[1182] Slow Burn

It’s been a little bit since I’ve dipped back into my onechannel. It’s the playlist I’ve created with every TV show I’ve downloaded that I haven’t specifically sought out to complete watching. Currently, there are 647 shows on it. These are shows I don’t consider worth slowing down from 2x to watch, at least yet. It’s all genres, languages, and eras. It provokes a unique sense in me when I’m immersed in it for hours at a time.

I think to create anything there’s an innate difficulty. I was listening to Mike Birbiglia and Ron Livingston talk about criticizing other people’s scripts and then realizing, “Oh, fuck, it’s hard to ‘just fix this,” whatever you may reflexively think about a line or scene, and then even harder to generate your own thing that isn’t rife with the same problems. Watching so many different types of things has softened me in how I might criticize as more objectively bad or poorly executed shows. It also has me thinking about the “why” so many of these shows exist or how they manage to occupy certain places culturally.

I’m sensing a distinction in comedies, for example. There’s a difference between zOMG RaNdOm, gonzo, irony, camp, or silly. That can be hard to make distinct, particularly from a creator’s point of view who has probably laughed at all of the above, messy mashing of them or otherwise, and considers them all part of their humor. Setting and maintaining a tone across a perhaps indefinite amount of episodes is basically impossible. At an individual level let alone at a professionally creative one.

Imagine having to maintain your “personality” every day, in every setting, and have it collaborated on with different departments so that it “made sense” or “accurately translated” through given constraints. You have a joke that is dead-on your humor and style, but standards and practices has opinions. You have a setting that speaks louder than any character will ever manage, but you can’t afford it. You have an emotionally compelling and pivotal moment in a character’s development, but it happened on the last episode, and season 2 is cancelled.

I often think many creator’s aren’t genuinely deciding on what lens they’re trying to tell a story. They just go with “comedy” and see what happens. That’s why you can get so many shows that might have different skin, but all sound the same or the “vibe” rests in a sort of middling place where you always feel like there’s more of a joke that’s supposed to be coming , but never arrives.

A show I love is Shameless. Part of what made me love it was that I could say, “Yep, that was shameless,” in scene after scene about every character. It knew its identity immediately, shouted it proudly, and doubled down at every opportunity. It didn’t feel like it was filling time in between incidentally shame-ish spaces. It wasn’t trying to persuade you of what reality was like for its characters. It was training the camera on exactly what it wanted and needed to say. If harder-to-believe things grew out of that, they at least had a reliable basin that felt honest to the environment that might breed such outstanding circumstances.

I feel cartoons went the way of arbitrary randomness. I get this sense after I watch a dozen Looney Tunes and then a modern Adult Swim show pops up. You’re tempted to pay attention to every moment of a 7-minute Looney Tunes skit. You’re invited to barely make-out at all what Assy Mcgee is even saying. Looney Tunes has visual jokes every few seconds like 30 Rock has verbal ones in almost every line. A show like Fairfax or Agent Elvis will build a unique enough visual world, but populate it with a kind of detached observational and circumstantial absurdity. What’s the voice? That you, in fact, recognize what people are wearing or are “supposed” to sound like?

I was scrolling though Trakt’s “discover” page and felt hollow. Another cop/murder investigation, or 10. Another doctor show, or 10. Another reboot. Another spin-off. Another “documentary” taking 8 episodes to tell you a 30-minute story. For the years of “identity based” rhetoric and public discourse, no one seems to have one, even and especially if a new show is based on having all of the boxes checked.

I’ve been exceptionally open to new bands and comedians the last 3 years. I’ve added or followed more than I’ve counted, but at least 100. One comedian I followed is coming to my local comedy club. I didn’t recognize him, and was only reminded when I scrolled through my follows. He, at least once, made me laugh, probably on the toilet. I scrolled through his page and decided he had enough of a unique voice and perspective to be worth checking out. I have 10 or more free passes to the club; it’s a no-brainer. Well, I didn’t have plans the weekend he was gonna be there. Now, it would involve an extra hour drive there, plus an even-later night drive, 3 hours instead of 2, to get where I’m otherwise going. Is his voice worth the extra gas money, time, and energy?

It’s mostly the wrong question, at least for me, as I tend to play things by ear based on my energy levels in the moment. I’m more curious about whether he would say it’s worth it. I want to know if he thinks his perspective and goals are things worth shopping around the country looking for laughs more than the thing he finds himself doing because he can.

I don’t think enough people, let alone creators, are asking themselves this. What are you trying to say, why, and what is it going to contribute to our overall experience of life? I don’t mean to suggest that everyone needs to have some deep and coherent purpose to everything they make. (I mean, have you seen how I write?) If you’re going to get on a stage, create or be cast in a TV show, learn the mechanics for bringing your animation, music, or comedy to the masses…I think you should bother more with why “you.”

Bill Burr is a comedian “the culture” is trying to mythologize. Why Bill? For many, he’s not a typically aggrieved east coast guy. He’s a “legendary ranter.” He’s not merely a funny comedian and creative who has been doing it long enough to have developed adequately. He’s treated more like a scapegoat instead of a goal. He’s what you don’t think you can be, so the more praise and lore you build around him, the less you need to concern yourself with your own comedic voice. Dave Chappelle was that for people previously. Dave recognized when people shifted from even knowing what the joke was about to laughing at the wrong things.

One of the first things that struck me about older, say 50+ years ago TV shows was how bluntly they dealt with issues I think a lot of younger people pretend were invented yesterday. We have these siloed screaming matches about race or gender, and there’s entire series based on those things many have never heard of. The crime or court procedural was dealing with heinous murders and unimaginable violence in black and white. Anything related to sex or its taboos shows up everywhere. You’re never reinventing the wheel, but you should be striving to drive the story in a machine maybe only you can build.

I theorize that people aren’t having genuine engagement with the things life throws at them, so they can’t discover their individual voice forged from the fires or compressive stress. They aren’t literate, so they can’t recognize nor say, “That’s close to what I mean, but here’s my flourish.” They aren’t curious because they’re exhausted by “the grind.” They aren’t genuinely creative, but more performing the performance of creativity in their Tik-Tok clipping and endless stream of podcast conversations.

Network restraints or dead-horse beating that you might recognize on any show, I do think real voices still manage to stick out. I do think shows that tap into the hunger we will always have while we’re alive to meaningfully engage experience altogether will most often win the day. At the same time, the barrier to entry is so low, you might have to sift through 650 shows to find the 5 or 10 worth being slowed down.

I’m decently creative when the inspiration hits. I’m not making a career out of it. I’ve never strived to turn it into something of monetary gain. I crack jokes. I do wood projects. I’ve started writing and creating music. It’s made me all the more sensitive to what is, or isn’t, in someone else’s creation. I get to ask myself if I could say that line, alone, and keep a straight face or feel sincere. I get to embody what I’m feeling, or don’t, as I reflect on what’s on offer. I don’t have emotional reactions to most things through most days. I can bring myself to tears writing and creating music. I can laugh till I cry. Measuring the contrast between connecting to that emotional space and why helps inform whether I even basically believe what you’re trying to tell me through your creative work.

I think it’s important to take as much space and time as you need to eventually “get it right.” The logic and engine of endless content or capitalism suggests that you need to turn into a machine your followers can gorge on indefinitely. I think the spirit of meaningful creation and engagement means you should do what you’re meant to do. Do it when you can, for your own reasons, and if you can both discover and celebrate that place, you’ll connect to that universal that let’s anyone else doing the same thing for themselves recognize and find you.

You might get cancelled, fired, ignored, endlessly misinterpreted and reimagined, but you’ll probably have something we should all slow down and pay attention to.