TV Therapy: Watch your way to better mental health

The Binge
By Jessica Zafra

ARE YOU ANXIOUS, stressed-out, neurotic? Are you haunted by the past, overwhelmed by the present, and worried about the future? Do you fear that you are losing your grip, your hair, or your mind? In short, are you a normal person?

The solution I prescribe is not only simple and accessible, but it’s entertaining and slots perfectly into your schedule. I recommend you watch television. Thanks to technology, watching TV is no longer an activity that requires you to plonk yourself in front of the set at a specific time. You can watch TV anytime, anywhere, as long as you are not driving a car, operating heavy machinery, or crossing the street. You can watch shows on an old-school TV set, on a computer screen, on a tablet, on a phone. If you’re extremely busy, you can watch a few minutes between appointments. If the traffic is bad enough, you can watch an entire season of Jonathan Norrell and Mr. Strange or Silicon Valley while sitting in a car.

Here are five very common situations and the TV shows that might make you feel less wretched about being in those situations. If they don’t work, at least you will be diverted or distracted. (In which case I recommend reading 19th-century Russian novels. Not only are they magnificent, but they will make your life seem cheerful in comparison.)

1. You are overworked, overextended, and beset on all sides by domestic, financial, relationship, medical, spiritual problems.
RX: BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

No matter how bad your situation may seem, Buffy Anne Summers had it worse. For starters, she had that name. For seven seasons, Sarah Michelle Gellar played the cute, petite, blonde California girl whom no one took seriously, and that just made her more awesome. She looked like a victim, but secretly she was the chosen one who saved the world over and over again. That was her epitaph at the end of season 5: “She saved the world — a lot.”

For setting fire to the gym because it was overrun by vampires, she was kicked out of school. While other teenagers were doing homework or going to parties, she was patrolling the town and slaying demons. She fell in love, and he turned out to be an ancient vampire. They made the relationship work, but an old curse kicked in and when he experienced happiness, he became evil. (Unlike today’s wimpy vampire girlfriends, she killed the guy. He came back on another show, Angel, but they could never be together or he would turn evil again.) In college Buffy met a nice guy, but he couldn’t deal with the fact that she was stronger than he was. Buffy’s mother fell ill, and the episode “The Body” is one of TV’s finest hours — you feel like your heart has been replaced with a ball of grief.

Buffy is the big bang that started the (Joss) Whedonverse. Its genius was that despite the heroine’s superpowers, she had to face the same problems as everyone else. Her gifts didn’t make her life any easier; she still had to grow up. With its distinctive language, its potent mix of humor and drama, and its formal experiments (the episode “Hush” had no dialogue; “Once More, With Feeling” was a musical), Buffy took on the most profound issues of human existence but never took itself too seriously. It wasn’t a huge hit during its TV run, but today more academic studies are dedicated to Buffy than any other TV show.

2. You are anxious and it’s taking a toll on your health.
RX: THE SOPRANOS

That’s exactly how this series created by David Chase begins. The anxiety-sufferer is Tony Soprano (the mighty James Gandolfini), who happens to be a Mafia boss in New Jersey. He starts undergoing psychotherapy with Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), and we start to see what his problem is. You’d have chest pains, too, if everyone including your mother is trying to have you whacked. Tony is a criminal, a murderer, and technically a horrible person, but he’s so vividly, recognizably human that we can’t help empathizing.

3. You feel out of touch and need to connect with the larger world.
RX: THE WIRE

Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) is ostensibly the main character when The Wire begins, but he’s not the protagonist. The city of Baltimore is the protagonist — its cops, its drug dealers from the syndicate heads down to the street-corner pushers, its union organizers, teachers, journalists, politicians. David Simon created a world so big and pulsing with life, it’s amazing that it could be contained on a TV screen. If you’ve just started watching it, don’t worry if they seem to be speaking a different language altogether. After three or four episodes it all kicks in, and a single F-bomb with varying inflections can mean so many different things.

Also, this is where we first noticed Idris Elba.

4. You’re smarter than everyone, but you’re broke and oppressed.
RX: BREAKING BAD

The series created by former X-Files writer Vince Gilligan set such a high standard for quality that two years after it ended, critics are still asking whether TV will ever be that good again. Bryan Cranston plays Walter White, a brilliant chemist who was part of a crystallography team that won a Nobel Prize. Years later, Walter is a high school chemistry teacher who has to work part-time at a car wash in order to support his wife Skyler (Anna Gun) and disabled son Walt, Jr. (RJ Mitte). Then he is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and he calculates the sum of money he must earn for his family’s security. His brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris), a DEA agent, inadvertently gives him the idea for money-making scheme: manufacturing crystal metamphetamine, a.k.a. shabu.

White teams up with his former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to produce the purest meth in the state, and he is soon on the way to making that nest egg. But his lucrative new business unleashes something in the meek teacher, and we have five marvelous seasons to ponder whether a good man has gone bad, or whether the evil was in there to begin with.

If you’re wondering whether you need an MBA, watch this show.

5. Your marriage is problematic.
RX: THE AMERICANS

Trust me, it is not more problematic than the marriage of Elizabeth (Keri Russell, forever burying your memory of Felicity) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), a seemingly all-American couple living with their two kids in the suburbs of Washington, DC in the early 1980s. Elizabeth and Philip are KGB agents living among the Yanks at the height of the Cold War. Not only must they keep their true identities secret from everyone including their own children, but they have to maintain multiple identities in dealing with their assets. Years into their fake marriage, they fall in love for real, and Philip wants to defect while Elizabeth considers training their teenage daughter (Holly Taylor) in spycraft. Their neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) is an FBI counterintelligence agent, and they’re always seconds away from having their cover blown. Complex, action-packed and ruthless, this show created by former CIA operative Joe Weisberg is the most consistently thrilling show on TV today.

Contact the author at TVatemyday@gmail.com.
Read her work every week at BusinessWorld, every day at JessicaRulestheUniverse.com.