Television in the Twenty-First Century

It didn't come out of a vacuum, of course. The nineties can boast some absolutely stellar television, especially The Simpsons and Seinfeld. However, there is no denying that American television has blossomed in the twenty-first century into true art. It's no longer just a couple of shows or just the comedies that are totally leveling any conception of what could be done on the small screen anymore. American television has gone nuclear. There are shows running right now that stand up to the best of the big screen in terms of brilliance of conception and narrative, and they aren't stopping after a 90-minute run time and they're not running out of ideas. Many of them are hard to watch, but that hasn't stopped at least the dramas from receiving great ratings. Just as with the 60's when the Beatles were able to challenge their audience and still succeed commercially, the American public is keeping right up with the increasingly challenging and complex television being put in front of them.

Before you sicken from my effusive optimism, let me put some names to faces, that I might justify my premise:

Arrested Development
It may not have the overflowing genius of The Simpsons or the gentle extremism of Seinfeld, but Arrested Development stands shoulder-to-shoulder with them on its own terms. It's among the finest dramedies ever made, and certainly the funniest, and that is saying something, because the dramedy is a beautiful invention. Unlike those other two eminent comedies, Arrested Development has a cohesion of purpose and a synergy of interlocking parts that is extremely gratifying-- jokes are carried over entire seasons without dulling or misstepping. Storylines weave in and out and always complement each other. It's also just wickedly, unrelentingly funny. Oh, and something about the image of the show-house on the desolate hillside really resonates with me.

The Wire
This show epitomizes, perhaps better than any other, the extraordinary change that has occurred in television. The show is grim, demanding, proceeds at a glacial pace without ever making an explicit point, and our nation was absolutely enthralled by it. I can't think of any show from the previous century that could compare to its intricacy, subtlety and symbolic depth. It is, quite simply, a show that redefined what was possible in the medium of television. I love how McNulty sometimes comes across as, not quite two-dimensional, but flat in a way that is somehow more genuine than if he were rounded. Real people are simple at the same time they are complex. And of course Omar rocks my socks.

Mad Men
It started with a gimmick, executed with unanticipated commitment-- setting a show in history and letting the characters act culturally backwards in ways the writers knew would bother the audience, but doing so with such a light brushstroke that it felt subversively natural. The rest of the shows I discuss did things that had never been done in television before, but I'm not sure this particular twist has precedent in any medium. Of course, the show is a heck of a lot more than a gimmick. It has this uncanny way of presenting people in single moments. Just as people make all kinds of decisions in real life, Mad Men's characters can be characterized, but not anticipated. Further, their actions don't always have consequences. There isn't really any poetic justice, which turns out to be jarring as fuck. The loose treatment of character makes it nearly impossible to make moral judgements and gives a certain starkness to characters-- when they repeat a bad decision it feels excruciating. It's an intriguing approach to narrative-- almost abdicating narrative. Of course, that is more sensation than reality, as the show is tightly controlled and threads play off one another with worthy synergy. Episodes have themes, but it feels like ambiguity could swallow up anything so simple as a theme at every turn, and there is something thrilling in that. Also Joan. Sometimes I just watch for Joan.

Breaking Bad
Moral ambiguity has been the order of the day for contemporary storytelling. We are no longer content with anti-heroes. We want to see ourselves at our worst. We want to find ourselves doing genuine, unalloyed evil. Breaking Bad takes that farther than any show by following the evolution of Walter White from sympathetic victim to villain, without ever losing the thread of his humanity. The show bears an obvious resemblance to Weeds, but like the drug it's about, it is light-years more intense and dangerous. Where Weeds equivocated or intentionally delayed character progression, Breaking Bad never flinches. If anything, Breaking Bad moves faster than the audience is ready for, giving them the emotional bludgeoning they didn't even know they craved. Of course, it would be disingenuous to describe the show as being about one man's descent. Jesse and his relationship with Walt is fundamental to the show. I've heard people call Jesse the heart of the show and the moral center, and he is, but that is perhaps the most terrifying thing, because in his own way Jesse is also a monster, and unlike Walt we love him without reservations.

There are other shows that probably deserve to be among the ranks of these shows-- West Wing and the Sopranos get a lot of lip service, and in some ways Firefly was the perfect dramedy. There are also a lot of shows that could have never existed ten or fifteen years ago and betray inspiration without the same consistent brilliance as the first tier, like Dexter or Game of Thrones. I've always thought Malcom in the Middle was under-appreciated and I can't pretend to discuss the wonders of modern television without at least name dropping the TV micro-revolution that was Adult Swim. Louie has a breathtaking sincerity that is uncomfortably, unflinchingly real. There is also the holy trinity of cult comedies-- Community, Parks and Rec and 30 Rock-- whose era is finally coming to a close.

I've thought about why television experienced such a revolution around the millenium. I think some credit can be given to reality TV, whose success influenced scripted television-- most notably oh-so-influential The Office. Probably even more important, I suspect, is that DVD sales changed how TV-makers thought about television. Cohesive, broad narratives with long story arcs began to make more sense once people began watching multiple episodes in a sitting, and writers could demand greater attention and devotion from their audience. This made room for the soaring ambitions of shows like The Wire.

I'd like to end this meditation on modern TV's awesomeness by bringing it back to my friend and favorite TV blogger, Myranda, whose tireless championing of and sincere respect for television continues to inspire me. Keep fighting the good fight, Myranda.

Humans: just incredibly awesome Animals

Reading a post by my friend Rob, I couldn't help but be struck at the unwitting revelation of a sentence of his: "The paths of insensitivity and self-delusion this conceit [that humans aren't animals] has led to are so enormous, a comprehensive study of the subject would be all the human history one would need to read." The indication being, of course, that anything about human history worth knowing has involved humans acting like we weren't animals. Think about that for a minute.

I actually really love the aspiration of humans to transcend animal nature. I realize that it is an aspiration rather than a reality and that it could be viewed as a quaint ambition, but it's only quaint when you exclude from consideration all the incredible things that we have done as animals, aided by a philosophy that we are different. We are, of course, very different. No other animal has even approached our impact, our control over our surroundings, or our understanding of ourselves. We've driven more species to extinction than anything short of a natural catastrophe. I also can't think of a single species on whom so many other species are dependent-- we are the most crucial of all keystone species in this modern ecology.

There is no species more altruistic than us or more cooperative. It boggles my mind that we continue to expand our population logarithmically (for the last 15,000 years at least), drastically change our means of living, habitation and social organization and somehow we don't all kill each other like rats. In spite of these pressures, not to mention the availability of incredibly lethal weapons, we instead continue kill each other less, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. In spite of our incredible population density we're also getting sick less and in spite of the incredible resource load we represent on the world we're permitting relatively fewer and fewer of our fellow humans to go hungry.

"Denial of our animal nature" is just an ungenerous rewording of "aspiring higher than the rest of the animal kingdom". We don't think of ourselves as animals, not because we're not animals, but because we have found that it is in what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom that makes us wonderful, that makes us worth reading about.