TV Will Whip Your Sanctimonious Ass…
I was pretty angry after suffering through this episode of Forum, our local yap show. Ostensibly a look at the new television series debuting in the fall, it ended up a gang of television critics complaining for the 5 millionth time that there’s nothing good on TV and the host, the normally commendable Michael Krasney, beginning the epsiode with the “Television is a vast wasteland” rag, a sentiment about as contemporary as I Like Ike.
Here’s my deal. Premising a conversation on television being a sludge bucket is like beginning a conversation about pop music with a take-down of Britney Spears. It’s a cheap, easy target that lets you smug-coast right past the glaring evidence to the contrary. It plays the snob gallery by letting you ignore that you are not only mypoic but wrong.
I’m sure you can find some television programming that feels like wet mashed potatoes. With 18+ hours, 7 days a week from now until the end of time to fill, much of it will be junk. But but for the first time in recent memory, much of it is much better than that. Thanks to cable, HBO, DVD and TiVo which means you don’t have to wade through chaff to get to wheat, good television programming grows thick and tall. Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Criminal Minds, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Veronica Mars, are all regular viewing for me. You may not care for one or many of them but to call them wastes of time and talent is nonsense. To use them as evidence that there is “nothing on TV” means a) you need more than a half dozen shows a week to be satisfied and are a glutton and b) you’re not looking hard enough for them.
Maybe TV isn’t your bag? No shame in that. But television is a platform not a state of mind. What matters is what’s in the box, not the box itself. The box doesn’t invade our lives like a cancer unless we let it. Worried that you watch too much or that it’s easy to fall back on it like an unhealthy ex-lover? Throw a tablecloth over your set. You’ll be amazed how soon you forget.
Salon’s Heather Havrilesky says it well in this feature and this roundup of the new fall series. I’m excited for “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “Six Degrees” already. The rest I’ll test out without guilt.