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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we'll be right back

Just a brief hiatus while I refuel with back-to-back episodes of CSI and Scrubs. You won't have to wait long for the return of my regularly-scheduled blogging...with all new episodes and a shocking twist you have to see to believe!

Er...or not.

Next week: “The Talking Cure.” Television as escape. Television as entertainment. Television as therapy?

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vast wasteland (part 2)

I still can’t decide whether it’s encouraging or terrifying that my biggest complaint from my twenty-four hour television viewing extravaganza was that I developed a stiff neck. I never found myself forced to watch infomercials. I was never mind-numbingly bored, although there were, of course, a few moments of “oh god, when will this end.” Neither my brain nor my eyes bled (although my eyes were feeling a bit strained by hour fourteen or so). And I’m fairly certain I didn’t kill any brain cells or lose any IQ points. In fact, I was surprisingly pleased by the ideas those twenty four hours generated; there’s seemingly always something on worth watching (although I guess that depends on your definition of “worth”), and I was able to give shows a chance—and find that I enjoyed them—that I would never usually give a second glance during the course of a normal day.

For the record, Roland Barthes was right: “Boredom is not far from bliss, it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.” Sure, I wafted in and out of boredom, but moments of entertainment or insight or (tele)visual pleasure were never far behind. That’s not to say I would recommend watching television for twenty four hours become a weekly or even monthly activity. I think someone might have to pay me to get me to do it again, but not because I was bored. I felt mostly content, if a little cramped, until around hour twenty, when I became incredibly, irreparably sleepy and never fully recovered (i.e. never fully regained consciousness). The rules of inertia dictate that a body at rest stays at rest and while earlier in the day I moved around the room and stretched and even danced to keep myself from turning into an uncomfortable heap of stiff muscles, it eventually became nearly impossible for me to drag myself off the couch, which I think contributed to my later lack of alertness. Besides chronic exhaustion, the other hazard of televisual gluttony is literal gluttony: I consumed twice the daily recommended calories and twice the maximum recommended grams of fat for my age and gender in little under fifteen hours (since the last ten hours or so I didn’t eat much). Sedentary viewing breeds hunger—not that this is huge news flash to any of us—especially when every other commercial is telling you to order Papa John’s or drink Miller Lite. One thing this experience did leave me with is a vast inventory of comments and observations from which to draw on in the next weeks and months, so in lieu of an extensive account today, here’s an overview of my day and evening. It was sunny on Friday, when I scheduled myself to undertake this marathon, a fact which I initially resented as I could have been outside flying a kite like Mary Poppins (but then I realized that the likelihood of that happening was slim to none, so my resentment ebbed).

The experiment began at 11:30am with the second half of The Today Show (NBC). After half an hour, I was not only insanely jealous of their frolicking ‘winter-break edition’ in Miami, but also knew the entire NBC line-up for the rest of day by heart. Apparently around lunchtime NBC prefers to promote itself rather than have actual advertisers. From there I moved on to Randy Jackson Presents America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV; I didn’t even know this was a show, but I was pretty impressed by the dancers (plus, it’s hosted by Mario Lopez, formerly of Saved By the Bell—alas, yon Slater, I remember him well). This show, though kind of cool, begged the question of what they’ll think up next in the “America’s Best…” genre of television: America’s Best Carpenter? So You Think You Can Scuba Dive? Seriously, where will it end?

The subsequent few hours were occupied with an episode of Family Matters on ABC Family (another blast from the past), Ten Years Younger on TLC (because nothing says “the learning channel” like veneers, Lasik surgery and a new wardrobe—although I do appreciate the attempt at a mind-body-soul approach to the makeover genre: i.e. better looks begets better lifestyle begets better overall health and happiness), a Law and Order rerun on TNT (ah, Law and Order, it’s like chicken soup for the televisual soul—such a comforting constant of the TV landscape), and an episode of Stargate Atlantis on the SciFi channel (a show I’d never seen before; hence I was very, very confused). The Ellen DeGeneres Show brought me back to NBC at 4pm and will fuel a more lengthy discussion next week about talk shows, the American Dream, free stuff and philanthropy.

After an hour back in the land of the thousand reality shows with The Discovery Channel’s It Takes a Thief (apparently going to jail is a good career move, one that can be parlayed into a reality show where you prove to people how easy it is to burglarize their homes and then provide them with better security systems), I drifted back into narrative television with Will and Grace on the CW (a show I sorely miss) and King of the Hill on Fox (a show I’ve been unfairly prejudiced against until now). From there I moved on to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on Spike (an enduring favorite, and the only time I accidentally ended up watching an episode I’d seen before). CSI segued nicely into Fox’s Bones (which will certainly fuel its own discussion one of these days about perception versus reality and rational thought versus emotional appeal) which, in turn, segued nicely into CBS’s The Ghost Whisperer (which I enjoyed but will probably never be able to watch again because there were too many, well, ghosts).

Done with my parade of crime shows for a little while, I moved on to Family Guy on the CW (always entertaining) and Out of Jimmy’s Head on the Cartoon Network (surprisingly confusing/weird even for a kid’s show or perhaps I just couldn’t have cared less). TLC’s What Not To Wear brought me back briefly to the makeover genre (one reality show that I absolutely adore, as shamed as I am to admit it). After that, two more sitcoms—reruns of Frasier on Lifetime and The Jamie Foxx Show on BET—made for rather entertaining counterpoints to each other, and not only because of the tension between race, class and each of their perceived audiences. At 1am, my television and I had a strange moment of synchronous exhaustion during an episode of CSI: Miami on A&E. At some point during the episode, I drifted off, and, when I awoke, my television had turned itself off as well. Perhaps I rolled over onto the remote or perhaps my television is sentient and was just looking out for my best interests—all I know is that I had to completely reset my cable box before my television would deign to provide me with programming again. The ghost in the machine.

After that eerie-yet-minor lapse, things progressed swimmingly again with an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown (the Bill Nye of food) on the Food Network and learned how to make olive bread, followed by a strange episode of The Jefferson’s on TV Land (actually, I find The Jefferson’s just generally strange). The History Channel’s Prostitution: Sex in the City provided a rather fascinating account of the world’s oldest profession, although I was disturbed by the implication that Greek slave women preferred prostitution to other possible tasks. Oh really? Yeah. Okay. In the “and now for something completely different” category of channel flips, I moved on from prostitution to The Cosby Show on Nick-at-Nite (more thoughts on race and perceived viewership may result eventually) and then from wholesome family togetherness to VH-1’s Top 20 Video Countdown (which was possibly the most boring program all evening—the videos I watched were supposedly from the top 6, but they seemed incredibly facile and sluggish).

A rerun of Dawson’s Creek on TBS reminded me how young Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams looked and seemed in the late nineties, and a rousing episode of Little House on the Prairie on the Hallmark Channel reminded me how idealistic television used to be in the 19^th century (okay, fine, the mid-seventies). After that, things start to get a little blurry and Sesame Street on PBS merges in my memory with ABC’s Good Morning America and Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker to form a highly unlikely scenario: Elmo and Zoe fight over who will marry the next Democratic presidential candidate. As I’m sure this didn’t actually happen, let’s just say that by the last few shows I was more than a little tired.

The stats: 24 channels, 29 programs (mostly reruns), 20.5 alert hours, 3.5 hours half-asleep, 3795 calories and 119 grams of fat consumed. The verdict: I think I can safely say that television is far from a vast wasteland. But I wouldn’t say it’s a vast utopia either. Vast is entertaining—and apparently only boring in the best of ways—but we shouldn’t necessarily be satisfied with quantity over quality. Still, after all that, I’m mostly left with the same ruling as last week: television is vast. End stop.

But at least now I have even more to say about it.

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(NEXT WEEK: “A Helping Hand and the Greater Good.” Talk shows, philanthropy, talent contests, and the American Dream.)

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once upon a time

When I was a kid in the early 1990s, there were these obnoxious Trix cereal commercials. You may remember the general theme: the white Trix Rabbit would plot yet another cockamamie scheme to get his hands on some cereal, only to be caught by a gaggle of cruel children and told “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!” Not only did I hate these commercials because I felt sorry for the poor, cereal-deprived rabbit, but I was also irked by the company’s penchant for serial advertisements in which two or three ads would be connected by the same narrative. (Trix cereal wasn’t the only product employing serial advertising; if I remember correctly, the Keebler Elves and others were also guilty-as-charged, but the Trix commercials really stuck with me). For example, in ad number 1, the Rabbit would devise a plan, often involving elaborate disguises; in ad number 2, he would execute his plan, his fingertips inches away from the bowl of Trix; in ad number 3, he would get caught and the kids would snatch the cereal away from him laughing while the Rabbit lamented his bad fortune. These serial cereal ads (pun intended) were such a nuisance to me because I never seemed to see more than two of them; even though I knew the Rabbit would never get his Trix, I held out hope time and again. Besides the fact that I think the Rabbit ad campaign was seriously flawed—catering only to mean, vindictive children who liked denying pleasure to cute, cartoon animals; I felt so bad for the Rabbit, I’m not sure I would have eaten Trix if someone had paid me—my childhood memory of these Trix commercials provides a useful springboard for a consideration of our (my?) desire for narrative closure in the televisual universe.

Think of the uproar inspired by the spectatio interruptus series finale of HBO’s The Sopranos (1999-2007). If television were real life, this is exactly how things would end, in mid-sentence, because real life doesn’t have a plot and, hence, can’t have any closure. Of course, television by necessity must offer us a narrative structure. Most, if not all, of the plot points in the majority of narrative television shows serve a purpose in the grand scheme of the episode or series. Very little is arbitrary on television; too many loose ends and viewers begin to complain.

Part of this is necessitated by the hour-long format: we’re only shown what we need to know. Can you imagine what CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-present) would be like if we watched every aspect of the investigation? Besides the fact that every episode would probably be about two weeks long (if not longer), we’d also find that ninety percent of the evidence collected is completely useless, all false leads and red herrings. And where’s the fun in that?

In the crime show especially, this question of fun—viewing pleasure—is also crucially linked to narrative. I would wager that the average person would not find watching someone being murdered—especially multiple times, as CSI’s flashbacks often facilitate—very entertaining or pleasurable. Granted, CSI and other shows of its ilk are fictional, which is significant, but these murder sequences are also narrativized (implicitly through context or sometimes through the investigator’s descriptive voiceover). They’re stylized for our comprehension and easy digestion. Without an overarching narrative structure, murder scenes in crime shows would be grotesque, pointless and visually inapprehensible to a viewing public. The contextual framing of violence and the promise of narrative closure (e.g. the impetus to catch the killer), allows violence to become part of the story—entertainment rather than trauma.

On a less gruesome note, the same narrative framing that structures the collection and presentation of only crucial evidence in crime shows also motivates the editing techniques used in most reality TV shows. Even reality television is predicated on a narrative framework—from competitions like Fox’s American Idol (2002-present) with elimination rounds leading up to a finale, to lifestyle shows like MTV’s Real World (1992-present) and The Hills (2006-present) which have tasks or career goals or relationship issues for the protagonists to deal with each week. Furthermore, it’s no secret that reality shows are often fictionalized through creative editing and rigged situations, not to mention the trope of the solitary interviews with contestants/participants that help frame the “action.” Okay, so why is any of this interesting? Because the popularity of reality shows (and not just those in the competition genre) may signal how compelling we find the idea of narrative in our real lives as well as in fiction. We don’t want to see every mundane detail of a reality-celebrity’s life, only the highlights. Who says you can’t experience just the good bits—the interesting bits—a desire which television, reality or otherwise, feeds.

In conclusion, the short-lived Fox show Andy Richter Controls the Universe (2002-2003) represents to me one of the ultimate narrative fantasies offered by television. Each episode, Andy, an aspiring novelist in a dead-end, boring job writing technical manuals, imagines creatively kooky versions of the most mundane aspects of his life: his friends ask him about his date Broadway musical-style, with choreography and in four-part harmony (versus their actual bored disinterest at the water cooler) or he suavely approaches the building receptionist with James Bond-esque flair (versus his actual inability to say more than a meek “hello”). These imagine scenarios, juxtaposed with what actually happens, seem to give Andy real pleasure even when reality turns out to be a monumental failure vis-à-vis his fantasies. Even though his real life is relatively dull and pointless, the imagined narrative of his life is fascinating and hilarious.

Television must by necessity boil down its narrative to only the essential plot points. What’s our excuse? Do we live week-to-week, setting goals, points of contextual interest, creating an imagined framework on which to rest the chaos of our lives? Is narrative—translated into the search for meaning or “purpose”—an ingrained human desire? Does television fuel that desire or sate it somewhat? If we compare ourselves to the characters in television shows, who comes up lacking: us or them?

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(NEXT WEEK: “Vast Wasteland, Part 1.” An introduction to an experiment in televisual seriality and visual/sensorial excess. Taking the narrative out of narrative television: a day in the life.)

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