america's most shocking

While I thoroughly, if a wee bit begrudgingly, enjoyed every moment of the new rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of its subplots was especially hilarious, keeping me in stitches for hours after the film ended. In the film, the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend, the eponymous Sarah Marshall, is the star of a hit TV crime drama called Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime (a clear send-up of the very real and likewise redundantly-titled CSI: Crime Scene Investigation). The clips of this fictional show were so hysterical—characters oozing misplaced sensuality over dead bodies in the morgue, dialogue full of horrible puns, outrageously unrealistic sexualized crimes, and dramatic music emphasizing each new twist with a knowing ba-BUM — that I’d probably be willing to pay to see the film again just for those brief snippets. Except, I don’t really need to go to all the trouble (and expense) of trekking back to the theatre. If I have a hankering for spectacularly over-the-top sexually-charged dramas, all I need to do is turn on my television, sit comfortably on my couch and wait. Significantly, the satirical Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime from Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a pretty reasonable facsimile, maybe ratcheted up only a notch or two, of what’s actually on these days (including shows that I used to be able to take seriously that have since jumped the shark—you know who you are…coughERcough). To add insult to injury, as the film’s closing credits roll, a preview for another fake show, Animal Psychic, combines the premise of Ghost Whisperer and with that of Dog Whisperer, resulting in a concept that is both laughably outrageous and not too far from the peculiarity of very real offerings about, say, immortal detectives or heroic dolphins (to mix my contemporary and historical examples). Like Karen from Will and Grace often says, slurred with drink: “It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.”

Obviously, sometimes peculiar concepts work and they work quite well. Shows like New Amsterdam or Flipper, while I only barely remember the latter and have admittedly not yet had a chance to watch the former, are established on slightly absurd fantasies. But that’s all fine and good. It’s one of the wonderful things about television: it allows us to live comfortably in the realm of fantasy for an hour or two, where we can imagine a world in which we may befriend dolphins or can live forever. As far as I’m concerned, comedies have free-rein as far as ridiculous plot twists go, and dramas should be able to operate under whatever guidelines govern the creator’s vision for the show’s world, however fantastical that premise may be.

As far as central tropes go, most things are fair game. For example, it’s ridiculous to imagine that tiny little Cabot Cove is so full of criminals; at the rate of murder per capita established on Murder She Wrote, everyone in the town would be dead in a few years. But these are the types of scenarios we have to accept in order to enjoy televisual make-believe and find pleasure in each episodic storyline. Especially in the procedural drama, a diverse offering of compelling plots depends on an already-established, set foundation of inalienable facts about the show, its characters and their lives—even if it’s Nancy Drew being 18 years old for over seventy years.

So, I’m not interested in quibbling about the premises of shows, although I suppose someone might want to take that on as a pet peeve (but, do we really want to watch shows about real life? Really? I don’t think so.). Rather, I’ve been noticing an increasingly trend lately toward plots which exceed the bounds of the even the most carefully-constructed drama’s pre-set conventions. Older, long-running, popular shows—ER, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (the original Law and Order has somehow remained pretty even keel), and CSI (although more so its spin-offs than the original) seem to be especially guilty of this. Characters act completely out of character completely out of the blue, relationships are upset and/or established (or both) at every possible opportunity, certain characters experience more traumas and/or dangerous situations in one season than any person does in a lifetime, and every week is the “most shocking night on television” or an episode so incredible that “you’ve never seen anything like it” or something “you have to see to believe.” Gone are the days when realistic character upheavals could sustain an entire season of well-developed and emotionally resonant plots—like Detective Christine Cagney suffering date rape and struggling with alcoholism in the final season of Cagney and Lacey. This wasn’t tackled in one or two action-packed episodes; her pain filtered through every day interactions in a dozen episodes, little moments of vulnerability as she tried to maintain a grip on her job and her professionalism. And this is just what we might expect of tough, stoic Cagney when her personality is established in the early seasons.

This is not to say that all contemporary television shows are guilty of this pandering to spectacle. But when Doctor Romano had his arm cut off by a helicopter blade in Season 9 of ER only to be killed by a different helicopter a season later, I had to say enough is enough. What, are we to believe that helicopters are out to kill Romano? And how many times can Abby and Luka get together and break up and date other people and get back together and have a baby (who is, by the way, born premature and almost dies) and then almost get engaged but not and then definitely get engaged and then plan one wedding but have another? I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.

I know I’m picking on ER a little, but I could have just as easily chosen another whipping boy to make my case. For example, two weeks ago on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Detective Olivia Benson went on an undercover operation in prison and was beaten and very nearly raped and killed by a corrupt prison officer, last week her secret relationship with a reporter ended when he was suspected of being a leak in a criminal case, and this week, if the previews are to be believed, she’s going to be kidnapped by a deranged Robin Williams. What a month for Detective Benson!

We need to put a moratorium on the never-ending, lightning-apparently-does-strike-the-same-place-twice plot twists or soon these oft-maligned characters are going to come out of the TV and throttle their creators. Albert Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe. Neither do TV writers. But some of them are playing Russian Roulette.

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(NEXT WEEK: “Yum-O.” Giving new meaning to the term couch potato: watching people eat and the cult of food TV.)

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imho*

In the spirit of true self-reflexivity—taking its point of origin from my recent post about therapy—I decided to spend a little while thinking about television writing, a real navel-gazing sort of exercise. While I laid out some semblance of a rationale (manifesto?) for my own engagement with television in my inaugural entry of Looking for Pleasure, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how, what and why other people write about the small screen. Also, it’s good to keep an eye on the “competition.” (Although what exactly we’re competing for, I’ll never know. But, I’m probably losing. So. Yeah.) In any case, I looked at three representative examples from three very different sources in the blogosphere: John W. Jordan writing a published, peer-reviewed online article in the FlowTV journal about the end of the writer’s strike; James Poniewozik, Time magazine’s television critic, writing about the first post-strike episodes of 30 Rock and The Office on his blog Tuned In; and Michael N. weecapping the aforementioned post-strike 30 Rock episode over at Television Without Pity.

First, we have Jordan at FlowTV lamenting television’s inability to address its absence and instead highlighting conspicuous fortitude at expressing self-appreciation for its own presence:

As the networks have begun announcing return dates for shows that have been off-air since the early days of the strike – including some of my favorites, like The Office and 30 Rock – I find it curious how television is treating the issue of these shows’ absence. The first time the networks really seemed to have acknowledged the fact that these shows have been gone has been in their celebratory announcement of their return. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to frame this in terms of how their absence is being erased by the networks through the irony of celebrating their return. A non-acknowledged hole has now been filled, apparently to everyone’s rejoicing. The memory of the strike is overcome by the nostalgia of our return to pre-strike television. I know I watch a lot of TV, but that makes my head hurt.

This makes my head hurt, too. I completely understand what Jordan is getting at: the lack evoked by television’s post-strike ellipsis of the actual strike; television is just back, but refuses to acknowledge why it was gone in the first place. However, I’m not exactly sure I’m on board with his tone. Read the whole article and you’ll realize that Jordan is berating television (or, I guess, the producers and programmers and network execs, since you can’t really berate an object) for dancin’ a little sidestep à la the song sung by the politician in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (my words, not his—I’ve just been trying to find a way to use TBLWiT in an analogy somehow and this seemed apt). Television executives, like politicians, are extraordinarily good at eliding the truth—we need look no further for proof than the sketchy negotiations during the strike itself—but is this really all that curious? Sure, television is a medium that depends on its audience’s fidelity to keep it chugging along, but politicians also rely on their constituencies and that doesn’t make them any less likely to gloss over unpleasantness. Actually, just the opposite is usually the case. Call me cynical, but I would have found it curious if television had acknowledged the strike as something more than an unfortunate unnamed hole in its programming. People are easily convinced to forget about things they wished hadn’t happened in the first place, so why would execs acknowledge their tyrannical grasp on the industry and its workers when it’s far easier to unequivocally celebrate television’s “return?” Aren’t we happily convinced to celebrate with them?

Case in point, Time writer Poniewozik’s review of the “welcome back” episodes of The Office and 30 Rock, in which he writes a comparative analysis of the two shows and only briefly hints at the ramifications of their return:

To overgeneralize a little, 30 Rock is mainly about jokes and The Office is mainly about characters. Neither approach is inherently better than the other. But last night I found myself laughing louder at 30 Rock, while enjoying The Office more overall. […] I'll be interested to see how the rest of the strike-shortened season plays out, though. Unlike 30 Rock—which is a hybrid of serial and standalone elements—I'd think The Office would suffer more from losing episodes in which to develop the season's arc, and I worry season 4 will seem rushed from here on out.

Poniewozik makes clear his adoration for both The Office and 30 Rock (as I nod in agreement) and provides compelling reasoning for how these shows can sustain completely different audience types and still hold together as a back-to-back pair in NBC’s line-up. I really like his style, although he is a critic through and through, which is necessarily very different from Jordan’s academic perspective. Poniewozik, as someone paid to review television shows, has to be invested in its return, rather than its absence.

And, last but not least, one more example from Michael N’s 30 Rock weecap at Television Without Pity:

[…] this doesn't look like the Discovery Channel. Wait, she's still talking. Tina Fey wants to know who is behind the quote in the paper and the room full of staffers shrug in unison. Now Jonathan walks in and asks her to go see Jack Donaghy in his office. Alec Baldwin? She demands a fess-up from the staff before she goes, insisting this time she will not be taking the bullet for anyone. Frank denotes: "This is bad. Real bad," and then the TV in the room that is set that night's finale of MILF Island focuses in as the MILF Island host squarely says "Prepare for the craziest night of television of your life." Wait a minute ... the strikes over? The strikes over! The strikes ova!!!

First expressing false confusion and then very real glee at the thought that he’s watching a new episode of 30 Rock rather than the Discovery Channel (used to fill the strike-shaped void), Michael somehow manages to simultaneously merge the varying foci of Jordan and Poniewozik’s posts while doing something completely different. The rest of the weecap outlines the episode while commenting on its efficacy, humor, narrative, etc., but he clearly signals through his enthusiasm that television is not alone in its celebratory post-strike amnesia. Writer’s strike? What writer’s strike?

The end of the writer’s strike as the return of the prodigal medium. As we all shout “hoorah, television is back!” (and kill fatted calves), the writers have been here all along, doing what they felt was right. When do we celebrate that? And, as fellow writers who rely on television to do what we like do to, whose side are we on?

*IMHO is the netspeak acronym for “in my humble opinion.”

[Author’s Note: Writing about writing about television proved much more difficult than I thought it would be, although I can’t say why. In any case, many apologies for posting this a week later than planned.]

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(NEXT WEEK: “America’s Most Shocking.” Is it just me or does television get more and more dramatic every three seconds?)

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it's not tv

Last week, in my discussion of television and/as therapy, I forgot to mention an important facet of this analogy. That is, that in psychoanalysis, in order to facilitate transference, the therapist becomes (whether subconsciously or consciously) the “subject supposed to know” in the eyes of the patient. This is not to say that the therapist is actually in the know or knows deep secrets about the analysand, but that the analysand begins to believe in the therapist’s superior facility over the patient’s unconscious thoughts. In regards to television, I could posit that shows are sometimes approached as more veracious than real life (who hasn’t thought, at least fleetingly, “well that’s not how couples act on [pick you show of choice], so we must be doing something wrong”); however, while television may approach that “subject supposed to know” status, it’s really the internet that’s already there. Or is it just me who gets angry with Google if it can’t find exactly what I’m looking for? We expect a lot from the internet as a form of collective intelligence: to know what we’re looking for, to have solutions to our problems, to understand our perspective, etc… But I’m starting to get off-track here, because we’ve come to expect more and more from television too these days. In fact, we often expect television to not be television at all. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Traditionally, television is a commercial medium and a serial one. Among a few other things, I would argue that television’s episodic structure—the cycle of shows, one after the other, along with the weekly repetition of new episodes of the same show—defines it as a medium. Obviously, there are a few exceptions to the weekly configuration: television movies, news programs (usually daily), competitions (i.e. American Idol’s extra elimination shows), rerun marathons, etc. However, even these exceptions fall within the overarching cyclicality of the medium as a whole, and most shows of a certain ilk (read: narrative shows) stick to a weekly format.

Lucky for HBO, then, that “it’s not TV” (as its tagline proclaims), so it can undermine some of the very qualities which make television television. First, there are no commercials, which is certainly part of the appeal of pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime. Secondly, HBO can offer shows like In Treatment, which I mentioned last week and which attempts to imitate daily life more closely than most narrative shows. Instead of a once-a-week condensation of goings-on in the character’s lives, In Treatment airs five nights a week for half-an-hour, showing a slightly abridged version (25 minutes instead of the conventional 50) of a therapist’s session with his patients. Each day's show corresponds to a different patient and on Fridays the therapist, Paul (played by Gabriel Byrne), goes to his own therapy session. Thus, In Treatment eschews the weekly televisual format in favor of the professional therapeutic format—the same patient only once a week, but different patients each day, offering us more fully developed characters and long blocks of time in which to contemplate them without the distancing breaks of either parallel action or commercials.

Of course, even before In Treatment, there were ways to mold television to our will, to subvert both the episodic structure and the commercial interruptions. The earliest manifestations of this subversion came in the rather clumsy form of television shows on VHS, which quickly (thankfully) evolved into TV-on-DVD and On Demand (digital cable’s answer to popular “commercial-free” networks like HBO and perhaps an attempted stop-gap against DVD sales curbing actual television viewing). And, of course, who can forget DVR and the beloved TiVo.

TiVo, especially, has enough cultural relevance that it’s still routinely mentioned in television shows themselves—which I don’t doubt has something to do with strategic, wily product placement. Unlike TV-on-DVD and Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature—both industries which could theoretically give people a reason to cancel their cable—TiVo necessitates a cable subscription and indulges viewers with that ever-seductive mirage of choice. Instead of being forced to watch whatever’s on TV, have to schedule yourself according to certain shows, or, god forbid, have to set a cumbersome VCR, with one click of a button TiVo records what you want when you want it and may even suggest other shows based on what it thinks you like.

In an amusing episode from Sex and the City’s final season (1997-2003, episode 6.2, “Great Sexpectations"– another HBO show, this one used the pay cable, not-TV system to its advantage by showing a fair amount of nudity rather than altering episodic convention), the character of Miranda panics when her nanny accidentally deletes her entire TiVo hard drive. Still recovering from a break-up with the father of her child, Miranda can’t quite fathom losing the only thing that’s there for her whenever she needs it in whatever way she wants it: her TiVo. Eventually, Steve, Miranda’s ex, fixes her TiVo much to her relief, and all is well with the world. However, TiVo’s seductive allure remains a constant, prompting Alex Richmond over at Television Without Pity to explore her own love of TiVo in her recap of the aforementioned episode:

TiVo is an amazing invention; it's really taught me a lot. I'm working on a story called "Lessons TiVo Has Taught Me," which include being selective, learning to let go, when to dump shit you know you don't really need, and really focusing on something. When I first got TiVo, I felt so liberated; I was forever freed from commercials, and no longer a slave to the delayed instant gratification of watching the news live. I can now watch a half-hour show in twenty minutes by zapping the ads, but now if I watch TV and am on the internet at the same time, I know I'm missing a lot. So, because of TiVo, I choose carefully and know when to move on. It's changed me.

I’m personally torn about the TiVo/DVR technology. On the one hand, how wonderful to be able to walk up to my television, sit down, and watch exactly what I’m in the mood for when I’m in the mood for it. On the other hand, how tragic to lose the adventure of flipping channels, the chance operations of what’s on now that I associate with television and, indeed, with some of the pleasure I get out of the medium. And if a machine’s making all my choices for me—what I might like to watch, what’s ready to be discarded, etc.—what’s the point of having all those other options? Television spoils us for choice, but doesn’t TiVo just encourage us back into a bunch of niche markets?

Of course, then there are new internet-based programs like Hulu, which serve as repositories for all the legal streaming video of television shows, films and favorite clips provided by various networks and production companies. This television-on-demand-online may be my favorite it’s-not-TV format because it keeps my television adventure—flipping channels on the actual set—intact, while allowing me the choice to watch something I really want to watch when I want to watch it. The best of both worlds. But if television isn’t only on television anymore, is it still television? Is this a “if a tree falls in a forest” kind of question? (Does anyone care?) Or do we have to come up with a new name, like, webervision? Telenet? Intertelevisinet?

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(NEXT WEEK: “IMHO,” in which I engage in a self-reflexive exploration of television bloggers—how we write about what we see.)

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