Television is artless. Television is brain rot. Television is ruining America’s youth. We’ve all heard these critiques many times. I read a novel a month and listen to NPR, therefore I am entitled (even expected) to trash television.
There probably was a time when deriding television as lowest common denominator junk was accurate. When I was growing up, the highest-rated prime-time television shows were the Six Million Dollar Man, Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company. Formulaic and stupid programming dominated. It was (and is) impossible to defend these programs.
But sometime after that, television started improving: clever comedies like The Simpsons and Seinfeld enjoyed long runs atop primetime ratings. Niche programs like Get a Life, Freaks and Geeks and Arrested Development created an ironic, comedy-of-discomfort genre on television before Augusten Burroughs and Judd Apatow, in their books and movies, mined the same comic terrain. NYPD Blue and Homocide: Life on the Streets brought ethical complication to that simplistic staple, the hour-long police drama.
And it went uphill from there. Cable channels invested in original programs. Starting with The Larry Sanders Show and The Soprano’s, HBO upped the ante on television content with a string of winners: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and The Wire. These programs, though very different, all feature original plot lines and move away from the once-ubiquitous heroic star and happy ending.
Beyond HBO, The Daily Show, although slipping, continues to offer excellent political commentary and media satire. Mad Men gives us unique anti-nostalgia for the “Greatest Generation.” Weeds explores the everyday suburban problems of a nice American family as it sells a lot of pot. Venerable South Park still inter-mingles biting social commentary with adolescent raunch. Three of the most inventive programs of the last decade, 30 Rock, Big Love, and The Sarah Silverman Program are women-created and starred—as television pushes out of the male-dominated era. Friends with discriminating tastes name other shows I am supposed to be watching, and I imagine many of them are very good—but I just don’t get it all.
Make no mistake, television still has a lot of junk. Judge shows, soaps, and infomercials dominate daytime television. Primetime “news” on Fox and MSNBC blends the worst elements of talk-radio and Roller Derby. National Geographic (stylishly re-packaged as “Nat Geo”) degrades its fine brand with self-consciously trite programming. Shows like Man vs. Wild offer three minutes of titillating survival footage inside bloated 60 minute timeslots. The History Channel distorts fact in search of salacious storylines. MTV sinks lower and lower.
Television is a mass-culture medium that serves diverse audiences—and we live in a country where Monday Night Raw has earned more viewers than any other show in the history cable television. But we shouldn’t conclude that novels are junk just because Danielle Steele outsells Sherman Alexie and Philip Roth; so we should not run down television because The Jersey Shore gets bigger ratings than Nova. And television is still young. Only fifty years ago, I Love Lucy was pushing the envelope with a two-camera shoot and a Latino-Anglo marriage. Today, The Office melds documentary film technique into the sitcom, and offers complex comedy-of-discomfort plotlines that rival David Sedaris and Woody Allen.
Despite the preceding, I don’t watch much television. Much as I like Mad Men and Weeds, I have seen these programs only twice each. 30 Rock is the only television show I make an effort to watch weekly. Most evenings, I spend primetime with my sons or writing, so don’t use this blog as a crutch if you feel guilt over television as your nightly activity. Television is easy, and this country watches too much of it. But for people who consider themselves discriminating consumers of comedy and commentary, television’s best programs have drawn even with the novel and cinema—and we are better for it.
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