I want to explore what I mean when I say I want to
experience “everything” by way of popular culture, TV, or more. This isn’t
true, obviously, on its face. There are plenty of popular things that I have no
interest in, but happen to catch because, maybe the mood is right, or I’m
otherwise not focused enough to care what’s whizzing past my eyes or in the
background. Over the last 5 hours, I’ve caught myself “holing out,” where I
find myself falling down an infinite series of thoughts regarding actions I can
take in service to this little “project” I’ve been engaging in; I’m building TV
channels.
It’s another “weird” and “particular” thing that I’m doing that I can’t really
discuss or share with anyone else. The closest analogues are going to be
whatever Netflix cultivates for you, or your particular set of subscriptions on
YouTube. Everything I’m using for my “channels” has been downloaded, renamed,
shuffled about my hard drives, and been a kind of time investment that courts a
confused dog head tilt. The “purpose” also feels terribly obscure until I get
this contented feeling as my vision comes to life. Were I a programmer, I could
probably build something to do what I’m doing by hand in a manner of moments. I’ve
tried to find and pay for someone to do what I want for these channels in the
past.
I’m organizing and ordering my shows to play in order and by
how I conceive of them per my interest and emotional salience. Given there’s an
incredible amount of TV, most of it is only going to resonate at the level of
it’s structure. When an individual show sticks out, I get an opportunity to
reflect on why. I’m searching for thought-provoking surprises and insight into
myself. I just watched the first episodes of about 30 different shows over the
last few days from I Love Lucy to the modern One Day At A Time. I went on ahead
to complete One Day At A Time, as well I noticed Malcolm in the Middle stuck
out to me.
Something is invariably lost in watching an older-than-you show. You can’t
experience what audiences at the time did when something was “revolutionary” for
its era. What you can do is gain insight into how long certain themes have been
on people’s minds, and see how far we have or haven’t come in dealing with
those issues. I don’t underestimate the impact of TV on its ability to mold
minds, particularly with the current circus and psychosis we’ve been going
through with fascism flirtation lately. I’ve listened to a number of Trump biographers
and historians who are convinced without his TV shows, he never would have been
president.
What resonates with me about any particular show? Is it familiar? Is it personal?
I vibe with Bernie Mac and Malcolm because it feels more “real” than most
shows. Ms. Pat is a modern analogue. One Day At A Time and pretty much every
Norman Lear show aimed to have real discussions where a lot of artifice and
cheese would otherwise dominate. We all want to bask in the glory of some lie
or another, even if it’s that our preferred TV show is more or less “real” than
the drama we experience in actual life. You don’t really find a tension-ridden,
yet still happy and respectful conversation with fascists, no matter what the
last episode of One Day At A Time suggests. It, like all TV, leaves you with a
dream. They suggest you can always fade to black with an open-ended imagination
and “perfect family” in tact without feeling the consequences of things going
wrong or staying neglected.
Perhaps that speaks to my interest in TV broadly. The more debased and simple
our media, the more we can surmise that the population lusting for it is basic
and simple-minded. I can’t really stomach most of reality TV, and haven’t been
able to since I was a child. My mother was almost obsessed with Anna Nicole-Smith.
She liked 90210. She’s an absolute lunatic pushing 60, and was emotionally
immature and abusive to me growing up. Does “dumb” TV “cause” that? Of course
not. Could I design a test with better-than-average predictive capacity that
assessed your TV watching habits and the health of your relationships? That’s
something much further down my rabbit hole, but it’s not hard for me to
imagine.
For a good portion of my life, I thought I only watched “good” things. You
know, the preferences of a young boy with goofy comedies and action movies with
the biggest stars. Subtitles? Miss me with that. Slow, conversational, or
romantic things? Boring. You get older, and you realize more and more not just
the appeal, but what each “weird” or “different” or “bad” movie is attempting
to speak to. You find yourself drawn to rom-coms? Maybe there’s an immense loneliness.
Or maybe there’s an intense childhood naivety that’s positively inflamed with
each stoked memory of the beautiful faces tacked to the first time you saw
them. Was your first crush Anna Chlumsky from My Girl, or one of Kevin’s
girlfriends from The Wonder Years, or Topanga? Or were you not a straight white
guy like me? [2022 gotta qualify everything!]
Now, I watch TV from an analysis and almost researching place. If I have no
interest in The Flash, or the vast majority of what DC has ever produced, I
want to figure out the qualitative difference for me and the culture at large
why I’ll put up with the weaknesses and cringe moments of Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.
but struggle, if not almost get angry, at any isolated 10 seconds of an Arrow
or CW show broadly. A line from Bill Maher recently was about not forgetting, “We’re
entertainers, and what we create needs to be entertaining,” (not a direct
quote.) Your brain has been worked on a great deal to be persuaded that a
certain style, format, word choice, and subject matter is entertaining. One way
you can observe that is by watching TV that all “fits” in its genre or style
across time. The Black family, Latino family, Asian family, white families,
rich people, poor people, working-class people, gays, country folk, city folk,
and even dinosaurs and aliens all speak the same language!
You get a Larry Sanders who breaks the 4th wall and then you get to
ask if it’s a case study in subversion or a meta-subversion of the impetus to think
for yourself and individuate once more. Is any real insight or success built
from an individuated voice? Is it just the dawning of familiar clothes and
walking down familiar streets reminding us all that we’ve been here before, will
be here again, and don’t need to worry about ever moving or changing into
something new or unfamiliar?
There are “individual” voices. People stick out from the baseline, and they get
famous or infamous. I’m a fucking individual, whether I can chuckle at an array
of sitcoms or not, and whether I occupy a dozen cliché boxes about men or otherwise.
I think it’s often read into a certain kind of dignity and obligation when one
invokes the “individual.” Individuals are supposed to be “aware” and “real” and
it’s the individual who will recycle and sacrifice their comfort or benefits of
joining the herd to stand for a beleaguered minority opinion. Being an
individual has no inherent dignity in and of itself. See: Kanye West.
Marc Maron, Al Jackson, Bert Kreisher, Kyle Kinane, Jessica Kirson, and others
are individuals who have provided me pain-inducing laughter. Are they not
popular or good at what they do by tapping into universally-relatable themes? Are
they not mining the stories from their lives and shaping them around comedic
timing and language? I barely, if ever, remember what any given comedian was
actually talking about, no matter how much they’ve made me laugh. I’m immersed in
how they’re telling it. I notice the difference in how Bert Kreisher tells a
story from the first time I heard it, to the 100th time he has to perform
it, and how it does or doesn’t make me feel each time I hear it.
We know internally that a certain pacing, structure, predictability, and
familiarity sell. It’s why we buy tickets and subscribe. It’s why we find ourselves
perpetually frustrated when “I thought!...” doesn’t match up with reality. Our
thoughts are continually subverted by different narrative structures ever-aligned
with what’s most entertaining. You get generational trauma from habituated
denial and abuses going unaccounted for. You get generational stupidity from
the habitual subversion of any accountable and meaningful engagement with the
information patternizing your mind.
I’ve drifted a bit away from the exploration of the hole I find myself in. What
does it serve me to develop a “deeper” and “more comprehensive” opinion of
media across ages? Why occupy my “idle” time with The Golden Girls and not
another phone call looking for a referral for my new business? It’s not an
either/or and is a different class of ways to engage my time, but another way
of phrasing it might be, aren’t there considerably more useful ways to exercise
my time? Doesn’t my business mean more to me than seeing what generic caricatures
are arguing about?
I’m someone who recognizes how little interest he has in TV the moment there’s
anyone to do something actually real with. What I seem to discover over most
minutes of most days is that those opportunities don’t exist that often for me.
What’s “actually real” mean? Exchange with other conscious entities. Whether it’s
conversation, dinner, traveling, or vibing to the same tunes. When you don’t
have that, or you don’t recognize the quality of it, I think the TV characters
take on a new perverse kind of meaning. They are where you find a happy home.
They are where you find a reliable and consistent setting. They are where you
find trust, growth, resolution, and predictability that is otherwise never on
offer unless you’re courting familiar misery.
I don’t watch TV while you’re sitting next to me unless I’m trying to introduce
you to something I find compelling; unless I’m trying to share something. Why I’m
sharing it is most often to see if you’ll laugh too or have something
interesting to say about how the drama is portrayed. My TV-watching habit may
have started as an OCD accounting for things I enjoyed when I was younger or
desire to claim more of that “everythingness” I’m after, but it’s turned into
this preoccupation with trying to “connect” with people in the only way on
offer. I can’t pretend to care about my regional sports team to the extent
people do, but the disconnect and superficiality is deadened when it comes to shows
we may have both seen. It was good, wasn’t it? Like that throw to 1st
base…or that comment from the new demagogue.
I think creators need to bear in mind the contexts on both sides of their own
mind. “You,” eager to breakout and make a name for yourself, and “you” modeled
around your heroes and cliches of your preferred mediums. What do “I” ever want
to say? I’m mostly discovering that with each new thing I write, after whatever
I’ve watched pushes me to do so. I have ever-vague, until the decision needs to
be made, concepts of what I value and think I/we need to survive. So I watch TV
indefinitely until you call me to do literally anything else. I know, through
examining my own circumstances, that you aren’t feeling like you’re doing anything
particularly more or less “meaningful” than me, or your version of watching TV,
so you feel like there’s nothing to exchange. Like there’s nothing to protect
or insulate from the influence of our different contexts. I think this is an
ongoing torture and tragedy of what it means both to us as individuals and our
potential relationship. Our obligation to use our voice is indefinitely
sublimated.
In fact, this blog is what I want from all of my TV watching. I want to find
what moves me out or away from the task of building a 150-show channel and
spending money and time looking for programmers so I can keep a running dialogue
of family-friendly and network-approved ways to not-discuss things in my head.
Why do I need their jokes? I’m not hearing any of yours. Why do I need their
drama? They engage and resolve it in a way you don’t and seemingly never will.
Why do I need their structure? We’re not building anything together. Why do I
need their family? You want nothing to do with me, as such. My character needs
to fit into a narrative you can stomach and summarize. That I’m still being
written, and doing the writing, doesn’t work because it naturally obligates you
to do the same. You might whisper that obligation to yourself in private, and
then proceed to never do so, so then it’s any wonder why I’m able to conjure so
much resentment and silence.
A TV character is always going to have the right thing to say. Right for them.
Right for the era. Right for the family dynamic. An arc begets an inevitable
conclusion. We don’t engage the consequences of an abstract “perpetual
conclusion” we’re living within. This moment is that conclusion where you take
responsibility and obligate yourself to a purposeful engagement with the world,
other conscious beings, or not. This moment you seek inspiration, or you don’t.
This moment you’re living in service to your highest ideals, or you’re at the
mercy of the neglected end of so many consequences. Evidence of your awareness
of this moment is in the utilization of your speech. When you don’t speak at
all, you conscript us to death. Perhaps the most sincere and impactful TV
producers recognize their feeble attempts to communicate this in any other manner
than the familiar formats so practicality requires acquiescence.
Perhaps, whether it’s the cheesiest TV show or the most convoluted yet on-point
philosophical digression, the question of what drove it to exist and the
impetus to understand it for how it impacts the culture or individual remains
the same. I don’t think you can understand either unless you understand both.
How does your individual move and orient in the world? What is that individual
over there attempting to move you or orient you around instead? Are you or they
malicious, ignorant, or both? Are you or they consistent, and in what? Will you
allow a de facto ignorance to let you off the hook for taking more responsibility,
using your voice, or seeing clearly the mess you’re making?
I’m not going to find “me” or “my personality” in a TV show. I’m not going to
join the family. I’m not going to let myself off the hook of building what I
know I need or speaking to what I think is missing. I need accountable
individuals speaking to how they’ve brought themselves a little bit more
stability, predictability, trust, and meaning into their day. Where do you think
I’ll find that?
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