Following Alfred Martin’s initial review of The Carmichael Show here at Antenna, he, Khadijah Costley White and Phillip Cunningham had a roundtable discussion on the new show.

Introductions:

Phillip Lamarr Cunningham (Quinnipiac University) is a scholar and critic of popular culture.

Alfred L. Martin, Jr. (The New School) studies race, gender and sexuality in American media as they intersect with production and audience reception.

Khadijah White (Rutgers University) is a writer, producer, and scholar studying race, gender, and politics in media.

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AM:     Ok. Well, I’ve been kind of in my feelings about The Carmichael Show because as my review of the series suggests, it’s kind of old school, but still there’s something charming about it. It simultaneously works and doesn’t work.

PC:      In a nutshell, what do you believe doesn’t work about the series?

AM:     It feels like a throwback to the “turn to relevance” series of the 1970s because it attempts to tackle “issues” in each episode. That feels forced to me in a way, but then it also kind of works. Although I will admit that it feels heavy-handed like a Tyler Perry movie in a lot of ways.

KW:    It’s definitely a black version of All in the Family, but I think it’s a necessary intervention. I mean, as an educated black person, it feels like “What If Tyler Perry’s World Met Me?”. Part of the reason it works as a program that keeps us tuning in is because it takes a really familiar black sitcom format and brings it some real politics. I’d say it’s more like Good Times than anything Tyler Perry can muster.

AM:     But I don’t feel like it gets the “offensive” in the way Archie Bunker was supposed to be offensive. So, while All in the Family was deemed cutting edge for the 1970s, I don’t think the same can be said for The Carmichael Show. I think it’s dealing with “issues” but it’s doing so in a way that is palatable for a network television audience. Where All in the Family, Good Times, Maude and other [Norman] Lear “turn to relevance series” were deliberately trying to make statements, I feel like The Carmichael Show is doing it in a way that feels dated and perhaps even forced.

PC:      Well, it’s heavy handed in that there’s always a resolution, it’s a self-contained narrative, etc. However, it almost feels as if he is trying to subvert that traditional black sitcom in a way.

AM:     How so, Phil?

PC:      Take the recent issue about the gun, for example. Certainly, we’ve seen sitcoms deal with gun issues, but the very idea that black men pack heat and, as the father suggests, do so in order to protect themselves from cops or white people feels a bit subversive to me. Now this is not to suggest that the show’s subversive nature always works, but I think it makes the attempt.

AM:     But I think it is in some ways undermined by the way the series needs to resolve itself. Ultimately Jerrod (who is the series’ axial character) ends up turning around his position on guns.

PC:      You’re right, Al. That certainly may be the weakness, but subversion does, in part, require that one negotiates with network constraints, genre conventions, and so on.

AM:     I think what bothers me is that its episodes seem to exist solely for the purpose of “bringing up issues” rather than them necessarily developing in a way that feels organic.

KW:    Yes, but the cool part is that it really exposes all the many issues about which black people think and discuss, the kinds of views that you’d have hashed out at your own house. That’s satisfying. There’s a sense of interiority; all the scenes are in the home. It gets at the ways in which black people engage in these sophisticated political conversations when they’re with each other, some of which involve race but mostly don’t. Everyone is able to articulate a really solid, logical argument.

AM:     I think the point you raise is a good one, Khadijah, but I think part of the issue I raised is that I’m not convinced that the series is having a conversation about blackness for black folks. I’d be surprised if given the way its audience has grown that the majority of the folks watching are, in fact, black.

KW:    I’m okay with that, inasmuch as I feel like it’s presenting the kind of complex and dissonant conversations we have with one another.

AM:     So it might also be that it’s a conversation happening about blackness out of class in a way. Also, I think its placement within the home is a central component of the black-cast sitcom. Other than Frank’s Place, I’m not sure there’s been a black-cast workplace comedy; black folks are always tethered to the home in the black-cast sitcom. Even something like Girlfriends and The Game were tethered to the home even as certain scenes happened at work. Living Single is, at base, a black-cast sitcom about black women living together (and Maxine).

KW:    I think your point about class is an important one, Alfred, and one that is really important here as an alternative to black-ish. This is an intra-class sitcom that I don’t know we’ve really seen since Roc.

AM:     Since Good Times and Roc, the only other working class black family in black-cast sitcom has been Everybody Hates Chris.

KW:    I’d leave out Everybody Hates Chris, because they owned a brownstone in Brooklyn and the mother was a stay-at-home mom. But the Carmichaels also own a home and have a housewife, and that gets at the way sitcom conventions don’t do class well at all.

PC:      Well do we even know what Jerrod is supposed to do in the show? Is he playing Jerrod the comedian? It doesn’t seem so, it hasn’t mentioned (yet) what he actually does. We know Maxine is a therapist-in-training.

KW:    We know Jarrod went to business school and seems to be doing well for himself based on the apartment and neighborhood he lives in.

AM:     And we are very clearly to understand that his apartment is a “come up” from where he came from. The family space is giving me Roseanne Realness.

KW:    Yes, Alfred, I was totally thinking Roseanne!

AM:     The show implicitly is dealing with class mobility as well–that (perhaps) black notion that the parents worked hard so their children could do better than they did.

KW:    But his brother is still struggling. We get a sense that, like so many of us, Jerrod made it but his brother and sister-in-law are still trying.

AM:     But I think that is the implicitness of the series. Jerrod succeeds because he worked hard. His brother didn’t because he’s lazy and trifling (and liked “ghetto” women).

KW:    No, I don’t get the sense that his brother doesn’t work hard. He’s maybe not as ambitious, but I don’t think it’s about laziness. For me, there’s such a sense of authenticity in this show because of its complexity–for example, the episode “Gender,” which focused on transgendergender identity. It was done so deftly, especially in terms of stomping on the idea that the black community is entirely homophobic or unable to have a conversation about gender.

AM:     That episode had me in my feelings. I felt like it was a very facile way to approach that topic. But I think that’s endemic of the genre. I just sat there looking at my screen…

PC:      I think you’re right about that episode being facile, but I think there’s something to be said that the resolution wasn’t neat.

AM:     I tend to hate the “neat” transition from gay to transgender. I think I got hung up on that.

KW:    Well, he said he was gay to test the waters. That felt somewhat like what a kid figuring stuff out might do. And there’s something really powerful about a person who appears to be a black boy who is a basketball star identifying as a girl and saying that she’s not confused about that identity! That is subversive. Like look it up in a dictionary and that scene is next to the word subversive.

AM:     I think it would have worked better to just have to deal with transgender-ness without gayness.. While I don’t profess to be transgender, I do know that a transition from straight to gay (in my case) wasn’t an overnight move. By attempting to do both, it gave both the short shrift

KW:    I think it was an attempt to fit in discussion about transgender identity and sexuality in one episode. A little simple, but fair-play in the world of sitcom plots.

AM:     Thinking about flow, do we think the stakes were/are “just” much higher for black-ish given its spot with Modern Family (and needing to capture a bulk of that audience and being run in the “real” TV season) versus The Carmichael Show as a summer series?

PC:      Well, black-ish is at least partially about the tensions in feeling distant from a “traditional” black life. The Carmichael Show is somewhat steeped in that “traditional” black life in a way.

KW:    In part, because Modern Family isn’t really so modern, there’s a chance that black-ish felt the need to be a lot more conservative, too. But that allowed The Carmichael Show to aim for a different feel. I mean there’s a theme song! Sort of. A live audience! We’re in 1993. Like, if The Cosby Show and A Different World had a baby.

AM:     Can we talk about that? I don’t feel like I am in love with the live audience and the laugh track. I feel like it seeks to telegraph (and control) the funny in a way that makes me stabby.

KW:    In part, I think it’s because we’re dealing with comics who are used to performing in front of live audiences. It helps them in their work. Also, I think it’s very much about nostalgia.

AM:     Part of the live studio audience is really about cost. A three-camera, proscenium set-up series is cheaper to shoot because there are a limited number of sets and often limited editing (because it can be edited while it’s being filmed).

PC:      Well those nostalgic touches are really what make The Carmichael Show a bit of a postmodern black sitcom.

AM:     In the sense of pastiche or in some other way?

PC:      It’s taking those conventions and embracing them, on the one hand, and attempting (the keyword here) to subvert them, in another way. I think Alfred is right when he suggests that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

KW:    For sure, I mean, there are a lot of Gina/Martin moments with Jerrod and Maxine In terms of her trying to accommodate “traditional” domestic roles and feminist ideals.

AM:     I’m still not sure I’m on board with the series as subversive, though. To what degree are these Gina/Martin moments really endemic of the ways relationships function in the sitcom broadly and the black-cast sitcom specifically? Put another way, do we see Gina and Martin because we have them as cultural touchstones?

KW:    The hyper-confident dark-skinned comic with conservative tendencies and his light-skinned, awkward, professional girlfriend? I think that dynamic is there.

PC:      In a way, the well-to-do light-skinned and/or biracial girlfriend/wife has become a hallmark of the black sitcom. In The Carmichael Show, Maxine is clearly marked as a bit of an outlier, which in a way makes her distinctive. Nobody in The Carmichael Show is trying to negotiate with whiteness, which I think is amazing. In fact–there hasn’t been a white person on The Carmichael Show, right?

KW:    Yes! So true. I don’t think there has been a white character. This show is trying to single-handedly keep black people employed, and in an age of colorblind comedy and drama, that’s important.

AM:     I can certainly raise my glass and drink to that. They are very clearly aware of their blackness and interact little (if at all) with a broader white world. In that sense, coming back to what (I think) Khadijah said, there is a sense of interiority in the series–almost in that Amos ‘n Andy way where there is a self-sustaining black world that does not consider or interact with whiteness.

KW:    But it’s also one that’s having really challenging conversations. What other show is doing this? Gun control? Police brutality? Even Scandal couldn’t do that right.

PC:      I think the brilliance of Maxine is that she’s not relinquishing her biracial identity either.

AM:     I think where Maxine does, in a way, represent whiteness in that her views are seen (I think) to stand in for whiteness (often attributed to her white parent).

KW:    We haven’t touched Nekeisha, and I think, in part, because I’m conflicted.

AM:     Can we see that as somewhat subversive and postmodern? Nekeisha as the “quintessential” black girl name and them playing with that?

KW:    On one hand, what she does in a lot of cases could be called cooning. Stealing TVs, showing up just to get free food, threatening to fight or cut people.

AM:     I admit that I hollered when she “found” that television in the “Protest” episode!

KW:    I did, too. Though I also cringed because I wasn’t sure where the “protestors are looters” storyline was going to go. And she has this big weave. I mean, in certain ways, I’m not sure about her.

PC:      However, I love the relationship between Bobby and her because it is complex (for television). Here is a divorcing couple who still have to navigate the same spaces.

KW:    Exactly. And I love that she’s still family.

AM:     But, to an earlier point, doesn’t she make blackness more complex as a “rainbow” of blackness that doesn’t sit firmly within respectable?

KW:    To be honest, I think it’s clear that the male characters are the core of the show. They end up performing the typical stoic, reasonable male role and the women often provide the humor and the jokes.

AM:     I’m not sure I’d concede the center to them because of La Divine.

PC:      Well, it’s interesting how Divine and Grier are actually de-centering Carmichael. And I’m wondering if that’s due to intention or just Divine’s powerful persona and Grier’s embrace of this character?

AM:     But I don’t think that’s on the page. I think it’s them and their skill. One thing I wanted to discuss that we haven’t really touched upon is why NBC? Why not BET or Comedy Central or some other cable network? What does an NBC sitcom (even if they were being burned off two at a time) mean with respect to a politics of representation?

KW:    Well, in part I think the turn to black is about what’s happening with for-pay web TV, the same way we got black sitcoms with the rise of cable. I’m not sure what it says about representation, though. I mean, NBC gave us The Cosby Show.

PC:      It’s interesting to think about the success of The Carmichael Show in lieu of the failure of Mr. Robinson, which also debuted this summer and with a bigger celebrity at the helm.

KW:    Maybe we should comment on why Mr. Robinson failed, other than it being a sad attempt at The Steve Harvey Show. It has a black lead, but blackness isn’t a central theme of the show. It felt like an old UPN show.

AM:     I think a lot of shows with black leads got greenlit this season so that the industry can watch most of them fail and then say, “See, we told y’all all this blackness wasn’t gone work.”

KW:    I think they got greenlit because Empire was successful. And because they don’t know why, that gives Jerrod Carmichael more editorial control.

AM:     For sure they did. But I still think the strategy remains the same from an industrial perspective. We’ve been to this rodeo before. I think the “major” networks are still attempting to “broadcast” when cable is narrowcasting, so their somewhat myopic view of “universal” has to supersede anything else. black-ish succeeds because there’s nothing really that black about it.

PC:      Well, The Carmichael Show also has benefitted from when it aired.

AM:     Meaning that the ratings assumptions were lower because it was a summer show?

PC:      Exactly, Al. It had the good fortune of airing new content just before the fall season really kicks off. If it was a mid-season replacement, we might not be having this conversation nor would it likely be renewed. How does the show grow from this point? Or can it even do so?

KW:    I think more discussions about their careers and choices, especially between the women, would be useful. I mean, neither son has children. That’s interesting.

AM:     I’d like to see it move less in a direction of “turn to relevance” and attempt to do some more in the way of character development. I’d love for it to get rid of the live shooting and laugh track. I just tend to be a postmodern viewer who wants to decide where I think the funny is located.

KW:    I want it to keep hashing out these tough debates we have within our own family. I think it’s helpful to have a space where everyone gets presented in a really humanizing way, regardless of education or occupation. I think that pushes against respectability, too.

PC:      My primary concern is whether it can remain funny with its current approach on a full season order. Right now, the success for the show has been that it has tackled black taboo, but there’s only so much left of that to address.

KW:    Well, I want to nominate that we title this discussion “Y’all All Nasty!!!” after Mama Carmichael’s favorite expression on the show.

PC:     Agreed.

Teaching people to be human sounds like an impossible task, but Iyanla Vanzant and Steve Harvey agree that for them, it is all part of a day’s work. While Vanzant emerged as a seemingly more qualified therapeutic voice in the 1990s having been ordained as a minister and earned a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology, Harvey has only recently (within the past 5 years) become an authority. Despite different beginnings, Harvey and Vanzant have both encountered mid-career valleys and have leveraged the appeal of in-your-face rebukes of women with problems to restore their media positions.

In Part I of this piece, I outlined Harvey’s career climb and offered that it was black women who made the difference for him. While the racially mixed guests appearing on his new talk show receive a much milder flavor of advice—Harvey-lite—his most aggressive critiques are reserved for his first audience: the black women who made his radio show number one among women ages 25-34 in urban markets and who continue to undergird the success of his self-help enterprise (Premiere Radio Networks, Inc.). In the remainder of this piece I will consider the complexity of the enterprise of black female discipline as I focus on a black woman as disciplinarian.

Before her return to television in the fall of 2012, Iyanla Vanzant spent nearly a decade in despair dealing with the cancellation of her first show and subsequent bankruptcy, a divorce, and the death of her daughter. For the 2-part premiere of her new show, Iyanla Fix My Life, Vanzant took on someone who can easily be described as a princess of pathology to demonstrate that despite her public failures to adhere to her own life strategies, she still has the skills to assist people in correcting the roots of their deviance. Scenes of Evelyn Lozada—whose infamous television role on reality show Basketball Wives has characterized her as a self-centered, materialistic, violent Jezebel type—tear-stained and humble by the end of the show are the miraculous proof that Vanzant has maintained her spiritual authority. Although Lozada is of Puerto-Rican descent, her position as wife-mother in a black household, and a cohort of black female co-stars, establish her as a stand-in for other racially marginalized women (Black and Latina).

From what we have seen of Iyanla Fix My Life thus far, a couple of things seem clear about her toolbox.

(1) The toolbox is probably pink.—In addition to largely featuring female guests on her show, Vanzant consistently focuses on shared behaviors among women that harm other women (i.e. gossip) and that harm the self; and distinguishes these acts as more damaging than those perpetrated by men. For example when Vanzant discusses domestic abuse experienced by Lozada, she insists the situation “is so not about your husband. It’s about you, and the choices you made, and the choices you didn’t make” (Vanzant). The estranged husband is characterized, not as an abuser, but as a teacher that “loved her enough to come into her life and show her that she needed to change” (Vanzant). Furthermore it is suggested that Lozada’s delinquent behavior, resulting from a poor example of womanhood modeled by her mother, granted others the permission to wreak havoc in her life.

(2) The tools are just as useful for demolition, as they are for construction.—No show seems complete without tears. Through physical exacts like wading through a pool of water, Vanzant facilitates emotional breakdowns. When guests resist, Vanzant will abruptly clench their head in her hands, or force their bodies into infantile positions in her own bosom. Until women endure the painful process of destroying the old self, they will not be capable of assimilating to the new self as prescribed by Vanzant.

For sure, one cannot consider these productions testaments to the host’s character. Their shows are mediated performances. Yet, it is from the vantage point of fan-critic that I challenge these privileged voices and their handling of black female subjects. In an attempt to offer solutions to the emotional issues that plague women, Harvey and Vanzant have lost sight of structural factors. By highlighting a female-specific pathology passed from mother to daughter as the most important factor in women’s trials (including domestic violence) Vanzant models a scornful and reductive practice of looking (see: Struken and Cartwright). This shaming gaze is just as subversive as that modeled in the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Since Vanzant is herself a black woman who takes ownership of the behavioral deficiencies mapped onto women as a collective, she genders the discourse in a way that Harvey cannot. Ultimately this gaze functions as a tool in the collective policing of black women’s lifestyles. It operates under the mask of feminist care because women are the agents and the objects of the gaze. Thus, the patriarchal order is not actually challenged, merely re-organized.

I call attention to this disciplinary enterprise because it is still yet growing. Vanzant and Harvey will combine forces this season when Vanzant is featured on Harvey’s talk show. One has to wonder, when we make demands for more “authentic” representations of black women in popular culture, is this what we have in mind?

Steve Harvey was once most recognizable for his wit, sarcasm, and refreshing take on everyday life situations–the usual things that make comedians successful. Today the actor, comedian, game show host, New York Times Bestselling author, and media entrepreneur is most well known for his relationship advice. After a mild career slump in the mid 2000s, Harvey’s shift to focus on (mostly black) women with problems led to a career revival. This fall Harvey continues to expand his brand with a nationally syndicated talk show, Steve Harvey. The show, which posted the best first week ratings since the premier of Dr. Oz (until Katie debuted a week later), is evidence that Harvey has surpassed his rank as a “king of comedy” and laid the foundation for a multi-platform media empire. The key building block on Harvey’s climb from comedian to relationship expert stardom: black women.

Harvey first aired his nationally syndicated radio show in the year 2000. Tapping into what media scholar Janice Peck (1995) has described as “therapeutic discourse” popular in the talk show genre, Harvey and co-host Shirley Strawberry introduced “The Strawberry Letter”—a segment featuring a letter from a (female) listener seeking a balm for her troubles.

In every segment, Harvey performs the last word in a style that borrows from the matter-of-fact, down-home vernacular reminiscent of Dr. Phil McGraw, mixed with the roaring declaratives he employs in comedy routines. To a letter entitled, “Pregnant by my Son-in-law,” Harvey responded: “What is yo’ ass doing? First off all you said I’m a 47-year-old attorney. Let’s start this letter off the right way; you’re a 47-year-old stupid attorney. You’re stupid. You’re stupid; you’re trifling; you’re raggedy.” Beginning his response with such a critique marks the parameters of the problem as within the woman’s own moral deficiencies and normalizes the public (albeit anonymous) rebuke and correction of a woman with complex intimate troubles.

After pausing for a commercial break, Harvey ends his thrashing with laughter:

The third son-in-law has got to be sitting down sucking his thumb, just wondering, when is his shot at the Promised Land coming…I hate to tell you this, but you ain’t a lawyer—you a one woman wrecking crew slash escort service (Harvey).

The chorus of laughter and panting from Harvey’s in-studio co-hosts drives the final moment to climax. Laughter here is not merely background noise; it is emphasized as an indicator that the listening audience should join in the moment of amusement. Any woman crazy enough to have an affair with her daughter’s husband, the exercise suggests, deserves our collective mocking. In the end Steve Harvey emerges as an expert in “common sense,” fit to call women on their foolishness one public disciplining at a time.

The success of the Strawberry Letter segment led to two books, both bestsellers, and a film, Think Like a Man (Sony/Screen Gems 2012), which feature Harvey as the friendly voice of truth among the masses of confused and lonely women. The film is punctuated by various Harvey-isms that pathologize the black female leads. In these various platforms, including the new talk show, there is little discussion of what (dis)qualifies Harvey as a coach in human relationships, including the fact that he has had two failed marriages. Rather Harvey claims that his is a “common sense approach” substantiated by 55 years of broad life experiences.

Harvey’s stake in the daytime talk show market is notable because, as an African American male, he is breaking ground in what is currently a predominantly white and female genre. It seems reasonable then that his show would follow the conventions of daytime talk “whereby females are assigned more responsibility for emotional and relational work, and, because of their subordinate status are taught to seek and accept (male) help for their problems” (Peck 60). Yet I argue that Harvey’s empire relies on a particular kind of black gender socialization where black women are subject to a specifically racialized critique.

Harvey is one of a group of African American men that have increased their marketability as national media personalities by critiquing single black women as helpless patients, and offering personalized solutions to their supposed relationship ailments. Hill Harper—actor and author of the best-selling book, The Conversation: How Black Men and Women Can Build Loving, Trusting Relationships—and Jimi Izrael—journalist and author of The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find Good Black Men—are two of the other men who, despite their lack of professional credibility and status as single men, join Harvey in narrating black women’s love lives. Harvey and his cohort turn a profit because they offer an authentic black response to what is deemed a threat to the black community: unmarried black women.

While it feels natural to celebrate the advance in African American representation demonstrated by Harvey’s multifaceted empire, the black feminist in me wonders if his large steps forward will mean a step backward for black women in media.

[This is part one of a two-part series on Steve Harvey – check back next week for the second installment]

I began to put together my thoughts on this issue in 2008 during Mad Men’s second season. Set in 1962, I had great hope for what this program could become. Two years later, this essay wrestles with those thoughts and the issues I incorrectly predicted.

First, let me be clear: this is not a generalizable defense of all shows that exclude blacks. Mad Men is an exceptional case because of its very rigid time period and object of study: advertising agencies in 1960s America. In season two, several important events had yet to occur that would make my argument differ: JFK’s death and the election of Lyndon B. Johnson which eventually beget the Civil Rights Act of 1964. African-Americans in particular had yet to gain equality in the workplace. Thus, it made little sense to “see” blacks outside of the positions they dominated at this time. The black elevator operator, the black lunch lady, the black janitor, and the black maid represented the various types of minority presence on the show. Initially off-put by the exclusion, I reconsidered once I realized the show’s desire to recreate that America in all of its ugliness.

Unlike other recreations of this era — I am thinking particularly of Hairspray (2008) — Mad Men does not carry the same kind of “hindsight smugness”; that is, a show’s ability to re-interpret an era’s ideology through a contemporarily superior lens. For example, Hairspray‘s seemingly easy integration of blacks and whites overwhelmingly contains hindsight smugness. That film’s thesis posits that people can just get together regardless of racial backgrounds and dance but that is a 21st century belief and not a 1950s one. Conversely, Mad Men‘s strategic exclusion of blacks in key character roles works because integration had not occurred in the way it would in the late 1960s and 70s. To place a black man in the offices of Sterling Cooper would be more to comfort ourselves as contemporary audience members than to give a more accurate depiction of that overtly racist era.

The future of race politics in American culture leads to my final point concerning the possible ways we can understand Mad Men‘s exclusion of blacks as central characters. Two years ago, I believed that as the show continued there would be African-American characters in key positions based on the steady increase of their presence in season two. And I was partially correct: season two found Paul Kinsey dating Sheila, the black grocery store clerk. While she only had two lines of dialogue, her presence was necessary to illustrate Kinsey’s superficial attempt at non-comformity and potentially brought Mad Men one step closer to negotiating racial conflict. As it is now, the show strategically places blacks and issues of blackness in the periphery—always present, always watching, always knowing the white characters think of them as invisible. However, is that enough? Is it enough to view the characters watching television’s coverage of Civil Rights? Is it enough that Betty dreams of Medgar Evers? At this point, blackness should not consist of a random black couple passing Don, as in last night’s episode. But maybe the answer speaks to a larger issue that queries if the show is imitating life or if life is imitating the show: what happens when a white showrunner and a staff of white writers review history through the eyes of characters who are wholly invested in white privilege? What does that suggest about the writers’ own privilege?

In closing, I still have hope that this strategic exclusion will pay off. But I have grave concerns that we will be satisfied with the nudges and winks at Don Draper’s world being turned upside down at the expense of a story about those who are doing the turning.
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