Up To My Eyebrows In Television
Beginning my “pre-production phase” for my book on television beyond formula, as usual, I find myself swimming against the tide. A great majority of critics, both journalists and academics, and I am excluding from my consideration “recappers” or patent shills for the networks, are focused on the problematic influence on television of network and cable hierarchies geared to lowest common denominator, massive audiences, and the commercial thrust of an industry in which there are at least as much energy and money invested in spot sales commercials as there are in the shows themselves; this does not even touch upon the corruption of the network and cable news programs that routinely suppress and spin events. But my attention is drawn to the amazing variety of the ways the creative community of television has defied and complicated formula. It is the sparks of life, real passion, and truth that I see emanating from the tube that compel my critical and scholarly attention. I have written about the mass media long enough to know that eventually the unbalanced importance of profits, the perverse pandering to the worst of audience responses, and the budgetary advantages of sticking to formulas eventually erode and contaminate almost every creation worthy of the name. But, and I write this with painful awareness that my choice of image is somewhat cliched, the fact that Camelot fell, the blistering reality that it was never what it set out to be and was at its best in its mythology of itself, does not invalidate the goals, the yearnings, the passions, the achievement that the ideal of Camelot undyingly represents.
It is to that ideal, for better or for worse, that I have directed and continue to direct my energies as a media scholar and critic. It is this that draws me to David Chase and David Lynch, in alphabetical order, two artists who miraculously, indomitably continue to say, to insist, as artists have through the millennia, “Only let me do the best I can do.” But even, as was mostly the case with respect to daytime soap operas, if truth and beauty strike the media inadvertently, there is value and it must be noted and celebrated, just in case celebration might lead to intentional artistry. I salute, welcome, and appreciate expose criticism and scholarship, but I continue to ask, “Is that all there is?” What are the consequences of omitting from the serious cultural dialogue about the media acknowledgement of high achievement? I contend this is a chilling trend.
I have been naïve at times; at times, I have been mistaken; but I have not yet regretted the light I have insisted on shining on beauty, truth, or true creative love in commercial film and television, no matter how brief its life. But what has been does not strictly dictate what will be. If that makes you curious, stay with me for the ride.