The Cult of the Serious

Maura had a good post a couple weeks back reacting to Virgina Heffernan's NYT Magazine piece lamenting the imminent passing of Friday Night Lights. Maura's conclusion:

i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general. (the success of a show like lost is probably the exception to the rule, although that show is pretty compelling on a mass level, and it featured many shots of absolutely stunning people running around shirtless and/or in rainstorms. hello, josh holloway!) but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be, much like certain other phenomena that i’ve come across in the day job.

Maura's coming at this from the particular perspective of her aforementioned day job--and in this case that's probably the right perspective to come at it from, since Heffernan's trying to make this about the internet. But what she says resonated with me for another reason. Let me come at it from my particular perspective for a minute.

I don't really know why I've felt the need to be coy about this, but I'm going to the Newhouse school right now as a grad student. (Please do call me out if I'm no longer keeping it real on clapclap. The implicit prohibition on swearing and general uncomfortableness with elaborate, obscene metaphors in the academy has been hard to adjust to.) I've taken two classes so far with Bob Thompson, who's probably the most visible television scholar in America. And while it was refreshing at first just to hear someone talk seriously about television, as the classes have progressed, I've become more and more dissatisfied with his critical perspective. And while I don't want to shy away from calling him out in particular on this--I'm going to use examples from his lectures in a second--he is, ultimately, a part of the group Maura calls "self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs." And as someone who's looking to spend a lot of time studying TV, I have a few problems with them and the particular artistic values they're attempting to impose on the rest of us.

While I don't recall him necessarily ever coming out and saying so, Thompson's favorite show of all time is probably St. Elsewhere. When he first began discussing the show last year, I was happy to go along for the ride. He's watched the show very closely and even corresponded with the show's staff to clarify and confirm certain points. But his argument for the show's quality revolves around one particular assumption: that it works on multiple levels. For instance, in watching an episode where Howie Mandel goes through the afterlife, he broke down a basic scene where two characters sit in the hospital kitchen and recapitulate previous plotlines by showing how a series of lines go by that all employ condiment metaphors, that those metaphors are also dirty jokes, and that the lines sometimes alliterate. He compared this to Shakespeare, as well as to Arrested Development, the former in a positive way, the latter in a negative. He criticized Arrested Development for being overly obvious in its delivery of jokes, whereas with St. Elsewhere, you might not even notice that there was a joke.

Now, I could point out here that this is at least partially because puns on condiments aren't particularly funny, whereas Arrested Development's jokes could sometimes exhibit the kind of structural complexity that would make a grown man weep. His point was, in this and other discussions of the show's worth, that the writing was dense, complex, and worked on multiple levels, and that therefore this made St. Elsewhere a great show.

Heffernan goes on about franchising and the internet and "museum fatigue" (agh!), but what her argument ultimately comes down to is the same thing Thompson's argument ultimately comes down to: that a show's worth is directly related to how dense it is. Not only that, but that density has to be visible and deliberate. It's not enough for a show to resonate on multiple levels; we have to have evidence that the show's creators intentionally put those multiple levels of meaning in there through a heroic act of creation. The show must cater to us or challenge us, rather than expecting us to bring our own meanings to it--it cannot be, as Heffernan puts it, "art that doesn’t need us." But art that does need us sounds like, well, needy art. And since when is needy attractive?

I don't mean to sound like I'm dismissing complex art here. I think complexity, intentional or otherwise, is certainly one level on which quality and pleasure can be generated, though as I imply above, I think it's a little silly to want it to be intentional complexity all the time. But it should not and cannot be the only critereon for excellence when it comes to TV programs. Indeed, it's clear that complexity is not the only way shows can prove their worth. There are too many well-loved, straightforward shows to think otherwise.

Thompson makes the case that the new crop of "quality TV" that's emerged over the last 25 years has fulfilled the promise of television as a medium by allowing it to become a new way to tell stories. But is it really a new way? Don't we often hear The Wire compared to novels? Isn't The Sopranos, for whatever you might think about it, just as much a "middle-class form of the novel," as Heffernan so annoyingly puts it, as anything else? For that matter, isn't Battlestar Galactica? (And in terms of storytelling, haven't we seen this before everywhere from Dickens to comic books to movie serials of the 1940s and 50s?)

I'm just saying that what gets touted as "quality TV"--shows that are, as Maura points out, overwhelmingly scripted dramas--aren't the be-all and end-all of good television. The formal possibilities of TV are by no means limited to the serialized episodic structure. You can do other things on the small screen besides what Dickens did when he was getting paid by the word 150 years ago.

Again, I'm being coy, so let me just come out with it. In an overview of the first 60 years of American television, Thompson commented while watching the famous chocolate eating scene in I Love Lucy that it was not all that different, formally, from what we're still watching today. The scene, he said, would fit right into an episode of Will and Grace. On this, he is most certainly right. And it applies to almost every genre of television. Game shows (which includes reality shows), dramas, soap operas, and news have changed their formats strikingly little from the 1950s. The tone and design might be slightly different, but the essential forms have been set for a good half-century.

And then there are cartoons.



What you see above is an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and I would challenge anyone to find a show predating it with which it shares any formal qualities. Seinfeld was hailed--rightly!--for its formal innovations, and it referred to itself as a show where nothing happened. But, of course, lots of things happened in Seinfeld episodes. There were numerous conflicts which were then complicated and intertwined and eventually resolved. That complexity and manipulation was a big part of what made the show so satisfying.

In contrast, there is one episode of Space Ghost which could be summarized thusly: Thurston Moore plays the guitar for 5 minutes. Then the credits roll. Literally nothing happens. The episode above consists of 9 minutes of Space Ghost following an ant along the ground, until he encounters giant ants and is chased by them for about 10 seconds. Then the episode ends. That's it. That's the episode. It's certainly like an Andy Warhol film, except this was broadcast on national television and ends with a joke about fire ants. (Miss Clap's comment: "Wow, I can't believe they aired that.")

Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a cartoon talk show, and sometimes it was structured as such: opening with a monologue, proceeding to interviews, and the three characters would banter back and forth for a while between. But other times, the show might start in the middle of a line, or wander off to Space Ghost's apartment, or take place entirely in black & white, or be not a cartoon at all, but a re-creation of a past cartoon by human actors. A bad recreation. Long--loooooong--uncomfortable silences were a regular gag. You counted it lucky if the show made any sense whatsoever. And it was immensely enjoyable. Generally, you know what's happening on TV shows; even what counts as a surprise is really just a lesser-traveled path on the recognizably branching forks of the basic TV plotlines. But with Space Ghost, you legitimately had no idea what was happening next. Look above--don't you keep thinking something's going to happen? Don't you keep thinking that they can't possibly drag it out this long? And yet--and yet--they do.

I am happy to recognize that there is an element of taste going on here. Even if I am not as blown away by many of the dramas hailed as groundbreaking and transcendent by the TV connoisseur crowd, I certainly recognize their worth and would never try and talk other people out of liking them so much. But if there was a shift to "quality TV" in the early 1980s, then it has to be recognized that TV cartoons went through at least as sweeping and productive a change starting with Ren and Stimpy in the 90s, and that cartoons are at an entirely different level than cartoons were for the 30 or so years preceding the arrival of NickToons in 1991. Though they might not all be as widely recognized as the HBO canon or the NBC canon, I think the cartoons that have come out of that explosion constitute a canon of at least equal worth. There's a great history to be written--by me, I hope--of the post-80s cartoons, which include, besides Ren and Stimpy and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, South Park, Metalocalypse, Animaniacs, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and whatever your personal favorites may be. If that seems too frivolous, narrow it down to The Simpsons--soon to become the longest-running show on TV--and South Park, plus a bunch of other quality short-hops. Are they excellent in different ways than Six Feet Under and The Wire? Sure. But that's still excellence.

Again, consider not depth of theme of complexity of structure, but formal innovation. In an interview, Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small said his pitch for the show went like this:

We’ve got a TV show. It’s going to be about a metal band, like a death metal band or black metal, I’m not sure -- old-school, kind of thrash stuff. But it’s going to be about a metal band, and there’s going to be tons of murder. And we’re not interested in having anyone understand anything anyone says.

Now look, that is just not a show. Why would anyone want to watch that? And yet it is a fairly accurate description of the final product, which is eminently watchable. That's formal innovation. People are talking over each other, sometimes in unintelligible accents, people are constantly getting killed, the whole conceit revolves around an extremely obscure genre of music--it's like having a show about bluegrass musicians who converse half in Gaelic--and they have found a way not just to make it work as art, but to make it entertaining, incisive, and funny as hell. That is at least amazing as multiple-layer jokes about condiments, isn't it?

It seems fair to say that, after a long time in the wilderness, TV is finally being taken seriously as an artform in the same way that pop music and movies are. Which means that, right now, we're negotiating the consensus critical understanding of the genre. With films, that seems to have coalesced around the idea of the auteur working through the Hollywood system to make a personal statement. With pop music, that centered on the creative genius making masterpieces in the context of a genre of teenage fluff. And with TV, we're rapidly coming together around these HBO shows that, if they crack a smile, are never remembered for doing so, with their successes attributed to single creators: David Chase, Alan Ball, David Simon. But why do these have to be the shows that legitimate the genre? Why, in the context of an artform that celebrated and was built on insubstantiality more than almost any other, do we have to once again fall prey to the cult of the serious--the cult of the complex, the cult of the romantic creative, the cult of the absurdly meaningful. Can we ever sanctify a form of expression without first deeming it sufficiently serious? And do we really want TV to move solely in this direction? Do we really want the standard of worth for future creators to be just these canonized shows, when the people who made these shows grew up on a very non-canonical diet of television? I object here not just because I think shows of incredible worth are being undervalued, but because I love the medium. I love that TV now is going in so many different directions, that it's exploring possibilities rather than closing them off as gauche or critically unacceptable. It's easy to say that we're embracing the discredited simply because we're taking TV seriously. But is it really an act of daring to trumpet the quality of shows that insist so visibly on being taken seriously? Isn't it possible that there are shows out there just as full of meaning which don't try and hit you over the head with it? Why not the cartoon? Why not now? Why not, before it is too late?

Labels: academia, cartoons, metalocalypse, pop, space ghost, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 11:23 PM 11 Comments

Party Party Join Us Join Us

I just realized that since I made this sporadic, I don't have to have thoughtful critical opinions on everything to post it here. So with that in mind, allow me to alert you to by far the best thing happening right now: Cartoon Network's newly-translated Shin Chan episodes.



(Can't even tell you how many times that's been sung around the clap clap household of late.)

The first time I watched it, I thought it was some sort of What's Up Tiger Lily? / MXC kinda thing where they replaced the dialogue of a Japanese children's cartoon with lines about suicide and testicles, but as it turns out, those are the original lines. It's really a brilliant piece of work, both in terms of the places they go to comedically, the juvenline humor of Shin (who has a tendency to get naked), and the way the show's cut to a rhythm of glee. It's sorta like an alternate-universe candy-raver Andrew WK who's obsessed with potty humor made a children's cartoon. That doesn't sound very complimentary, but it is.

Anyway, again, no deep critical insights here, though I wish there were--just immense love. There are full episodes on YouTube if you want to check it out (I'm particularly a fan of an episode entitled "Super Pooper," which nails the Shin aesthetic pretty well), or you can just keep watching Cartoon Network after the similarly awesome Metalacolypse/Lucy, Daughter of the Devil midnight block. Party party!

Labels: cartoons, shin chan, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 10:08 AM 0 Comments

Libertarian Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Comedy Central recently started running a cartoon called Lil' Bush. It's set loosely during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, with all the players in the current political scene present as children. The main characters are the main characters in the original G.W. Bush administation, except with "Lil'" in front of their names: Lil' Condi (who has a crush on Lil' George), Lil' Cheney (who talks like a mix between Boomhauer and the Penguin), and Lil' Rummy. Also, Lil' Jeb, who acts like a dog for some reason. It's been generally panned, seemingly because it debuted as cell-phone-only content, which is always mentioned, and despite the fact that the creator, Donick Cary, wrote for The Simpsons, which is almost never mentioned.

It's a great show, though, in large part because it's not a Robert Smeigel-style one-off, so it can't just coast on the "Bush is a small child!" concept. It has to function as a cartoon in addition to functioning as a satire--it has to work in the way a regular ol' non-satirical cartoon does. And while it does engage in some parodying of its less-respectable cartoon forebears, with its opening credits featuing the Lil' characters jamming as a band for no particular reason a la Jem and many plots being resolved in schematically the same way they would be on Heathcliff[1], it still provides potent does of the silliness and absurdism that people have always come to cartoons for. (Take a look at old Looney Tunes shorts sometime and ignore the fact that all that stuff has become conventions and a common grammar. Is a talking meatball really that much more ridiculous than a coyote building a series of elaborate traps to catch a trickster bird?) The characters' status as children allows them to be cute--which is good--and also makes the offensive things more offensive. So, for instance, in the episode where the gang goes to camp ("Camp Lil' Camp David"), it allows the writers to tweak, revel in, and exploit all the conventions of a "going to camp" episode. The familiar structure provides opportunities for character-driven jokes (all Lil' George cares about is pranking), while at the same time the expectation of light conflict makes the discovery of an Al-Quaeda training camp as Camp Lil' Camp David's rivals (and the subsequent sending of a video in which one of the campers apparently has body parts sawed off) more surprising and thus more funny. The overall argument is not that Bush is dumb, but that Bush is unserious--in a world filled with real threats and real consequences, he blithely pursues his own individual interests and is saved only by a combination of luck and priviledge.

It's also notable, though, because it's the first of a number of attempts[2] at making sustained, character-based fun of the current administration to succeed both as comedy and as politics, the former in that it's funny and the latter in that it has a coherent and accurate point. You might recall Will Ferrell disowning his impression of George W. Bush as making him seem too nice of a guy and too harmless, more like a lost puppy than someone dangerously unfit to govern. Most other anti-Bush humor has been too self-righteous and desperate to really work as comedy, which requires both sympathy with and superiority to its subject.

The most obvious comparison, of course, is with the other show Comedy Central aired about George W. Bush: That's My Bush! It was created by South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone and premiered shortly after the 2000 election (they said they were prepared to do one about Gore if he won, although I forget the less-hilarious title they had picked for his version of the show) and it wasn't very good, having little relation to any of the actual people being represented. Bush was just a lovable schlub, the other adminsitration members were his frustrated handlers, and the whole thing proceeded self-consciously as a parody of old laugh-track sitcoms. (See above about rising above your concept.) Non-Americans seem to like it, of course, but non-Americans seem to regard opposition to Bush as heroic rather than, you know, something at least half the country has done for most of his term. It didn't last more than three months.

It did, however, suggest some interesting things about Parker and Stone, which were later more or less confirmed in their movie Team America: World Police. It was doomed from the start given that it was their cinematic follow-up to the South Park movie, i.e. probably the Funniest Thing Ever, but it did fairly well for itself when it stuck to wonderfully ambiguous jokes about jingoistic action movies and jingoism in general. The rest, though, was their Ouroboros moment, a likely byproduct of too much time spent in Hollywood: everyone with an anti-war viewpoint was a celebrity who didn't know what they were talking about. While we can all agree that Sean Penn should shut the fuck up, I don't think we spend too much time thinking about it, and whatever point they had to make seemed to be limited to a three-square-mile area of California. They seemed far less interested in expressing any kind of fundamental truth or meaning than they did in pointing out how people who are obviously wrong are obviously wrong.

Which is another way of saying that they're libertarians. A libertarian is what you say you are if you're a white male member of the entertainment industry who wants to talk about politics without alienating certain segments of your fanbase, and it basically means you're a liberal, but not one-a them wussy liberals like Tim Robbins[3]--think Bill Mahr. You still talk about things being "politically correct," even though no one else has for 15 years. The theory is that this makes you look like you don't care about, and in fact hate, ideology and political parties, which is kind of like saying you're a baseball fan but think teams are stupid. Small-l libertarianism (which Stone and Parker have basically admitted to) is an almost entirely superficial way of thinking about politics, like constructing an ideology out of Maureen Dowd columns. "Everybody is wrong but me" is their rallying cry, and while that's an undeniably attractive one to consumers from crochety old men to emo kids, it's not a political viewpoint but an apolitical one. It's an attempt to opt out of something no one who interacts with other human beings can avoid. The social contract's a bitch, ain't it?

As usual, we can probably blame the boomers for this. They came along in the late 60s and decried politics based on one issue, Vietnam, that would have essentially corrected itself just as effectively without their help. They've lionized this moment ever since, despite the fact that what was accomplished through politics before them and outside them (school integration by the force of the friggin' military, civil rights, all of Johnson's great society programs) far outstripped anything brought about by their politics of no-politics; they also let douches like John Kerry have political careers. The party system has never been the same, although structural changes like open primaries account for a decent portion of that, and declaring yourself an independent, above the messy fray of politics and too smart to engage with other people's opinions, which are inevitably wrong, has increasingly been the thing to do. People have somehow gotten the impression that a political party is useless unless it precisely mirrors each and every one of their personal views, that unless a given candidate agrees with them on every issue, or even if they're insufficiently strenuous on a particular issue, then politics has failed. But the whole point of politics is that you can't always get what you want in a society of several million people. Politics is the process by which we negotiate the different things people want, need, think are right, and think are wrong, which unless you set up the kind of convenient scenarios Parker and Stone have a tendency to do, are rarely clear-cut. You're not supposed to get what you want in politics, and that doesn't mean politics doesn't work, but that it does.

Then again, maybe Team America: World Police was just ahead of its time. Back in 2004, when it seemed like no one was against the war, criticizing the few people who were (however incoherently and self-centeredly) speaking out against it seemed like strangling the baby in its crib, and to align yourself with a conservative viewpoint that has actually been since proven wrong. But before they were, the climactic speech seemed, well, a little too jingoistic:[5]

We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!

In restrospect, though, Trey and Stone have always been decidedly sympathetic to the left, even if they do criticize it[4], and in this post-Iraq world, that speech reads more like a corrective to the isolationist drift that the Bush doctrine has set liberals on. War's bad, sure, but so are genocides and civil wars and all sorts of things that we might be able to stop. As Madeline Albright said, if we're paying for this giant military, we should use it. Just because the current administration picked maybe the absolutely wrongest country possibile to intervene in doesn't mean that intervening in countries is bad, no more so than adding kimchee to strawberry shortcake means that kimchee is bad, and if we can accomplish the kind of things we did in Bosnia et al--well, if the dicks can do some good, what's wrong with a little fucking? It all depends on what you define as an asshole.


[1] The analysis of which was a watershed moment in structuralist criticism for me, at least as an eight-year old. I somehow never managed to crack the code of Scooby-Doo until I was well into my adulthood, which is super embarassing.
[2] There's an odd tradition of long-lasting political humor that I've never quite understood. The most famous example is The First Family, a parody of the Kennedies released in 1962 that sold enough copies to be as ubiquitous as Journey and Frank Sinatra at garage sales and used record stores. Essentially, the things being made fun of are all as time-sensitive as, say, the astronaut who wore a diaper, but peeing-astronaut jokes are told on TV and then disappear, whereas Presidential humor gets enshrined on albums and DVDs. Maybe that's just because Presidents stick around so long and inevitably do a lot of things you can make fun of, but regardless, it's interesting.
[3] In the 80s I guess this would be "like Alan Alda," which I only know from reading old comic strips and still don't really understand.
[4] Conservatives who think South Park is on their side would seem to think making fun of liberals necessarily implies you're against, say, gay marriage, in which case all my friends should be fighting with each other a lot more.
[5] And apparently endorsing the invasion of North Korea due to Kim Jong Il being a space alien.

Labels: cartoons, comedy, libertarians, lil bush, politics, south park, theory, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 7:46 AM 2 Comments