one, two, three, go

I saw someone on Facebook refer to television as a "passive, non-cognitive activity," and it was the dumbest fucking thing I'd read all week. If watching television is passive, so is listening to music. So is looking at a painting. So is going to the theater. Just because it's something you can do fresh out of the box, without needing to be taught a skill like reading, doesn't mean it doesn't invite, encourage, or benefit from engagement. If you're a passive television-watcher, that foolishness has nobody's stink on it but your own.

A couple days later, in response to news about Fox picking up a new series, another Facebook user referred to the myth that Fox never gives shows a chance, and cancels everything good -- one of those myths that makes me bang your head against the wall and, God help me, actually feel bad for Fox, because the reality is that in the period this myth developed, Fox regularly aired series other networks would never have touched. But the "Fox kills shows" myth survives because of a myopia endemic to fan communities, which is the subject of a rant that I should probably postpone forever.

Rolling your eyes at things people say on the internet is the worst reason to add content to the internet.

I will find better reasons.

ONE REASON

This is the best time to be a TV fan (whatever that means). Whether or not we're still in the Golden Age of television dramas, we still have that television -- an unbelievable amount of television, in total -- available to us. We took this for granted with remarkable alacrity. Between my girlfriend and myself, we have complete series sets of Twin Peaks, Breaking Bad, Friends, the Wire, the Sopranos, Wiseguy, Sports Night, The State, The Mighty Boosh, the X-Files, Sapphire and Steel, and Mary Hartman Mary Hartman -- I'm sure I'm forgetting some -- and only a couple of those sets cost a significant amount of money, and it's still crazy to me that these sets are even available to be owned. But nevermind DVD and Blu-Ray -- beyond that, we have a ridiculous breadth of shows available streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, not to mention the free, subscription, and pay On Demand options through our cable company.

There is SO MUCH TELEVISION.

Almost twenty years ago I taught a course on television criticism, frankly a kind of self-righteous defense of "television is better than you realize, y'all dinks," and the biggest challenge at the time was finding ways to talk about television without knowing for sure that my students had seen it or could see it. Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective were available on videocassette, but not easy to find -- this was in that long, long age of scarcity, see, before you could find absolutely everything for purchase or piracy on the internet -- and talking about Hill Street Blues, Mary Tyler Moore, Soap, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, St Elsewhere, and Family pretty much required summarizing series and episodes for students who weren't familiar with them.

This was a pain in the ass, and you know, it probably wasn't a very good course, my best intentions notwithstanding. Being a pop culture major in the early 90s was different, sort of the way being a comics reader in the 80s was different than it is now -- it was one of those things that seemed to demand explanation any time you brought it up, whereas now I think everyone has got over the novelty of "OMG the college kids are taking classes on Game of Thrones!!" We were immersed in a certain kind of sticky, elastic, drippy defensiveness, some of which may still cling today, though the environment for which it evolved has largely been displaced through the mainstreaming of geekery. This ties in with that fan community rant I said I wasn't going to get into.

Point being, the hardest part of putting that course together then would continue to be hard now, but for the opposite reason: with virtually everything available now -- an availability so near-complete that it's always a little surprising when you can't find something that only a few years ago it would never occur to you would be out there -- how would I whittle the syllabus down? How many hours of television would I insist my students watch? What assumptions would I make about what they'd already seen?

What, in fact, is the common ground when nothing needs to be watched live anymore and forty year old shows are no less accessible than last week's episodes? Television used to be the weather: everybody who wasn't sheltered got the same kind of wet.

TWO REASONS (ah ah ah)

I'm part of Generation X, which grew up on the reruns of the generations before. For decades, a number of shows -- probably most prominently, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, and I Love Lucy -- were on the air every week if not every day, while kids' shows like Batman, Spider-Man, and the Superfriends were rerun over and over for successive waves of kids. There was a common ground, a common frame of reference, a common language. Friends makes jokes about Three's Company, a show that'd been off the air for a decade when Friends premiered -- and at least into the late 90s, Dragnet and Gilligan's Island were still staple references for sitcoms and comedians.

These days, despite having access to All The Television, it can be hard to find reruns older than Seinfeld or Friends unless you turn to a channel devoted to them - MeTV, Cosi, and so on. But even though you can still technically watch the Brady Bunch every weekend on those channels, it's not the same as watching the Brady Bunch in the 20th century, because it's less and less likely that you're watching because "nothing else is on." We grew up with three networks and a handful of UHF stations, and until cable became ubiquitous, not everyone even got all three networks -- even as an adult, I've lived places where reception of one or two of the major networks was too poor to bother with.

People knew Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch not because these were the best shows across several decades but because they were available. They might be the only thing on when you can't sleep at 3am. They might be the only show that isn't boring to kids that's on during the day when you're home sick and you've had all the PBS you can take. They might be on one of the UHF stations when the networks are showing the news. That's ultimately what these reruns were, for many years - the alternatives to other things, the fallbacks. After after VCRs, we still needed fallbacks.

There are SO MANY channels now, though, and reruns of sitcoms have disappeared in favor of extensive daytime talk shows, court shows, and so on, while infomercials fill those 3am slots. As much as you would think a million channels leads to a billion reruns, every channel seems to produce its own content -- the popularity of cheap-as-shit reality TV has helped make that possible -- and rerun it over and over again.

That plethora of channels also means the viewing audience is more fractured, something people have written plenty about: it's one reason ratings aren't as high, and can never again be as high, as they used to be, something that I don't think the industry has finished adjusting to. When there were three networks, the most popular show at any given time was obviously going to get huge numbers compared to today, when there are five broadcast networks, a number of basic cable networks producing shows at at least the same level of quality and production values as the networks, a couple premium channels like HBO and Showtime with their own shows, and of course the endless glut of minor cable channels that at least nibble away at the shares of the bigger ones. Sports fans have more sports to watch. Reality show or procedural addicts need never watch anything else. Etc. There are fewer and fewer shows that you can comfortably assume "most people" are familiar with.

Lack of a common framework, or changes in where the pieces of the common framework come from, is something I've thought a LOT about, which isn't to say I have any conclusions about it. But perhaps a blog is a good place to think out loud, see.

THREE REASONS

Lately I've been obsessed with traditional pop or whatever you want to call it -- an obsession that grew out of my love of Frank Sinatra and spilled over into Dick Haymes, Nancy Wilson, Hoagy Carmichael, etc. It's a pretty big change from my usual musical choices and for the most part it's not an interest that's relevant here. But it gets me thinking about the idea of the Great American Songbook: the canon of songs from the middle of the 20th century by composers like Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter. These are songs that are almost surely familiar to you, regardless of whether you and I have heard the same people sing them: Over the Rainbow, Georgia on My Mind, Puttin on the Ritz, Let's Face the Music and Dance, Fly Me to the Moon, I've Got You Under My Skin, The Lady is a Tramp, Ain't Misbehavin ...

When you put an Ella Fitzgerald album on, you don't get het up that you've already heard this song on your Peggy Lee album. You're not bothered that Hoagy Carmichael and Mel Torme sing some of the same songs, and you may not even prefer one to the other. What defines a Hoagy Carmichael album is very different from what defines a Pixies album, in other words. All the work of differentiation and personalization is being done in a different part of the map than I'm used to.

What this has to do with TV is it's a way of thinking about tropes and genre conventions. The bottle episode. The misunderstanding as a result of overhearing part of a conversation. The will they or won't they. Obviously the TVtropes site has been zealous in cataloguing these things, but a catalogue isn't a conversation. I'm interested in paying attention to when these conventions are used skillfully, and when it's just hackery, and where the difference comes from -- why is this guy's version timeless, but that guy's version is lounge-lizard cheese?

So there are some decent enough reasons.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THIS GUY?

The deal with me is I'm a writer with a neglected cooking blog (after a while I just reached the point where there were fewer new things to say about cooking). I'm not a writer for or about television - I've published maybe forty, fifty thousand words about TV from a cultural history standpoint, in bits and pieces for textbooks and encyclopedias, but that's it.

My girlfriend Caitlin suggested that I start a blog about TV. We talk about it a lot, not just in terms of what we've been watching lately but the historical trends that interest us -- the way that television in the 70s was less conservative, and the Moral Majority put such a fear of God into the networks in the 80s that in 2015 we've barely caught up to where we were, for instance. I work at home, so I watch more TV than she does, sometimes checking out new shows to decide whether or not to recommend them as things we watch together when she gets home after her commute.

I knew immediately what I didn't want to do: a "this is what I watched last night" blog. There are a couple of good ones - Alan Sepinwall is the gold standard, of course, and Mo Ryan is quite good. There are also a lot of awful ones, even among the professional sites. I think it takes a special knack to have something to say every week about the same shows, even if you're selective in what you blog about. (Sepinwall is really the Roger Ebert of the genre, and part of his skill is knowing what to cover and what not to cover.) I don't want the tail to wag the dog: I don't want to find myself watching something in order to blog about it.

At the same time there is an awful lot going on right now that I certainly have thoughts about. Just some obvious examples, as they occurred to me after Caitlin's suggestion --

The retirement of Craig Ferguson and David Letterman, and the general decline of late-night television even as it's exploded to include ever increasing numbers of white men;

The final season of Mad Men, a strong contender for best series of all time, and the way that Mad Men seems to have shed viewers (or at least hype) over time, as opposed to the way Breaking Bad suddenly became a phenomenon at its end;

Community's probably-final season on Yahoo, of all things;

The explosion of superhero shows across all broadcast networks, Netflix, and even the freaking Playstation;

Better Call Saul starts soon, which is a fascinating idea independent of whether or not the show succeeds;

Lord, I am tired of all these serial killer shows, how do these shows' settings even have so many serial killers, is "death by serial killer" the most frequent cause of death?;

The Sci Fi Channel's recent commitment to "good TV," and my lifelong frustration that science fiction shows are almost always awful, even the ones that go on for years.

I'm so tired of snark, irony, and hate-watching, so none of that will play a part here.

So what I seem to be suggesting to myself is an occasional series of long posts, rather than a blog that is especially concerned with the present moment.

As far as my tastes, and whether they're close enough to yours that you should have any investment in what I say about TV, my favorites are probably not too far from the canon. Rectify, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Louie, Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, Twin Peaks, The State, Community, Battlestar Galactica, Pulling, Gavin and Stacey, Peep Show, Eight is Enough, Mad About You, Family Ties, Parks, Curb, brief-lived wonders like Freaks and Geeks, Rubicon, Party Down, and Happy Endings, flawed greats like American Gothic and Wiseguy ... I'm also a little obsessed with Friends (I have the first season of Joey on DVD).


I love the utter ridiculousness of the Saturday morning cartoons of yore, and my love for animation in general is a whole nother thing. In theory I love the ridiculousness of 80s adventure shows like Automan or Knight Rider, but in practice I can't watch them for long.

I'm sick of the "oaf husband/long-suffering wife" sitcom, a la According to Jim, King of Queens, and so far about half of the episodes of Black-ish.

I love Bryan Fuller's whimsical shows but have had more trouble getting into Hannibal.

I hate the final seasons of Buffy and Lost, was fine with the ending of the Sopranos, had deep misgivings about the ending of Battlestar Galactica.

I don't like procedurals, whether medical, legal, or police, and I especially hate quirky or mentally ill people solving crimes while being all quirky or mentally ill. I do love The Good Wife, though.