engl 3815 survey of popular culture fall 2013 ph 321 dr. david lavery the “tv is better than the...

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ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery The “TV is Better Than the Movies” Meme

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ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture

Fall 2013PH 321

Dr. David Lavery

The “TV is Better Than the Movies” Meme

Survey of Popular Culture

As an admitted one-time (TV)antipathist, my first conscious

encounter with the now proliferating “Television is better than

the movies” meme[1] (hereafter TViBttM) was

Survey of Popular Culture

“TV Saves the World,” a 1995 article by

Bruce Fretts in Entertainment Weekly which

offered, two years before Buffy the Vampire

Slayer debuted, four years before The

Sopranos defined “not TV” for HBO, and

twelve years before the exquisite Mad Men

graced our living rooms on the unlikeliest of

basic cable channels, ten solid reasons for

television’s superiority, nine of which remain

still timely[2]:

Survey of Popular Culture

1. Women thrive on TV.

2. We care more about TV characters.

3. TV does better with drama.

4. In TV, the writer rules.

5. TV is more fun to talk about.

6. TV deals with mature themes more

maturely.

7. TV is more convenient.

8. TV does better with less money.

9. On TV, you can change the channel.

Survey of Popular Culture

I found it impossible to argue then with any one of these

contentions, and now, after fifteen years of admiring such brilliant

women as Edie Falco (The Sopranos, Nurse Jackie), Connie Britton

(Friday Night Lights), and Mary McDonnell (Battlestar Galactica); of

being enthralled with characters like Rory Gilmore (Gilmore Girls),

Sam Tyler (Life on Mars), and Dexter Morgan (Dexter); of getting

dramatic with Big Love, The Good Wife, and Being Human; of

“reading” (and viewing) the work of ruling scribes like David Milch

(Deadwood), Aaron Sorkin (West Wing), and Steven Moffat (Doctor

Who); of talking, online and off, about LOST and Buffy the Vampire

Slayer and Northern Exposure; of coming to maturity with ER and Oz

and Six Feet Under, television remains more convenient and

continues to do more with less, while the choice of channels has

increased exponentially.

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In the bibliography (on the right) you will find ten

different examinations of the meme, all of which

count as evidence that the proposition is being taken

seriously. (Take note that half of the ten specimens

appeared in 2010, while four are from the second half

of the century’s first decade.)

Admitting that he once considered television as

“low-budget dreck,” Steven Axelrod has come to feel

quite differently. Harkening back to Mad Men creator

Matthew Weiner’s “battle cry” in an Emmy Award

acceptance speech—“The difference between me and

the rest of you is that I have complete creative

freedom”—he writes:

Survey of Popular Culture

The quality of work that such unfettered inspiration produced over

the last decade—from The Sopranos, Six feet Under and The Wire

to Weeds, Dexter and Treme—has made most of the films

produced in this era look puny and venal by comparison.

Axelrod finds it impossible that any careful observer could

conclude otherwise: “We are living through a golden age of television

right now—a mass medium that triumphed precisely because it chose

to narrow the appeal of its shows, even as movie studios seek to

reach the largest possible audience with the most possible explosions

and the broadest narrative gestures.” Television, he is convinced, is

the true heir to great literature: “we await the next season of Mad

Men just as we anticipate the new Jonathan Franzen novel or the

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or the American readers lined up on the dock for the next installment of Little Dorritt. The novel isn’t dead—it’s alive and dangerously robust, and television of all things, that ‘great wasteland’ that gave us Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard, proves that extraordinary fact beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

For Edward Jay Epstein the answer to his title’s questions (“Why Has TV Replaced Movies as Elite Entertainment?”) is to be found in large part in the cinema’s inclination toward crass subject matter. “Once upon a time,” Epstein writes,

over a generation ago, The television set was commonly called the “boob tube” and looked down on by elites as a purveyors of mind-numbing entertainment. Movie theaters, on the other hand, were considered a venue for, if not art, more sophisticated dramas and comedies. Not any more. The multiplexes are now primarily a venue for comic-book inspired action and fantasy movies, whereas television, especially the pay and cable channels, is increasingly becoming a venue for character-driven adult programs, such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire.

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Like Axelrod (and like myself), Marshall Fine acknowledges that he was once “a movie chauvinist and believed that anything TV did well, it did accidentally,” but full immersion in both media has turned his head. “In any given week,” Fine writes, “I see between two and six movie—and I'm lucky if there's one that I'm willing to recommend to other people. Or even one every two or three weeks.” The experience of television is decidedly different: “in any given week, there's a minimum of one series a night—and often more—that I make an appointment to watch.” He sings the praises of that moment when “[a]pparently some networks finally decided, hey, maybe we can draw an audience with programming that doesn't insult viewers' intelligence. It's no more of a risk than something stupid.” He rejoices in particular at the wonderful series now being generated on basic cable channels like AMC, FX, and TNT: “shows [that] help improve my mood and my faith in the creative impulse each week, just by being on.”

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Mark Harris, author of the impressively researched Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (2008), concludes that “[t]he kindest thing you can say about [Summer 2010’s] movies is that they were creatively unnecessary; not one of them exists because the people behind them believed that they had a great story to tell.” He is especially tough on television series transformed into movies:

SATC 2 transformed four once mildly likable characters into rancid, obliviously overentitled grotesques, and thus proved that the movies have now sunk so low that they can't even replicate decent TV. (Forget decent TV: They can't even replicate MacGruber.)

In an important road marker for the advance of the meme under our consideration, Harris states emphatically: “Four or five years ago, it was a jaunty provocation to claim that ''TV is better than the movies. . . . Today, it's just a fact.”

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In a suggestive reflection in a regional American newspaper (The Louisville Courier

Journal), Tamara Ikenberg acknowledges that the TViBttM makes her almost nostalgic:

“Remember when people would brag about not watching TV or not even owning one of those

brain-dissolving objects? Well, it's nothing to brag about anymore. Ignore TV and you're

ignoring some of the best acting, writing and directing on any screen.” Serious actors know

television is superior. She quotes TV Guide editor Tim Molloy: “Actors really want to have a

character arc they can really explore and play with. In a movie, really every single scene has

to count and you might only get one brief scene to get across who somebody is. . . . Michael

Corleone (The Godfather saga) is one of the most famous characters in cinema and we've

spent what? Nine hours with him? We feel like we know him so well, but we haven't spent that

much time with him at all. We've probably spent about 35 hours with Don Draper (of Mad

Men) so far and I'm still figuring him out.”

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Steven Johnson’s often brilliant book Everything Bad is

Good for You is not just about film and television of

course, but it makes important contributions to the

TViBttM meme. While charting just how complex television

narratives have become in the age of LOST, Johnson

argues that the movies are now a bit jealous of a medium

they once feared (at the inception of the small-screen era)

would replace them:

[F]ilm has historically confronted a ceiling that has

reined in its complexity, because its narratives are

limited to two to three hours. The television dramas

we examined tell stories that unfold over multiple

seasons, each with more than a dozen episodes. The

temporal scale for a successful television drama can

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Be more than a hundred hours, which gives the

storylines time to complexify, and gives the audience

time to become familiar with the many characters

and their multiple interactions. . . .[3] By this standard,

your average two-hour Hollywood film is the

equivalent of a television pilot or the opening training

sequence of a video game: there are only so many

threads and subtleties you can

introduce in that time frame. It's no accident that the

most complex blockbuster of our era—the Lord of the

Rings trilogy—lasts more than ten hours in its uncut

DVD version. . . . [T]he most crucial ingredient is also

the simplest one: time. (131)

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In a comparison of the Academy Award winning 2006 film Crash

(Paul Haggis, 2006) and the reality television show Black. White. (FX

2006), Time’s TV critic Poniewozik offers an unusual version of the

TViBttM meme. Poniewozik suggests that the movie, for him an

“exaggerated image” of racial issues in America “that lets the

audience off the hook, because we can feel easily superior,” could

stillhave learned a lot from the deeply flawed television series.

Even the New York Times film critic has his doubts about his

chosen medium’s claim to supremacy. While ready to contend that

movies still occupy an Olympian position in the pop-culture

landscape. They are bigger than television, grander than video

Survey of Popular Culture

games, more important than viral Internet videos—even if those

things can often be more interesting, more profitable or more fun.

Movie stars are coveted for magazine covers and talk-show guest

spots; the premier movie awards show is a red-letter date on the

global television calendar; movie advertisements festoon

billboards, buses and Web pages. Movies are everywhere!

Everyone loves movies!

A. O. Scott nevertheless admits that, over the last decade, “How

many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological

density of The Sopranos or The Wire? Engaged recent American

history with the verve and insight of Mad Men? Turned indeterminacy

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and ambiguity into high entertainment with the

conviction of Lost? Addressed modern families

with the sharp humor and sly warmth of

Modern Family? Look at Glee, and then try to

think of any big-screen teen comedy or musical

—or, for that matter, movie set in Ohio—that

manages to be so madly satirical with so little

mean-spiritedness.” Rhetorical questions,

right?

In the best written, most provocative

of the pieces under consideration—an essay

adorned with a wonderful illustration showing a

movie theatre crowd gathered to watch on the

big screen before them an episode of The

Sopranos—James Wolcott suggests that

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TViBttM can be summed up elegantly in the maxim: “TV promises so

much less, yet gives so much more.” Television superiority is a

“simple” matter of epistemology:

television syncs to the synaptic speed of our minds, our ability to

process information and achieve pattern recognition. Series such

as 24, the C.S.I. shows, Bones, and Numb3rs lay down an acoustic

strip under the alphabet-soup techno-jargon that correlates to a

mental hum, as if the shows were thinking along with us (whereas

so many movies are thinking for us, bringing the word down from

on high).

Like Axelrod, Wolcott is convinced the secret lies, too, in the creativity

television fosters: “TV is less hierarchical than Hollywood, more

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willing to share. The intimacy of television offers an ideal frame for

the sort of teamwork at which Hollywood once excelled. . . .” Like

almost all these commentators, Wolcott singles out television’s

luxurious excess of time:

Charles McGrath observed in The New York Times Magazine

(October 22, 1995). “To think of a character in recent American

fiction who actually evolves this way—who ages and changes

before our eyes—you may have to go back to Harry Angstrom, in

Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels. In so many contemporary books, you get

just a few days or weeks in the lives of the characters, or a year

or two at most. There isn’t room enough for a whole lot to

happen.” Movies are more like one-night stands. Either you get off

or you don’t, then it’s on to the next.

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“Are there two hours of television in the last few years,” Steven

Zeitchik writes in a thoughtful LA Times comparison and contrast of

film and television, the only one of our ten that takes the side of the

movies, “that achieved, on the screen and in our minds, what The

Hurt Locker or Slumdog Millionaire did?” I will let Entertainment

Weekly’s Dennis Franich respond: “That’s a good question, and my

answer is ‘Yes, The Pacific episodes 7 & 8, and any two episodes of

Breaking Bad.’” (In another essay relevant to consideration of

TViBttM, Franich goes on to insist, idiosyncratically, that the real test

would be to compare the two media at their worst.)

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Before the 1990s the TViBttM meme was unthinkable. Now, for all but

the most cine-chauvinistic (we’re talking about you Roger Ebert), it

has become common sense. Will the meme endure? A decade from

now will the pro television argument still persuade? Given that it is

difficult to say in 2011 what television, the original “new platform,”

will become in the age of convergence culture, prognostication is

difficult, but it seems likely that memetic historians will one day

conclude that 1995 to the present was TViBttM’s golden age.

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BibliographyAxelrod, Steven. “Why TV Is Better Than the Movies.” Salon 20 July 2010.Epstein, Edward Jay. “Role Reversal: Why TV Is Replacing Movies As Elite Entertainment?” The Hollywood Economist: The Reality Behind the Movies October 2010.Fine, Marshall. “Breaking Bad, Saving Grace: Why TV Is Better than Movies.” Huffington Post 24 February 24 2009.Franich, Darren. “Is a bad TV show better than a bad movie?” Entertainment Weekly 1 September 2010.Fretts, Bruce. "TV Saves the World!" Entertainment Weekly 20 October 1995.Harris, Mark “What's wrong with this summer's movies?” Entertainment Weekly 11 June 2010.Ikenberg, Tamara “Why TV is better than the movies: Great shows find small-screen homes.” Louisville Courier-Journal 17 September 2010.Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.Poniewozik, James. “Why TV Is Better Than the Movies.” Time 8 March 2006.Scott, A. O. “Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better?” NY Times 8 September 2010.Wolcott, James. “Little Big Screen.” Vanity Fair October 2008.Zeitchik, Steven. “Is television really the new cinema? Or is that just something TV people like to say?” Los Angeles Times 31 August 2010.

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Notes[1] The online Urban Dictionary offers some good entries on “memes.” Here’s a pertinent one:an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)[2] Now no longer relevant: “James Burrows Does TV. Burrows, of course, wrote for/created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, and Friends.[3] Video games are likewise the object of duration envy: “the average video game takes about forty hours to play, the complexity of the puzzles and objectives growing steadily over time as the game progresses” (131).