Since Shailene Woodley broke out of her Secret Life of the American Teenager pigeonhole with The Descendants in 2011, two things about her have remained constant. First, she is a gifted actress who almost always turns in an excellent performance, no matter what role she’s playing. Second, she will make a point of establishing her hippie chick bona fides in every interview she gives, and it will range from charming to hilarious to annoying.
Shailene Woodley on the Emmys red carpet: “I don’t own a TV”
Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
And at the 2017 Emmys, Woodley stuck to her pattern. She was very good on Big Little Lies, for which she received an Emmy nomination. She also kicked off the night by telling a red-carpet interviewer that she doesn’t even own a TV because she prefers to read, like a parody of an insufferable person from the mid-’90s, before we all started talking about how TV is just as intellectually stimulating as books are these days.
“When do people find time to [watch TV]?” Woodley asked rhetorically. “I’m a reader, so I always read a book.”
On any other night, audiences most likely would have brushed off Woodley’s comment as mildly pretentious but ultimately harmless — but Woodley decided to trash TV on the red carpet of the Emmys, an awards show dedicated to celebrating television, which she is attending because she was nominated for an award celebrating the work she did on television. So TV critics across Twitter were understandably a bit miffed, in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Woodley’s comments are a reminder that even in the era of Peak TV and the so-called golden age of television, TV is still considered by many to be an unserious art form. It might be a major cultural force — but that doesn’t necessarily make it respected.
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