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.