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TV Then, TV Now: The Moral Life of Hit Programming
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20363 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
4,942 Words |
| Author
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Josh Ozersky
Josh Ozersky is an independent journalist, based in New York,
who writes on media. |
It has been forty years now, and television is so much a part of American life that its critics are, by and large, now silenced. This or that show may be criticized, Dan Rather may be shown up by Bernard Shaw, but the old claim of the critics—that TV was a crafty fraud inflicted on a technologically innocent nation—now seems as archaic as Prohibition. It will seem even more so in the next ten years, but it may be even more true.
At one time, writing about TV was a fairly easy business for cultural critics. Spout a few facts about the hundreds of hours we spend each week watching, discuss (later, "deconstruct") the more popular sitcoms, throw in a few sinister quotations from advertising moguls and a martyrdom story (Ed Murrow or Asner, depending on your audience), and there it was. An artist drew a picture of a family with TV sets for heads, and you had an "indictment," as the book reviewers were fond of saying. When, in the 1970s, the fashion moved from attacks on television to defenses of it, the business hardly changed at all: All you had to do was drop the quotations, throw in some stuff about culture and subversion, and your book was now a "postmodern exegesis," which could compete with Inner Woodworking and I Am Third on the remainder tables.
This isn't so much the case anymore, however, and most published thought about TV reflects it. Since the advent of cable and the resulting decline of the networks, most of the basic assumptions of writers have become obsolete. A critic writing in 1973 could feel pretty sure of his material, since there were only three channels producing new material, and most of that consisted of sitcoms. Everyone who watched TV was watching more or less the same thing—which is almost never true today, except in the case of major spectacles such as the Kennedy rape trial or the Gulf War.
Now, with the range of programming available on cable TV, critiques of particular shows are of limited value. The old accusations of censorship, irrationalism, propaganda, and so forth are still true enough in a general sense, but they are no longer demonstrably true. An essay laying bare the dangers of every sitcom ever made would hardly even scratch the surface of a night of average programming, which also includes TV movies, "dramedies," cartoons, CNN, Headline News, the Weather Channel, and so forth.
Still, the tendencies of TV can be made out pretty clearly. First of all, TV means to keep us watching. Doing this means keeping us from getting up. This means keeping us interested, but, most of all, it means letting us
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