending a season muddying ideas of monogamy between the foursome friend group. Not even a zombie apocalypse and the complete collapse of society as they knew it could stop a wedding and a white dress (it would take ten of these newsletters to explain Search Party’s plot so I’ll stop there). A few years prior, I may have cried during its finale, but Schitt’s Creek ended in a wedding too.
Both seasons of Love Life are much more about love than they are about life. In fact the entire series seem absolutely determined in equating growth with marriage and babies—the seasons must end on this specific note to manufacture catharsis via our preprogrammed notions of what our life is supposed to look like by 30-something. On the other end of the spectrum, You paints itself as a deconstruction of suburban married life in its third season, using murder as a (gross to watch) metaphor for its disillusion. In a way, it sort of frames finding balance in the hegemony of marriage as the ultimate goal for both of its lead characters—and when that balance falls out of equilibrium, its characters spin [way] out of control.
You're the Worst ends with an almost-wedding. Its two lead characters realize the last thing they actually want is to tie the knot, a refreshing twist on this conclusion, despite nonetheless focusing on marriage to wrap things up. The most iconic line about marriage in your 20s probably came out of Broad City, when Ilana sits across from Hannibal Buress after he informally proposes and says: "Marriage? Lincoln. I'm only 27, what am I? A child bride?" Broad City’s ending is the best of the bunch: focused on its front-and-centre friendship, the root of the series since its first episode. I was surprised to notice I felt like the finale back in 2019 to be inconclusive, anti-climactic—my TV-watching reflexes awaited some sort of grand conclusion. On television, that’s commonly a wedding.
How these millennial stories end have been weighing on my mind heavily this month, which has overall been a kind of crash-landing to my embodied reality. I moved to Vancouver alone, with my cat screaming in my UHaul's passenger seat. I spent the first month in my new, bank-breakingly expensive apartment alone. With most of my city friends sick and awaiting the start of my new job, I wandered my new neighbourhood alone. I watched my shows alone. I spent hours building my furniture alone. And finally, of course, I got COVID. Alone.
I've never been a stranger to quiet solitude, it has always been how I come back to myself. Most of us single folks have spent a lot of pandemic time with ourselves. But Insecure's ending rattled in my head while I tried to process what my ending would look like. Quite literally one weekend at the ER with heart palpitations and chest pressure. After a series of tests, I was deemed healthy with "regular COVID side effects" and discharged. My mom texted me when I headed back home to make my sad little post-hospital dinner: "you really do need a Steve."
According to Census data in the United States, only 29% of 18-to-34 year olds were married in 2018, compared to 59% in 1978. As countless articles detailed in 2015-2019, millennials were blamed with ruining the wedding industry and bankrupting diamonds, but these articles sort of fizzled out and made way for gender reveal parties gone wrong at some point in 2019-2020.
The world feels like it has been spinning so far out of control lately. The path to marriage sure seems to secure a kind of certainty that the economy, pandemic, climate, and so on, can’t and probably won’t guarantee going forward. I would bet that census data during the pandemic saw a significant increase in marriage and bébés in this age group.
What exactly is bothering me so much, though?
Is it the institution of marriage itself? Is it my own aloneness echoing in characters finding their Hollywood-ever-after? Is it compulsory heterosexuality? I don’t actually give much thought about real people getting married and having babies if that’s what makes them happy (my sister is recently pregnant and I was the MC at her wedding!). Until a baby is screaming at my local coffee shop, that is. But how these stories I’m watching on television are ending does bother me—it feels like lazy writing, the last trick in the box.
To someone binging Insecure from front to back, I think they would feel a bait-and-switch. Insecure was always really about Issa and Molly, a long-standing but tumultuous friendship. The series found its nuance and complexity in the exploration of the ways they grew closer and further apart over four seasons, only for that context to get swept under the rug in the final season.
Insecure really was a game-changing show. It opened the door to a half dozen comedies with an all-Black cast airing right now (Run the World and Harlem come to mind). It was a huge success for HBO and like Issa Rae mentioned in countless interviews back in 2016, it was just about “regular Black people being basic” (and having graphic, bed-thumping sex). It was, like many shows in the post-Girls era, a show about millennials figuring out their shit in an economy and digital era where they couldn’t look to their previous generation for wisdom on how to do it all.
I think that might be it, for me. Sure, television has a long history of marrying off its main characters as big splashy endings, this is not a new phenomenon. But we millennials (and our character counterparts) had to figure out so much on our own. Many of us are still tearing our way through an uncertain path, relying on our friendships to get through it all. To watch TV characters we invested in cave to the certainty of marriage and/or babies feels unsatisfying and perhaps disappointing. I’ve just been wondering, why these choices on the part of writers and showrunners? We were supposed to do it differently, weren’t we?
Further reading:
My interview with Morgan Spector (The Plot Against America, Homeland, The Gilded Age) is up now for W magazine. He was a delight to chat with.
ICYMI: My interview with Mackenzie Davis and my review of Acapulco.