My Perfect, If Inadvertent, Timing

I know what you're thinking: it was pretty savvy of me to publish that big essay on the merits of television on the exact day that the national "Turn Off Your TV Week" was starting.

Except for one little niggling detail: I had absolutely no idea until this morning that this was TV Turnoff week. Pop culture may be making us smarter, but it's still better to be lucky than smart.

Comments

[Michael Barrett]

Hi Steve,

A friend forwarded your excellent NYT article to me b/c we've been batting around some of these ideas, which have also been batted around by David Bianculli and the two authors of a book called, I think, "Saturday Morning TV" that I interviewed once. I'm absolutely in agreement with your point that we live in a Golden Age of TV right now, in that even the trash is at a higher level than trash used to be. I notice this all the time, although ironically I watch less TV than ever. Now let me offer a few more observations.

I'm glad you made the point about the soap opera form, although I think you imply that the form itself is simple and doesn't give soaps a particular complexity, b/c you say that "Hill Street" was only using an old formula but still giving viewers the "arrows," whereas today's shows like "ER" demand more attention. There are several disputable points here.

First, the soap form gives a cumulative complexity of texture and character that's probably unrivalled, and this can be demonstrated by the fact that soaps are compelling even though usually "nothing is happening." The casual viewer can grasp a few basic emotional points when walking into a soap, when eavesdropping in a doctor's office for example--oh, this girl hates that one--but the full meaning of the scene, based on knowledge of complex histories and reversals, is unknown.

On the other hand, it's easy to understand "ER" casually. I say this b/c I never watch "ER" or "NYPD" b/c after a few episodes, I realized how dull and superficial they were. "ER" is warmed-over "St. Elsewhere" and "NYPD" is warmed-over "Hill Street," and their 80s models were better shows. They coast on the form: the rapid shifts, the handheld camera, the movement that substitutes for action. You can even predict the criss-crossing shifts from farce to tragedy; whenever a neurotic comic relief character shows up, look out--he'll be dead by the time they're finished with him. But when I happen to hear a few lines of dialogue while surfing, I'm always struck by how bad, obvious and cliched are the dialogue and situations, of the shallow confrontational "You don't know how I feel" variety. These shows have no deeper meaning than "Marcus Welby" and "Kojak."

The lengthy excerpt you give of "ER" dialogue proves this. You point out that it does contain several "arrows" amid the gobbledy-gook, but I submit that you'd hear the same babble in emergency room scenes going back to, say, "Medical Center." I certainly remember the like from "MASH"--"Clamp the aorta and give me 20 cc's of plasma stat!" It's an old device to disorient the viewer with a sense of busy professionalism, and the "ER" viewer isn't expected to "concentrate" on it any more than the viewers of older shows. It's still the kind of dialogue you can listen to while getting something out of the fridge, and you won't miss the important arrows.

Many shows, like the "CSI" things, use "visual texture" to dazzle the viewer in a way that doesn't actually encourage concentration; it's just a visual cliche for things that are still heavily spelled out in dialogue, and now visually as well. It's much easier for viewers to get lost in the rapid single-plot complexities of "Law and Order." My octogenarian parents follow the "Law and Order" shows and often are baffled at the show's end, asking each other what happened. It's no "Murder She Wrote," that's for sure.

There's another type of complexity that has nothing to do with processing multiple plots but with what I can call the "deep moment." This is sometimes described as "atmosphere" vs. plot, and "Twin Peaks" excelled at it. It was at its best not as a soap opera of the "what happens next" variety, but as an existential mystery of the "what's happening now" variety, those lengthy scenes when, to the casual or average viewer, "nothing is happening." The dreams and silences that caused some people to say "I don't get it."

Let's compare with film. As Hollywood often makes fast-paced, kinetic, video-gamish action films, they increasingly produce films that flicker before the eye, but in which "nothing happens" in terms of drama, character or depth of meaning. Meanwhile, many high-profile filmmakers around the world are eschewing this for the models of Tarkovsky, Bresson, Godard, Bergman, etc. Filmmakers like Wong Kar-Wei, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Ceylan, Kiarostami, Sokurov and many others make films that focus on lengthy unchanging scenes and extended dialogue, scenes where "nothing happens," but which demand intense intellectual concentration to "read" the image for subtle emotional clues in colors, composition, rhythm, etc.

Modern TV tends to avoid this, although I've mentioned "Twin Peaks." Older TV usually avoided it too, but it was often static and some writers worked with that well. (For breathtaking brilliance, I refer you to the "Outer Limits" episode called "The Form of Things Unknown" and the "Tales of Tomorrow" episode called "The Window," which brilliantly exploits live TV as its own medium.) More to the point, many Hollywood classics (e.g. "Sunset Boulevard") are incredibly rich both within each frame and in the "arc," balancing many meanings and emotions simultaneously, but they often seem slow and talky to the modern viewer. You pointed out that "Dallas" does too; no one is making any claims for the complexity of "Dallas," but what about "Sunset Boulevard" and "Marnie"? Does this mean a certain type of intelligent viewing is waning? Except in foreign film festivals?

In music, we may compare the complexity and counterpoint of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven (which often produces a simple effect) with the simplicity of Satie or minimalists like Glass, which often produce a complex effect that rewards deep listening. I wouldn't say one is smarter than another.

So there is a type of TV that brings density into static drama. A great example is "The Prisoner" from the late '60s, which followed a single plotline per episode but which utterly baffled viewers and required great attention. The viewer's standard reaction was a feeling of being completely at sea, much more so than your "ER" dialogue. One whole episode, for example, simply transferred the show to the old west, including the credits, and never explained itself until the last few minutes. Another was in the form of a standard spy show or spoof of same, in which the prisoner was freely moving throughout the world, again until the last minute. But a casual viewer would have assumed it was an ordinary western or spy show; only the regular audience understood that something baffling was going on.

Certain episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" have this effect also. So, I think, did the "Dark Shadows" soap, which usually fed the viewers a single plotline with agonizing slowness, but regular viewers knew that all these shenanigans with time travel and "parallel time," with the same actors showing up in different roles and dead characters turning up again, were all a strange puzzle that required close attention.

People still think "Seinfeld" was groundbreaking for being about "nothing" and rewarding the regular viewer with its myriad recurring references and characters--and it was relative to the 80s-90s. Certainly its multiple plotlines are interesting. But looking back, I see the same kind of recurrence in, say, "Green Acres" and even "The Addams Family." Close study of these shows, which have started to come out on DVD, show infinitesmal details of story progress over the long haul (esp. "Green Acres"), accumulating characters and references that refer back to things many episodes before. The "Green Acres" experience is very similar to the "Seinfeld" experience; perhaps this was never fully appreciated. And I've realized, in the course of researching "Seinfeld," that it's basically just "The Jack Benny Program" reincarnated in tone and set-up.

There's much more to say but surely this is enough!

best,
Michael Barrett
(San Antonio Express-News)