In a New York Times profile published Wednesday, reporter Sopan Deb interviews a majority of the Arrested Development cast in advance of the show’s fifth-season return to Netflix at the end of this month. If your interests are in reading how a cult-hit TV show can destroy itself over the course of a single promotional interview, well, it’s quite a novel experience.
I mean it's one interview Michael, what could it cost. Your reputation?
— Bec Shaw (@Brocklesnitch) May 23, 2018
The profile, which ostensibly appears to be a promo bid for the show’s new season, quickly turns to a subject Deb describes as “the elephant in the room”: the sexual misconduct allegations made against star Jeffrey Tambor (George/Oscar Bluth) on the set of his other show, Transparent, which subsequently got him fired from that series.
When the allegations initially came out, creator Mitch Hurwitz and his team were wrapping production on season five of Arrested Development. At the time Hurwitz and the cast expressed their support for Tambor, but in this profile Deb sought to dig a little deeper – including exploring a revelation made by Tambor, in his (softball) Hollywood Reporter profile, that he once verbally abused Jessica Walter (who plays his wife Lucille Bluth) on the Arrested Development set.
The interview is an uncomfortable – but revealing – experience that any fan of the show should read. Present for the discussion are Tambor, Walter, Jason Bateman (Michael), Will Arnett (Gob), Tony Hale (Buster), David Cross (Tobias) and Alia Shawkat (Maeby).
As the allegations unravel, Tambor’s male co-stars rush to his defense and brush the incident away as uneventful, despite Walter’s continued protests that “in like almost 60 years of working, I’ve never had anybody yell at me like that on a set”.
Eventually, Walter is brought to tears, and only Shawkat – the only other female co-star in the discussion, and the only other actor to work on both Arrested Development and Transparent besides Tambor – stands by her. “That doesn’t mean it’s acceptable,” Shawkat says, when Bateman (who comes off particularly poorly in the interview) alleges that behaviour like Tambor’s is due to people having “certain processes”. It’s an exhausting read – and an even worse listen.
Here’s audio of Jessica Walter CRYING, standing up for herself after all the men in the AD cast try to gaslight her into thinking Tambor’s harassment isn’t THAT bad. This is horrific. pic.twitter.com/innJv8LIYF
— Kevin T. Porter (@KevinTPorter) May 23, 2018
There’s a lot to unpack here: about abusive behaviour in the creative industries and what is considered acceptable as a part of creative “process”; about toxic masculinity, and how men will continue to protect each other even (unwittingly or not) when their own reputations are at stake.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the whole situation is that rare glimpse we’ve been afforded under the hood of Hollywood’s hardworking bullshit machine.
It’s no accident that Deb was put in a room with this jovial cast to ask about Tambor’s behaviour – and to have it explained away. The New York Times doesn’t just accidentally get to ask the cast of Arrested Development about a star’s widely reported sexual and verbal abuses. This was a very deliberate set up by Netflix to try and smooth over any perceived ill feeling towards Tambor and the show in advance of the series’ fifth season. And every element of those scenarios is usually controlled to prevent just this kind of PR catastrophe from occurring in the aftermath.
So, when a fuck up like this happens, it really happens.
Instead of the desired effect – a repentant man reckoning with his bad behaviour before a supportive group of beloved, funny cronies – Netflix has this: a group of conceited, asinine bullies gaslighting their openly weeping female colleague out of her own discomfort with a male co-star, who brazenly admits to verbally abusing her as part of his creative process. Literally, that is the worst look you could imagine.
More illuminating still, it exposes something a majority of Arrested Development fans probably didn’t much care about to begin with. For my money, the crossover in Transparent/Arrested Development fandom is probably not huge.
Plus, news about Tambor’s ousting from the set of Transparent has been met with minimal fanfare, compared with similar high-profile allegations of sexual misconduct in Hollywood. (Read what you want into why that is, but it’s worth remembering the people accusing Tambor of misconduct are trans women.)
There’s something delicious, in a cynical, very 2018 sense, about Netflix and the Arrested Development team seeking to quash a conversation before it snowballed, by teeing up this rosy New York Times “family” profile of its cast, only to have it blow up in their faces. And not because Walter is clearly still suffering from the resulting trauma of being abused on set by Tambor – for that is truly horrible.
But because the rest of the cast was so spectacularly, dickishly unfeeling about the whole thing – in ways that come through clearly in the transcript as well as the audio – they now look like Part Of The Problem. As Walter tells Deb at one point during the interview, “I want you to say in the article, there’s so much testosterone in the room”.
How many times have we cried because a man was cruel abusive and had our feelings lovingly dismissed by even our dearest male friends? Every woman knows this feeling.
— The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Courtney Enlow (@courtenlow) May 23, 2018
As we wrestle, in the wake of #MeToo, with why these men got away with what they got away with, we must ask ourselves the tough questions about who is complicit in such mistreatment and how. With a man like Harvey Weinstein, his abuses were so wide ranging, often his more “acceptable” bad behaviour assisted in covering up his greater crimes. When the New York Times’ Weinstein exposé came out, dozens of people rushed to exclaim how everyone knew he was a “bully”. Perhaps turning a blind eye to those offenses meant refusing to see the larger ones.
So it is with Tambor, a man who openly admits he bullies everyone from the showrunner and his co-star of 15 years down to young assistants on the sets of his shows. If a man is capable of such behaviour, what else might he be able to wave off? And, if his co-workers are so willing to literally laugh this stuff away on the public record, what hope can any of us have of coming forward, reporting the misconduct and changing the toxic culture?
https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/999391693467213825?s=19
But if there’s anything to be learned from this whole sorry affair, it’s this: the mood has shifted, ever so slightly. Walter may have been shot down and undermined, but, as Deb points out, she said all of this to Tambor’s face with a journalist present. The Bullshit Spin Machine doesn’t feel as powerful as it once did. And, finally, just admitting you’ve done something, then laughing it off, is being recognised widely as not being the same thing as “reckoning” with your behaviour.
There’s no more “sorry not sorry”. Not when your co-worker is crying beside you, with no-one, save the one other woman in the room, coming to her aid.