TV or not TV?

Not so long ago, yet far back enough to be another millennium, there was one certainty most culture vultures could agree on: television was crap.

Most of the product being pushed out by network TV as late as the 1990s was puerile and worthless. And there was a certain snob appeal in recognizing this.

So people pinned their hopes on indy cinema, thinking the likes of Todd Solondz and David O. Russell and others who emerged in the wake of 1994’s Pulp Fiction would change things. It didn’t, really.

That was then. Now, it’s television and its product that gets Gen Y all hopped up, and Hollywood is once again a wasteland. All kids talk about today is their favorite TV series. Their shows have become their tribal colors. Television is a social glue, a lubricant and a litmus test rolled into one.

What happened? Has TV really gotten better? Or have our standards just dropped even lower in this “buy one, take one” era of media overload?

To answer the question, I had to consider when the tide started to turn for TV. Any half-assed pop sociologist would agree it started with the advent of cable and the plethora of new viewing options it provided that network TV wouldn’t touch. For me, it was Fox network that led the brigade. It’s hard to remember a time when The Simpsons seemed like the end of Western Civilization, but in 1991, this was groundbreaking, unruly stuff. No wonder the networks wouldn’t go near it. Same, too, with Married… With Children, a blast of foul-mouthed family dysfunction that took the piss out of every domestic TV family sitcom coming before it. All in subversive, 30-minute doses. No wonder it was on Fox.

Then, of course, things started to turn with Chris Carter’s The X-Files in ’95 and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer in ‘97. The X-Files added layers of irony and wit, but it was Buffy that held a cult-like sway over its fans. The complicated story arc, Gen-X lines and eyebrow-arching subtext (Vampires! Teen lust! Identity!) left a glaring hickey on young TV viewers.

With Buffy, a new audience sensibility was born: one that could only subsist on up-to-date one-liners and knowing postmodernism. In Buffy’s wake came Felicity, Gilmore Girls, Arrested Development, Geeks and Freaks, Ugly Betty, Gossip Girl and scores of spin cycles based on well-worn formulae that have more than a little in common with soap opera (teens in high school, kids in college, dysfunctional or alternate families), all packaged in sleek, hip new bottles.

Which brings us to the second wave in TV’s ascendance: the DVD. Before, TV viewers had to rely on weekly doses of their favorite shows. (Pinoys, you will recall, would rent VHS copies containing two to three episodes hastily taped off US television sets and smuggled, via circuitous means, to video rental outfits here. Ah, yes: the dark days before broadband downloading.) Now, as young viewers discovered the DVD “boxed set,” a love affair with faintly fetishistic overtones began to sink in its teeth: kids could view a whole season in one setting, and often did; they could rewind and catch one-liners over and over again.

An appetite for TV saturation was born. The binge would continue well into the new millennium. 

Thus, for the past six months, we have had to endure young TV viewers whining about the Hollywood writers’ strike, and about the unspeakable crime of being deprived of their favorite shows. (Gasp! The heavens shall take note!) Now that the strike is settled, we can endure endless rounds of online dissection and column space devoted to which shows matter and which do not. TV, it seems, is the one thing that can kick-start a stalled conversation for this generation: as long as there is television, there will never be dead air.

But the question still remains, like a large, flat-screen, high-definition white elephant in the room: Is TV really any better?

I have to conclude that it is marginally better asked: in some ways, and just as bad in others. Reality TV has nurtured an increased appetite for the mundane, disguised as revelation. This is actually, I would argue, lowering our collective standards further. Many pundits to ask: Who cares about the writers’ strike when most people watch unscripted reality shows now anyway? And they’re not wrong. People have been conditioned to accept carefully edited packages of basically raw footage, and this lowers the bar for brave or original television further.

But the main objection I have to the whole TV-viewing orgy is that…it’s still just TV. You mostly get it for free, unless it’s premium cable, and at a certain level, the incentive to “raise the bar” for something given away for free tends to approach zero. Even HBO offerings such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City tended to drift into formula after a few groundbreaking seasons.

Perhaps this is an inescapable condition of TV: there has to be a cycle. Recurring motifs and catchphrases tend to give viewers a sense of comfort (“Are you having a laugh?”). Comfort equals repeat viewing. And this tends to set limits on the transcendent — or subversive — possibilities of television.

But the other reality is that, as long as Hollywood product tends to suck in predictable ways, TV will seem like a golden oasis in comparison to young viewers. They will sit through things like Heroes and Lost because it offers alternatives to Kate Hudson/Matthew McConaughey rom-coms.

Oddly, what has emerged in Hollywood in response is a sort of “third stream” of movies (let’s call them “Sundance entries”) that seek to address this need for quirky, indy-seeming, yet light fare. Such entries often end up getting paid lip service at the Oscars. Little Miss Sunshine and Juno are prime examples of this trend, designed to appeal to young TV viewers whose appetite for pithy one-liners, eccentric characters and idiosyncratic story arcs is seemingly limitless.

There is an alternative to both mediocre paths, of course: people could just read more books. But at this late stage, it’s beginning to seem like books are becoming simply another media option among too many, waiting numbly to be optioned and reformatted into something that will serve the greater mass need for entertainment (films like Atonement being a case in point). In this new, multimedia environment in which TV has regained some prime real estate space in young people’s consciousness, books arguably exist only in the sense that they can be spun into new TV series or movies. Put another way, if literature didn’t exist, it would be necessary for TV to conceptualize it.