At the recommendations of first my friend Matt and then my mother, I just watched the first season of Burn Notice on Hulu. In the past few years I've been trying to experience more in the way of mainstream American culture since I feel that anybody who wants to have useful conclusions about social policy better have some idea of how the people in that society actually live.
So in some ways I've found it fun, charming, certainly pretty. But by the end of the first season my disgust with it had finally reached the boiling point.
Now I could tell you what plot points and what production issues and what tricks of lighting and casting and editing nailed it down for me but let me jump to the chase.
Conventional episodic television is built around "normal" people (ones carefully engineered to fundamentally feel sympathetic to the audience) constantly doing extraordinary things. Over and over. And simultaneously doing them in an amped up way that is ten or twenty or a hundred times more eventful than real life.
And then being there for the next episode to do it all again.
What does this mean?
That conventional episodic television is, by definition, built around a world of actions without consequences. People get shot at and two days later are shaking it off in ways that make PTSD seem like some silly myth. They get married and divorced and married again but are still making the same jokes. They are pernicious fantasies and they have real impacts on people's personal behaviors, on how they teach their children, how they deal with each other, and vote.
Enormous numbers of events happen on any episodic television show of the sort that would utterly reshape people's lives but they can't change much or too fast because if they did the show wouldn't ever be able to sell in syndication.
One of the basic guiding realities of television is that a hell of a lot of the possible profits on a show come not from when it first airs but from when it airs again and again and again. And when the DVDs sell. And from sales of just the sort of licenced merchandise that depends on characters staying very much the same. So it is a rock solid rule of television production that you're always going for a bare minimum of three seasons worth of episodes. Episodes that need to have pretty much the same people doing pretty the same thing in pretty much the same kind of place. All while living through at least fifty to one hundred events of the sort that would, in the real world, guarantee that such consistency would never, ever happen.
Now you can spout all you want about Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos and House all that mahooah. But let's get real here, the Galactica's pilots would never, ever be able to have the kind of mortality counts they supposedly have and still have Starbuck and Apollo and all the "important" pilots both predictably take on insane risks and reliably get away with it. "Oh, you say, but Apollo had a really scary time that once and had to wait for rescue for hours!" Yeah, whatever. If you believe that this refutes my statement, then somewhere deep in your mind you know that you're rationalizing.
"But that's just television" you say. What does that mean, exactly? Explain to me how being able to describe why this is done (a thing that I understand full well) makes it somehow exempt from being destructive. A destructive thing is destructive UNLESS IT DOESN"T DAMAGE THINGS. "But they have a reason" is fundamentally a non-sequitur if what we're discussing is whether or not it causes a given result. Charles Manson had reasons. Executives at General Motor and McDonalds and Enron have had plenty of reasons. Having reasons does not change the basic fact that those actions have had consequences. "But that's just the way things are" has been the best protection of segregationists, slave traders, war profiteers, and oppressors and underminers of decent lives of a thousand different stripes for all the history of the known world. When something makes an impact on our world we need to look past "but that's just how things are". And whether people want to face it or not, these shows are created to make an impression.
And they do. Every time you watch an episode of a television show you are being exposed to a brilliantly seductive world, one that tries harder and with greater skill every year to give the superficial appearance of credibility, in which people are constantly rewarded for and and evade the changes that would come from their actions and circumstances. Actions and circumstances that relate to ones we engage in or at the least are expected to make decisions about all through our lives. Every hour you watch this stuff you're being seduced. You're being brainwashed. And the "realistic" shows like the Sopranos, with their high production values and skillful writing, are the one that will brainwash you the most and the fastest.
Count on it.
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