An und für sich

Why write about TV?

I’ve written a great deal about TV — three short books on negative character traits in contemporary television, a peer-reviewed article and now a planned book on Star Trek, and countless blog posts and online publications. I’m even teaching a course that’s primarily about television this fall, namely a study of Watchmen and its HBO adaptation (with the latter being the main object of interest for me). Yet I find myself a big exhausted and disengaged by the culture of TV commentary. Part of that is simply the fact that there has been a vast overproduction of commentary and “takes.” Many of these pieces are written by people I admire and are of very high quality, but the sense of being rushed or forced somehow haunts even the best pieces for me.

I would like TV analysis to be “insight recollected in tranquility,” and the current online publication culture simply is not compatible with that. Trying to keep up is the only way to effectively get read, at all. In six months, no outlet is going to publish your piece about how you just realized something about Succession — there’s a window, and that window is now. I can blog about it and my friends will see it and maybe even like it, but that’s no way to build a reputation or a career as a writer. I understand that it’s a privilege that my full-time teaching job allows me (and in many ways requires me) to sit that out, and perhaps part of my fatigue is a form of survivor’s guilt, because there are many possible alternative timelines where I might have been pushed out of academia and seen the TV commentary game as the only way to maintain some kind of intellectual engagement in my work.

I don’t think that overproduction or weird personal vibes are the only factors here, though. There’s a fundamental unclarity about the task of TV writing. Sometimes, as in episode-by-episode write-ups, the task seems to be to help people remember what happened or process basic plot points — or keep up with events on the show without actually watching it. I notice that sometimes people respond to those write-ups as though they contain “smart” commentary, when it seems to me that they are mostly just summary. Everything about that corner of the TV writing game makes me feel sad — though I would totally accept a TV write-up job for a Star Trek series if offered.

The write-up partly makes me feel sad because I can tell that the writers know the task is beneath their dignity and beneath the dignity of their readers. This is not the case for the true lowest of the low — the kind of TV commentary that suspends disbelief permanently and responds to events as though the characters were real people. This seems to characterize a lot of the Succession takes circulating right now. They amount to gossip columns about fictional characters. At a slightly higher level, perhaps, are speculations about what might happen, especially if they are keyed into what would please or surprise fans the most. Though the latter concerns are superficial, they at least bring into view the show’s status as an intentionally crafted aesthetic object, rather than a window into a fictional but “real” world.

But this is the problem — the TV show’s status as an aesthetic object is never fully secure. Even “prestige drama” is haunted by the anxiety that it’s still just… TV. Is Mad Men a soap opera? Is Succession a weird kind of sitcom? Clearly they are. But are they just that? It’s never okay for a TV show to be precisely and exactly a TV show, and especially to typify a TV genre. The greats have to somehow transcend their medium. The Wire was, famously, like a Victorian novel. Except it wasn’t a novel — it was a TV show, with visual storytelling parcelled out in serialized hour-long units. Even film seems to have enough prestige at this point to be an object of aspiration, so that the most poorly-paced blob of formless content on Netflix can be pitched as a “10-hour movie.” And surely much of the prestige of “prestige TV” comes from the adoption of cinematic-quality production values and performances, though that gap has been narrowing.

If we can’t hold firm to the TV show as a worthy aesthetic object, then, we inflate its importance in another direction — usually by turning it into a source of political insight. Every show produced in the US can be pressed into service as a window into the American soul, almost by definition. How this is supposed to work is unclear to me. The American people did not produce the show. There was not an election in which they got to choose which shows would be made. Ratings provide some kind of measure of popularity, which must mean there’s some kind of resonance there. But I’ve seen similar claims made that, for instance, Star Trek: Enterprise — by all standards a failed show, which struggled to stay above a million viewers in its final seasons — demonstrated how Americans tried to navigate the tensions in a post-Cold War world or whatever. How can we draw any real evidence for American attitudes in general from such a marginal entertainment product?

Even less plausible than the political reflection thesis is the quest for a political prescription in the TV show, which of course always manages to fall short of the critic’s (usually unstated) standards of “correct” politics, or “correct” representation, or what-have-you. Sometimes such pieces seem to veer toward a disguised form of “Monday-morning show-runner” — the political prescription serves as an alibi for the critic’s preference for the plot to have gone in another direction. Strangest of all, though, are the ones that want to see positive political guidance from the TV show, or at least political “lessons.” The sense that this is what TV is somehow “for” leads to a related syndrome of lamenting that a portrayal of bad politics will somehow give people the wrong political ideas — because presumably people get their political ideas directly from TV shows.

What I’d like to see — and what I hope to practice — is a form of analysis that centers the TV show as a work of narrative art with its own strengths and limitations, its own genre expectations and standards. This would mean pausing before lamenting that the show didn’t take your preferred direction and asking why the writers did choose what they chose. It may turn out that their implicit reasons don’t make sense or work at cross-purposes with something else, such that we can lament that the urn is not as well-wrought as we wish it could be. Similarly, before reading off political messages (positive or negative) from a show, we might ask ourselves why such issues are being foregrounded.

For instance, in Andor — widely praised for its gritty political realism — we might note that the goal is to impart a kind of sophistication into an IP that is primarily oriented toward children. The same would presumably hold for the HBO adaptation of Watchmen and its unexpected centering of racial issues. The politics are not the “goal,” they are part of the aesthetic effect. And I guess sometimes people are basically saying that they like TV shows better when they align better with their politics — which is only fair, but is perhaps a point that could be stated more forthrightly, instead of dressing it up in this weird quasi-normative stance. There is nothing preventing a show from genuinely having good political lessons or — more likely — supplying powerful political metaphors, nor is it by any means impossible that a show’s politics could have deleterious real-world effects (e.g., West Wing). But I can’t help but feel we’d get a better handle on that kind of thing if we contextualized it in a formal-aesthetic analysis of the show.

Of course, there is no audience for the kind of criticism I’m calling for, because it feels like English class and everyone hated English class for stealing away their naive enjoyment of literature or whatever. So I’m left blogging, or writing for academic or para-academic presses, or just tweeting out complaints about writers who are really just doing their best. You do you, everyone! Everything is fine and nothing matters.