I'm sorry to report that Looking for Pleasure will be on hiatus until further notice. I will, however, leave all my entries up in hopes that I will be able to come back and frolic in the televisual landscape again soon.
~Aviva
Update (September 7, 2008): No update on the status of LoP, but I've started a new blog, Fourth Wave Feminism, and plan to post there about television, among other things. Check it out.
Every time I tune into the Food Network, I wage an internal war with myself: do I find the ubiquitous Rachael Ray obnoxiously perky or charmingly adorable? You may think I'm exaggerating about the extent of this debate. After all, Rachael isn't really always on the Food Network, is she? My three favorite FN programs have nothing to do with Ms. Ray: Iron Chef America, Ace of Cakes, and Good Eats, Alton Brown's foodie tribute to that geek-childhood favorite Bill Nye the Science Guy. Regardless, Rachael Ray is still all over the Food Network whether you're watching one of her myriad shows or not (and even amongst her shows, you can take your pick: her talk show, her travel show, her travel-on-the-cheap show, or the show that started it all, her cooking show 30 Minute Meals. I'd wager that you can't make it through an hour of Food Network programming (maybe even a half-hour) without seeing Rachael Ray at least once (in an ad for Dunkin' Donuts or Triscuits, at the very least). Plus, I'm a wee bit embarrassed to admit that I also have a subscription to her magazine, so I truly do live Everyday with Rachael Ray. But why is this of any interest to anyone but me? Because as with Rachael Ray's meteoric rise to fame over the past five years--certainly fueled in large part by the ineffable powerhouse of promotion that is Oprah--so has the Food Network, and food TV in general, grown to baffling proportions, leading me to wonder, what's the appeal? And, is it possible that Food TV (and Rachael Ray) might one day grow too big for its ramekin, hit the top of the oven and implode like a soufflé?
First of all, as much as I myself love it, I'm a little flummoxed by the appeal of the Food Network--even, indeed, my own interest in it. What's so exciting about watching other people cook? It makes you hungry for things that none but the most gifted of us could possibly prepare for ourselves, especially not on the fly at the very moment when the program we're watching makes us most desire the presented food object. Cooking shows highlight the average viewer's own failures in the kitchen, an "I'll never be able to do that" jealously that's somehow simultaneously frustrating and seductive. This is the case for most Food Network cooking shows, even those that sport titles implying that the recipes are appropriate for the home cook--not only 30 Minute Meals, but also Sunny Anderson's Cooking for Real, Giada De Laurentiis' Everyday Italian, and Paula Deen's Paula's Home Cooking. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that a lot of people do cook the meals made on these shows, but chances are they have to go the "traditional" route first by looking up and printing out the recipes. But I'm certain there's an equally-substantial number of viewers (like me) who watch these or other cooking shows without actually cooking anything they see (except perhaps very occasionally). Now, a show like Ace of Cakes makes sense to me because it highlights the extreme expertise of a radical baker and his funny hipster team of fellow artists. It's a show about people as much as it's a show about fabulous cakes. Most people probably have no desire to bake like Duff, but it's fun to watch Duff and company create and goof off and then marvel at how they pull together ever-astounding, playful designs. And his staff seem like real people, the kind of people you'd like in your circle of friends, which is always an added bonus for any of the gentler reality shows, including makeover shows and the like. If you're into the cutthroat, nasty competition of shows like Survivor, you're probably not watching the Food Network--let's just face it, the demographics probably don't overlap much--but you may be watching something like Fox's popular show Hell's Kitchen, which impressively juxtaposes the competitive asshole mentality of Survivor and The Apprentice with food preparation and culinary prowess. Despite similarities in composition and genre, Food Network competition shows like Iron Chef America or Food Network Challenge--with their respective emphases on a Samurai-like code of honor, precision and respectful superiority and a competitive spirit shaded with amiable virtuosity--can't hold a candle to the hardcore, sado-masochistic challenges and failures that Hell's Kitchen's promises and delivers week after week. Speaking of sado-masochism (speaking of clumsy segues), despite the push-pull of frustration/pleasure at watching the preparation and consumption of amazing culinary treats we may never get to taste ourselves, watching people cook is immensely sexy, although not necessarily in the way that, I don't know, Sex and the City or The Tudors can be sexy. Food TV is sexy in part because it has nothing to do with interpersonal relationships and everything to do with individual responses to singular, personal relationships with sensory pleasure. Eating has often been equated with sexuality, so that's nothing new, but almost every moment on the Food Network could easily stand-in as a metaphor for desire and satisfaction: Rachael Ray's passionate chorus of "yums" and "oh wows" and "mmmmmms" on her two food/travel shows ($40 a Day and Tasty Travels); Emeril Lagasse's signature, eruptive "Bam!"; the intense, vigorous fervor in Kitchen Stadium on Iron Chef America and the judges obvious delight in getting to sample dish after dish of savory and sweet and everything in between; Alton Brown's nerdy-cute, Harley-riding, boyish-but-strangely-adult enthusiasm for the open road and diner culture in Feasting on Asphalt (although this last one may be just me--a consequence of my inexplicable Alton Brown fetish). Suffice it to say, I think I may have answered my own question. Rachael Ray's enthusiasm, her pleasure in, of and for food, is both what I love and don't love about her; I can overcome the slight discomfort of her sometimes seemingly false vivacity because that same vivacity is so charming. And exactly what's appealing about the Food Network is how it frustrates and what it lacks. Food TV offers us the desire with little of the satisfaction (except whatever satisfaction we glean from the faces of others, who are also unreachable fantasy "characters"), which is both a little bit pleasurable and a larger bit maddening. Kind of like Andy Warhol writing that "sex is nostalgia for sex," and being annoyingly right. Food TV is always already about being hungry for more hunger (the desire to desire). Not unlike a lot of television, Food TV asks us to want what we can't have and then enjoy that concomitant sensation of our stomach's growling in empty protest. Talk about sado-masochism. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~(IN TWO WEEKS: “Animaniacs.” In which I again use a title to describe a post that will not actually discuss the show it references. Instead: Family Guy...The Simpsons...Cartoons for adults? Why? Why not? Why do we love them so?
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.~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~(NEXT WEEK: “Yum-O.” Giving new meaning to the term couch potato: watching people eat and the cult of food TV.)
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: 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: 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.
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?)
