TV - On Why It Is Good For You

Okay, when I lured Sam over to the dark side to start this blog, I promised her that it wouldn't be confined to entirely literary pursuits and that our shared enjoyment of things pop culture would be represented. So, for this entry she asked me to "snap on Lost," as I have a tendency to do in our frequent conversations. However, I am going to defy her instructions simply because the Lost finale was more than a week ago and my ire is getting a little stale. Still, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk a bit about television and why we are so enamored of it.

Genres of storytelling evolve all the time based on media, and television is a fascinating example. Like a film, and capable of showing films, but also capable of much more than that. It's always on. Whether or not you choose to watch it and whether or not you like what's being shown, it is always there. But we break it up into time slots and further into sections around commercial breaks. The whole business side of television, how it arrives to the consumer as free programming restricts the form of television shows to fascinating effects. The half-hour comedy and the hour-long drama function, as any media studies professor will tell you, not as the product of television, but as the enticement so that the consumer will sit through commercials. But in turn, these enticements have to seem to the merchants who buy commercials, like they will draw in enough viewers to justify buying the commercial. Therefore the forms that have worked in the past are the forms that will be produced in the future. Unlike poetry or fiction or even movies, the form is finite and almost completely commercially controlled. I mean, you can raise money on your own to make a serial television show, but someone has to agree to put it on TV.

Try to think what you would do with something like that. You have 22 episodes of a drama which will not be put on TV. It is not a movie. It doesn't look like a movie and it is far too long to show in one sitting. There are strange emphasized breaks where commercials would go--moments of suspense meant to keep people from flipping during those commercials which are quickly resolved in the next cut. Therefore, it's a form with plenty of limitations. Corporate approval, federal decency regulations, limited time, and precarious longevity.

And yet, I can't help but see these as formal restrictions that, while at times engendering sameness and mediocrity, can force truly creative people to innovate and produce great things. As in Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," sometimes the restrictions of the form make the maneuvering within that form all the more incredible, entertaining or heart-breaking. The episode to episode or season to season cliff-hanger comes to mind as a genre-specific device. Although serial television most closely resembles a novel in its narrative structure (as opposed to movies, which would be more like short stories), you can't just flip to the back page to find out the ending. The narrative is protected by the structures of the medium--the fact that the network wants you to need to tune in again, next week. This season, it seems like all my favorite shows ended with cliff-hangers: Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, Alias, Lost, Desperate Housewives. It's something that keeps the narrative alive and bubbling in your head over a long period of time.

And not just your head, but the heads of all your friends as well. That's the other great thing about TV. It's a shared experience. It's a mass medium. Walking down the street in New York, I can hear people debating the same plot points that Sam and I debated the night before. It's a weird and wonderful feeling. I'll leave it to Sam to add any of her own comments on the subject, but for me, TV is a modern phenomenon I often feel lucky to be able to participate in. I mean, whenever American Idol's not on.