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