Even at this late age in the life of television, to say you watch it professionally is, in some quarters, akin to saying you remain Curious about George. No other medium is so thoroughly and so thoughtlessly reviled as what is variously known as the boob tube, the idiot box and the electronic baby-sitter–but seldom lauded as the temple of all wisdom.
If you choose to associate with it–as, for instance, a newspaper television critic does–count on hearing in people’s voices, from time to time, a tone not unlike one they would use to praise your ability to color within the lines.
Many thinking people–even the ones who will watch tonight’s primetime Emmy Awards–hold TV not just at arm’s length but buried and covered over, seeing it as the enemy to learning, to human interaction, to something even so basic as accomplishing positive deeds with your life. In this view of things, had television been around in 18th Century Austria, we might have gotten some air-guitar motions out of Mozart but little else musical, and young Wolfgang might instead have become an aficionado of science-fiction series or home shopping clubs.
Television, as any U.S. congressman trying to make a national name for himself will tell you, turns our children into violent, prematurely sexual monsters. It makes our adolescents into enervated automatons who will while away the hours staring at rock and rap songs set to pictures between bouts of getting pregnant and shooting at each other.
For all the high-profile fretting about youth, though, television’s actual effects are perhaps most profound in our adults, some of whom behave as if life is not happening unless the set is on.
The event, for these televictims, does not matter: golf, college basketball, the all-Madagascar rugby championships; the newest situation comedies that debut every September and are gone by December, remarkable only for how indistinguishable they are from the failed sitcoms of years prior; helpful shows in which are demonstrated the proper technique for cooking rice, the life-changing side effects of paying a stranger to be your psychic friend, the cornucopia of consumer goods that can be encrusted with cubic zirconia.
It has come to my attention that large numbers of adults actually enjoy watching hours of cable’s Weather Channel, on the theory, one presumes, that you would hate to be the last one to know that it is raining in Schenectady. This propensity tends to increase the closer one is to retirement age, a fact to which any number of 30-somethings who have recently visited their parents can attest.
All of these notions feed into people’s rather visceral responses to the idea that someone could actually get paid to watch television. Sympathy, pity and scorn are foremost on the list, mixed with the tacit suggestion that reacting, in writing, to the tube isn’t like real work and, “By the way,” they ask me, “do you have any brain cells left?”
It helps matters little that the few people who seem to think “television critic” is a cool job are either 10 years old or living life as if they are trying to get back there. They’re excited about television because–whoa, dude–“Speed Racer” is still on, and so is “The Brady Bunch.”
But people on both sides of the television-is-a-cranial-tap/television-i s-the-source-of-all-irony-and-nostalgia spectrum miss the essential point. TV is merely a blank canvas, like any other, and one on which an incredible variety of people get to paint. This is not so much true when you examine prime-time television, as typified by this month’s new program rollouts. They are mostly the product of the same dozen production houses, chosen by the same half-dozen network heads, and their overriding tendency is to be slick, recognizably of quality and utterly uninspired, aiming for nothing more than a dull professionalism.
But when you think of all of television, incorporating the multifarious world of cable, then you come to realize that TV is remarkably catholic in its tastes.
In 1978 Jerry Mander published a book called “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.” It spoke of TV’s numbing effect on the brain and its corrosive salesmanship and such, and it lasted 400 pages. I’m here to make 12 Arguments for the Proliferation of Television, and I’ll make them in only a few pages. There’s another argument right there: Television, which I have embraced in a way Mr. Mander has not, teaches economy.
1. Television is Better than Ever. People talk about the 1950s as the medium’s “Golden Age,” but they are really referring to the Stone Age, because that is when television was new. Just as all the tools in the actual Stone Age seemed like the saber-toothed tiger’s meow, many of the programs from television’s Stone Age seem especially memorable because they were first. But was Steve Allen really that funny? Milton Berle? Were they anything more than carefully shaped rocks? This is not to say good and lasting TV was not made in the early days: the various Lucille Ball shows, the talk work of Ernie Kovacs and Jack Paar, “Playhouse 90” and “The Twilight Zone” and many more. But what exists now is an unprecedented depth of quality. It only makes sense: The medium has matured and grown; the audience has matured and grown. And because of the big money TV pays, it is now drawing a lot of the nation’s best and brightest writers, people who in other decades might have spent their time writing novels or plays or movies.
The makers of the best network series–people like Steven Bochco and David Milch of “NYPD Blue,” Tom Fontana of “Homicide: Life on the Street” and Dick Wolf of “Law & Order”–are turning out more than 20 episodes each year of first-rate dramatic fare, material that illuminates the human condition as well as almost any novel or play. At least three TV comedies for the ages are in production right now: “The Larry Sanders Show,” a backstage probe into the needy psyche of the entertainment world; “Seinfeld,” a show that claims to be about nothing, but is really about the giddy possibility of writing; and “The Simpsons,” whose cartoon characters are more human than the putative heroes of any Hollywood blockbuster. You might add, too, a fourth, “Frasier,” as smartly written and skillfully played as comedy gets, if not as inventive as the other three. PBS remains a showcase for not only the best of British TV but for documentary work of extraordinary power, from the efforts of Ken Burns and his brother Ric to the “American Experience,” “Frontline” and “P.O.V.” series.
What is especially characteristic of our era is how stuffed is the second tier of programs, series that may not prove eternal but deliver intelligent, enlightening, or just plain engrossing entertainment week in and week out. On this list I would put, to name a few, “Mad About You,” “The X-Files,” and, much as I hate to admit it, “Friends.”
What is also new is the explosion of cable and the positive effect it has had on television programming. Many paragraphs have been spent lampooning the concept of a cable channel for every hobby, but if you’re a gardener or an old home nut, you have HGTV. If you like art films, you’ve got Bravo. The old animals-scientists-and-artists purview of PBS has been split a dozen ways on cable: A&E, Discovery, The Learning Channel, Animal Planet and more. The result is there are more original documentaries, about more unusual topics, being made and made widely available than ever. Cable, where a show needs to draw only a million households to be a success, is airing some extremely inventive and delightfully quirky fare (see accompanying list of lesser-known pleasures). And cable also has helped the cause of quality TV on the networks, by siphoning off former network viewers and leaving the hurdle that much lower for a network series to survive. In practical terms, without cable, the always-revered, never-popular “Homicide” would not have survived its first season. With cable, it is soon to hit its fifth anniversary.
2. Television Is No Worse Than Any Other Medium. It is a simple fact: Most people who try to make art, sadly, fail, or at least fail to achieve greatness. That television is, mostly, free means its failures are more noticeable (and, similarly, its achievements are less respected). You think there wasn’t schlocky classical music? Opera was the television of its age: mass, low entertainment. Only the very best operas have survived. So who is to say that a couple of centuries from now we won’t be gathering together to watch staged revivals of “Mary Tyler Moore” episodes, and that television critics won’t be the most effete sorts at whatever digital medium replaces newspapers.
Put another way, look at the bestseller list right now, or the top 10 movies. Anybody studying those would find it tough not to conclude that cinema and literature no longer deserve those exalted titles and that whatever they have morphed into is killing our culture. But for some reason, TV is the only medium that is routinely strung up by the worst of what it has to offer. People don’t sneer at all of modern popular music because Celine Dion sells a lot of records. They don’t sniff at all movies because simpleminded, hole-ridden formula pictures like “Independence Day” and “Twister” make a lot of money. They don’t ban books from their houses because Robert Waller outsells Saul Bellow. So why should TV be the one defined by its “Baywatches” and “Jerry Springers”?
3. Television is One of Earth’s Last Entertainment Bargains. Right up there with library books and pickup basketball, TV gives you hours of entertainment for nothing more than the cost of the equipment–less than $300 nowadays for a good 20-inch color set and antenna. If you add cable to the mix, for about $45 a month with one premium movie channel, the opportunities only multiply. Far from 57 channels and nothing on, as Bruce Springsteen had it, TV is more like 75 channels and too much on. If you add a satellite dish, you have the option of dialing up pretty much every one of the narrow little cable networks you’ve ever read about, from Canadian news to Mexican soaps. TV lets even guys like me–guys without multicolored sweaters and cellular phones and companies that are able to manipulate the tax laws to have their companies pay for the courtside seats–follow the Bulls in exacting, wife-alienating detail.
4. Television is the Next Best Thing to Buying Art. Bear with me on this one, because it’s brilliant. Many people never decorate their walls because they are afraid of making the wrong choice. TV gives you a constant gallery of images, in a variety that is sure, at one moment or another, to match any sofa you can find, even at a Salvation Army store. Those teenagers you worry so much about? A number of the videos on MTV pay homage to some of the most revered images in the fine arts.
5. Television Is the Nation’s Water Cooler. From the significant (the Gulf War, the Civil Rights struggle, the moon landing, the O.J. Simpson trial) to the stress-relieving (the Tiny Tim wedding, the “MASH” finale, the O.J. Simpson trial), TV, by putting a face on events, gives us common ground for conversation and debate.
6. Television Occupies the Minds of Small Children. Some have seen this as a bad thing, preferring to focus on the negative images children receive, from bimbo displays to the fist-and-bullet fests that live on, mostly in syndication. But prime-time network fare is as violence-free as it has ever been, partly because sitcoms are king now and partly because the dramatic series have grown more sophisticated and more likely to use violence not as an end in itself but as a window into the human condition. Outside of the big-screen films brought to TV, murders without consequence rarely happen on networks. And by the end of next year, the V-chip should be in place to help parents out, though the suspicion here is that the device is largely extraneous: The same parents who will take the time to figure it out are the ones who were already monitoring what the kiddies watched.
Besides, what else, short of Nintendo 64, packs enough entertainment punch to keep a sugar-crazed 7-year-old silent while Mom or, say, Dad prepares an entire meal? And the fact is, for all the dreck aimed at giving kids action-figure fever, there are also enough entirely respectable programs that the involved parent can steer his wee ones to. The list includes perennials such as “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Sesame Street,” and newer fare such as “Shining Time Station” and “Wishbone.” Even “Barney,” if you can stand the plush purple reptile’s grinning stage-kid friends, is hard to find fault with: Those annoying little ditties are all about respecting your brother and helping clean up the kitchen and picking up your room. These are fine lessons, and if you’ve raised your kid right in other respects, if there is enough healthy skepticism in the household, he or she, like everybody else, will begin to hate Barney at about age 5.
7. Television Is Everywhere. Airport lobbies. Bus stations. At the Laundromat. In the backs of the most advanced minivans and embedded in the seat back in front of you on the most modern airplanes. In every room of many houses you visit. Throughout the stands at Bears games, the better to allow people to see miniaturized close-up versions of the crunching they have just seen live. At electronics superstores, where the question is begged and begged and begged: Doesn’t everybody have a TV already? (And, by the way, where is a salesman?)
We all know from playground theology and grammar school science that only two other things are everywhere: God and water. God, as the deity’s centuries of interpreters would have it, is good. Water is so good people are willing to pay $1.25 for 16 ounces of it at convenience stores, and in a world where entire store aisles are devoted to cleaning chemicals, only one substance, H2O, is “the universal solvent.” It follows then, that if television is everywhere, television is also good. Really good.
8. Television Is the Great Socializer. A significant part of the mores learned by young ones is picked up by watching TV. There is a curious contradiction at work there. As much as writers for television like to tempt good taste by slamming sexual innuendo into even the Friday night family blocs, and as many shows as there are about divorced moms and bumbling dads and sexually charged 20-somethings, television, big picture, still mostly reaffirms the values of “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best.” If you doubt this, find a sitcom where the episode’s Lesson Learned is to steal from your parents and cheat on your tests. Find a cop show where the bad guys mostly get away with it.
TV can be a teaching tool, too, as with the Ellen Degeneres closet-vacating of last spring. The segment of America that fears gay people learned that an actual, in-the-flesh lesbian can be as non-threatening as the aw-shucks star of “Ellen.”
Where television falls woefully short as a socializer is in its depiction of minorities. Young black or Latin or Asian kids searching for someone like them on TV have to work really hard at it. This is probably not because of deliberate racism: No network would fail to open its vaults for another “Cosby.” This is because TV executives are still white and mostly male and the programs that tend to speak to them are, in the best interpretation, the ones that reflect their experience, or are, in the more cynical interpretation, the ones that seem likely to grab the majority population.
TV doesn’t teach us just about our own culture, but about scores of others as well. Much of what we learn about the world comes from TV, as channels like Travel and Discovery and TV Food and yes, even Weather, bring distant lands and exotic items across our doorsteps. (Network news used to do this, but that’s another article.)
9. Television Is a Really Good Friend. It does not borrow money. It does not borrow clothes. It goes away when you tell it to. It does not come over unannounced. It eats very little. It is always ready to try to amuse you. It rarely breaks down. It can make you feel connected to the world, even if you are new to a city distant from your home. The danger of this, of course, is when it becomes a substitute for real connections to the world. But that is true of anything done to excess, from reading to constructing elaborate scale-model representations of 18th-Century frigates.
10. Without Television, There Would Be No Local Television News. Also missing: infomercials, “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and other funny-in-spite-of-themselves entertainments. By offering such a wide range of fare, TV does a splendid job developing critical skills.
11. Television Is a Boon to Literacy. I’m not talking only about Oprah’s Book Club here, although I suppose I must allow that. I am not talking just about TV’s tendency to make movies out of books like “The Odyssey” and “Gulliver’s Travels” and Stephen King’s “The Shining,” which then spur interest in the source material, although I suppose I must allow that. I am talking about how some of our greatest (by which I mean, of course, “bestselling”) authors, in the last few years, have proven to be television comedians. Whether Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen Degeneres and Paul Reiser will prove to be the Robert Benchleys and S.J. Perelmans of our times, only history will tell.
12. Television Is Joining the Modern Era. It’s been a slow climb up the technology scale for TV, which took a couple of decades to fully embrace color and to perfect perhaps the most important TV implement, the remote control device. On the horizon now are HD, or High Definition, TV, which threatens to reveal Dan Rather for the 66-year-old man he is and TV stages for the cheap veneer they are, even as it turns the screen size to a height-to-width ratio more closely resembling a movie screen’s.
It seems inevitable that the home computer and the TV set will merge, in the not-too-distant future, into an all-in-one infotainment appliance. It’s likely people will be able to call up TV programs on demand, rather than being dictated to by a network scheduler. Some people, on this appliance, will bounce back and forth between programming and the helter-skelter offerings of the Internet. But given the realities of the Internet–it is an exceptionally ill-organized library full of books, pamphlets and graffiti by professionals and amateurs alike–it is hard to imagine there ceasing to be a demand for something approximating the current television model, in which a programming service offers fare that it has shaped to attract a mass audience.
This, at last, is the best argument for the proliferation of television. Any other viewpoint is futile. Households now average more than two TV sets per. Children of the last couple of generations have grown up accepting it as a fact of life. Networks, despite the rise of cable and their decreasing audience share, reap more money from advertising than ever before, because TV still remains the best way to reach the most people. Television certainly understands you. The trick is to understand and control it, rather than letting it control you.
