When I hear a statistic like the average American consumes six plus hours of television a day (I think I might've pulled that from an old DFW essay, "Television and U.S. Fiction"), I want to scoff because I can't imagine my life being so filled with drivel. But then I think about lunch and dinner, and how Melanie and I usually spend that time on the couch. And then there's the falling to sleep to background noise. (We didn't listen to all the advice to not put a TV in the bedroom because it's a comfortable place to be and we needed something to sit atop that dresser). This doesn't account for most of the television I enjoy watching, it's just what's on while we consume in other ways. What else are we going to do, talk?
I say that with sarcasm only because we have plenty of time to talk to one another. We are lucky in that we're able to spend lots of time with each other. We don't venture out to separate jobs. We share several classes every semester. It is rare that a conversation begins "How was your day?" because usually I already know. I was there. So without television and discussions about what we've recently watched, we'd be forced into discussing the weather or something even more banal, like our lives. So television is an escape. It's a look at lives that are perhaps more interesting than the ones on this side of the screen.
Only, I don't really care about the people on television. While I feel bad for Sandra Bullock, I don't need to know more and more about Jesse James and his gross mistress. I especially don't care about the lives of people who are famous because they're on TV. I already know too much about Kourtney, Khloe, and Kim Kardashian. I knew too much when I found out how to spell their names. But I still see reruns of their show when nothing else is on. And I still hear celebrity gossip from Chelsea Handler and her harem of comedians. Granted, this is all non-scripted television (maybe we can stop calling it reality?), but what about the other stuff. The shows that have scripts and actors?
I don't like most of them either. I like shows that make me laugh. And even though I enjoy the occasional fart joke and some physical comedy (I do watch 30 Rock and The Office), I prefer smart humor. Because I like to think I'm smart. I like shows that are unfamiliar. It's tough for me to watch programs that rely on my emotional connection though. It bugs me that I know most of the characters' lines before they say them. This isn't an example of consistent characterization, it's a problem with a lack of originality. It's putting the same people in the same situations with a slightly different coloring. And I don't feel any connection to that.
But it wasn't really my intention to rant. Plenty of smarter people have explained the problems with television and it's not as if my saying it is going to change anything. The question still remains. Why do I watch so much television that I think is bad?
In part, it's about my inability to do anything better with my time. If something is on, as it often is, I'm going to pay attention. I'll probably make fun of most of it, but that just goes back to me feeling smart. (Again, I think that DFW essay is leaking into this). Mostly though, I watch it because my wife likes to. And she likes to think we're connected if we're sitting next to each other facing the same direction. I can't honestly say that she's wrong either. After a particularly predictable show, we'll talk about all the problems with it. It provides fodder for our conversation cannon. Still, I can't watch One Tree Hill. It just makes my brain itch.
In the end, I see it as an exercise in learning what to avoid when attempting to produce art. I try to write the opposite of TV. Ultimately that will probably lead to some starving artist cliche, but I could probably stand to lose the weight. What I really need to find a way for her to be emotionally connected to the XBox 360, but that's probably for another post.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
On "Bad" TV and Why I Watch It
As a writer of fiction, I feel at once snobbish and ashamed when it comes to the TV I choose to watch. The part of me that spends days with the same characters, listening to them and letting them materialize from the vapors of imagination wants the same care and attention to fictional characters on television and in movies and wants the choices those characters make and the situations they’re placed in to feel fair and not sensationalized. The part of me that reads Cosmo occasionally and thinks Robert Pattinson is attractive and always wanted to be a famous rock star, embarrassing as she is, DVRs shows like Vampire Diaries and Greek. I do take some guilty pleasure in shows geared toward teens, and while I’m not proud of it, I don’t feel that bad. I’m the kind of person who looks forward to sleeping just to see what crazy dreams my mind will come up with, probably because my life is fairly dull. I don’t want real-life drama in my own everyday, but in someone else’s, real or not, I’ll watch for awhile.
Television is a big part of my life. Josh and I watch it while we eat lunch and dinner, while we unwind from classes and the hermit-like world of writing. We get whole seasons of shows like Dexter and Lost via Netflix, and I am so ravenously invested in them that I have little self-control, running us through marathons of entire seasons in a matter of days. I am fascinated by fictions of all types, and although I know TV and film have sort of ruined things for writers in a lot of ways, I can’t deny that I like it. When you work with words all the time, sound and image can be seductive. TV loses its appeal (for me) only when too many elements become impossible to believe or the characters devolve into simple tools for the plot. (If a show posits that vampires and witches exist from the beginning, I’m way more likely to run with it than if, say, three seasons later, special powers come out of nowhere.)
They say you write what you read. I imagine, for artists, this extends to all media we take in: what we listen to, what we read, what we watch. Those pieces of art, low or high as they may be, supposedly come back up in our own work. So there’s this feeling of danger in exposure to melodrama, sentimentality, etc. But if I weren’t watching it on TV, I might be writing it simply because that little part of me that craves tension and conflict isn’t satisfied. Whether this is true or not, I guess it’s my defense. And my own goals as a writer are different from what I’m willing to watch as an everyday human. I would be embarrassed if I wrote what I watch. But isn’t that the key thing – knowing the difference?
As a five-year-old, I disliked Sesame Street because I could tell when I was being talked down to, but my adult preferences include some juvenile, flat, not-quite-realistic shows. Here’s my theory about why: most television is not great, and the more you live, the clearer that becomes. When a show leans toward a soap opera format, it’s instantly terrible because it’s a more female-oriented, melodramatic genre, but police procedurals and hospital dramas are really no less manipulative and reliant on too-familiar characters and situations. Nearly all TV is rehashed and dumb. The good shows are less accessible – they are, in fact, driven to the margins – because the general public doesn’t like change, or we’re used to what we’ve got, or we can’t handle sex, profanity, or homosexuality; or there’s never been a real widespread mainstream interest in “high art” in most media but especially TV (if you even consider TV a medium capable of high art). If there were more shows like Dexter and The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and we didn’t have to pay extra for them, maybe there would be fewer “reality” train wrecks and predictable, gimmicky sitcoms about middle-class suburban married couples, though it would take quite a change in the Nielsen ratings for cable companies to shell out the money for them. I wouldn’t miss the mediocre stuff I watch if that were the case, but in the meantime, I’ve got to fill in the gaps. Well, in the words of Dr. House from a rerun last night, “I don’t need to watch The O.C., but it makes me happy.”
The truth is, when it comes to Josh and me, he’s more discerning than I am, but I suspect that it comes from less general interest in TV. He would have no problem turning to video games when we don’t have the Thursday night NBC lineup to watch. I like Community, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. But that leaves Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday wide open. And I don’t play video games. He tends to go more for cerebral enjoyment while I want to cry here and there and feel something for the characters of a show. I like those transitional moments in hour-long dramas where a Matt Nathanson song plays over a conclusion-driving montage of all the characters in their various states of conflict. It’s usually fluid and pretty and emotionally resonating because of the music, and you get that feeling that life is lovely in this way, even in the midst of tragedies and betrayals. Real life isn’t so lovely; or if it is in some bigger-picture-yin-and-yang sort of way, we don’t really feel it as such. The only way I see this as a bad thing is when people then want their lives to be stylized like TV. They run the risk of submitting themselves to a lifetime of feeling never important or spectacular enough or becoming a cast member of the worst trash on TV – the reality show, which no longer offers a fictional escape but masquerades as something tangible and true.
I don’t believe in TV, after all. I just enjoy it.
Television is a big part of my life. Josh and I watch it while we eat lunch and dinner, while we unwind from classes and the hermit-like world of writing. We get whole seasons of shows like Dexter and Lost via Netflix, and I am so ravenously invested in them that I have little self-control, running us through marathons of entire seasons in a matter of days. I am fascinated by fictions of all types, and although I know TV and film have sort of ruined things for writers in a lot of ways, I can’t deny that I like it. When you work with words all the time, sound and image can be seductive. TV loses its appeal (for me) only when too many elements become impossible to believe or the characters devolve into simple tools for the plot. (If a show posits that vampires and witches exist from the beginning, I’m way more likely to run with it than if, say, three seasons later, special powers come out of nowhere.)
They say you write what you read. I imagine, for artists, this extends to all media we take in: what we listen to, what we read, what we watch. Those pieces of art, low or high as they may be, supposedly come back up in our own work. So there’s this feeling of danger in exposure to melodrama, sentimentality, etc. But if I weren’t watching it on TV, I might be writing it simply because that little part of me that craves tension and conflict isn’t satisfied. Whether this is true or not, I guess it’s my defense. And my own goals as a writer are different from what I’m willing to watch as an everyday human. I would be embarrassed if I wrote what I watch. But isn’t that the key thing – knowing the difference?
As a five-year-old, I disliked Sesame Street because I could tell when I was being talked down to, but my adult preferences include some juvenile, flat, not-quite-realistic shows. Here’s my theory about why: most television is not great, and the more you live, the clearer that becomes. When a show leans toward a soap opera format, it’s instantly terrible because it’s a more female-oriented, melodramatic genre, but police procedurals and hospital dramas are really no less manipulative and reliant on too-familiar characters and situations. Nearly all TV is rehashed and dumb. The good shows are less accessible – they are, in fact, driven to the margins – because the general public doesn’t like change, or we’re used to what we’ve got, or we can’t handle sex, profanity, or homosexuality; or there’s never been a real widespread mainstream interest in “high art” in most media but especially TV (if you even consider TV a medium capable of high art). If there were more shows like Dexter and The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and we didn’t have to pay extra for them, maybe there would be fewer “reality” train wrecks and predictable, gimmicky sitcoms about middle-class suburban married couples, though it would take quite a change in the Nielsen ratings for cable companies to shell out the money for them. I wouldn’t miss the mediocre stuff I watch if that were the case, but in the meantime, I’ve got to fill in the gaps. Well, in the words of Dr. House from a rerun last night, “I don’t need to watch The O.C., but it makes me happy.”
The truth is, when it comes to Josh and me, he’s more discerning than I am, but I suspect that it comes from less general interest in TV. He would have no problem turning to video games when we don’t have the Thursday night NBC lineup to watch. I like Community, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. But that leaves Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday wide open. And I don’t play video games. He tends to go more for cerebral enjoyment while I want to cry here and there and feel something for the characters of a show. I like those transitional moments in hour-long dramas where a Matt Nathanson song plays over a conclusion-driving montage of all the characters in their various states of conflict. It’s usually fluid and pretty and emotionally resonating because of the music, and you get that feeling that life is lovely in this way, even in the midst of tragedies and betrayals. Real life isn’t so lovely; or if it is in some bigger-picture-yin-and-yang sort of way, we don’t really feel it as such. The only way I see this as a bad thing is when people then want their lives to be stylized like TV. They run the risk of submitting themselves to a lifetime of feeling never important or spectacular enough or becoming a cast member of the worst trash on TV – the reality show, which no longer offers a fictional escape but masquerades as something tangible and true.
I don’t believe in TV, after all. I just enjoy it.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
On Blogging and Reasons for It
When faced with the question "Do we really need another blog?" we couldn't come up with a solid yes, but then Melanie started thinking of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and I thought of John and Abigail Adams. Sure, it sounds romantic, but we feel like we missed out on the days when you could write letters to your spouse about your perspectives on the world. All that great stuff about not forgetting the women when the men were creating the new republic. Our relationship started through correspondence, but it doesn't make that much sense for us to send letters to each other when we're sitting two feet apart.
Blogging feels different.
Each week we'll share our take on pressing topics: postmodern literature, college basketball, or who left the keys in the door. It may occasionally devolve into airing our dirty laundry, but laundry is on her chore list anyway. Sometimes we might agree but rarely using the same words (she tends to use more). We hope it will be entertaining if not enlightening.
Blogging feels different.
Each week we'll share our take on pressing topics: postmodern literature, college basketball, or who left the keys in the door. It may occasionally devolve into airing our dirty laundry, but laundry is on her chore list anyway. Sometimes we might agree but rarely using the same words (she tends to use more). We hope it will be entertaining if not enlightening.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)