Day 3 of 30 - Your favorite television program

I completely understand why many people hate television. Where movies are about telling a story that satisfies a person with a solid beginning, middle, and end, television shows have a strong beginning, intriguing complications, and... no real ending.

Traditionally, television is designed not to provide a satisfying conclusion, but rather to perpetuate watching. Each act break builds to generate interest to engage the viewer and then the viewer is presented with... a message from our sponsors.

The shows I gravitate towards are the ones that don't have commercial breaks, whether they be from other countries or on cable (the BBC version of 'The Office,' HBO offerings, etc.), or the ones that don't require sustained viewing (like 'The Twilight Zone' or 'The Carol Burnett Show'). The standard template for shows draws me out of them. (I think that was one of the big problems with 'Arrested Development.' As much as I loved watching the show on DVD, when I tried to watch it on television, the commercial breaks made it fall flat.)

Having said all that, my current favorite television show is a Canadian show called 'Slings & Arrows.' It has just the right mixture of artistic ambition, inspiration, and humor to have me completely enthralled. Plus it is Canadian, so you can make a drinking game out of how many times people apologize.



The show is about a fictional Shakespeare Festival, and the difficulties that occur when they try to produce plays (Season 1 is 'Hamlet'; Season 2 is 'MacBeth'; and Season 3 is 'King Lear'). The show is smart, witty, and thoroughly engaging. And it also does a great job of showing how great literature can enter and affect our lives.

Without getting too esoteric or metaphorical, I am am always amazed at this wondrous gift of received culture and history. There are so many good stories that have been passed down to us, how can do anything except revel in them and have some fun?

My Rant about Cable Television Shows

Despite the fact that I occasionally write television spec scripts, I am one of those people who inherently doesn’t like television. However, I have to admit I obsess over certain shows when they get good.

And when I heard all sorts of people talking about how Dexter was nine kinds of awesome, my curiosity was roused. So I tried watching the critically acclaimed show and couldn’t get any further than Disc 1 of Season 1.

Let me tell you, Dexter is not nine kinds of awesome. It is like half of awesome, and not the awe part. It is some.

Here is my problem – people who develop original programming for cable really love breaking their own arms patting themselves on the back for creativity. “You can do things in this show you can’t do on normal television!” they exclaim. “We advocate complete creative freedom! We believe in quality more than anything else!” and that is just not true.

They believe in objectionable content. Nudity, sex, violence, whatever you can’t show on regular television.

And here is the tricky part, the show has to convince the viewers each week that this excessive amount of objectionable content is not gratuitous, that it is indeed necessary to the plot.

The only way to work around this is, of course, to have the entire premise of the show based around sex and/or violence. The main character is a serial killer. The main character is a Mafioso. The main character is Larry David.

The problem with a premise like this is that the longer the show continues, the less plausible it becomes. The classic example of this is Murder She Wrote . After 12 years of solving a crime a week, no one ever caught on that you should not invite this woman to your birthday party, because a guest was going to mysteriously die. And, yet, week after week they did this.

So you have a premise of a show where someone dies every week. Or someone gets raped every week. Or someone gets tortured every week. And the writers have to go out of their way to conform to the formula even when the storyline or the character development makes it reasonable to deviate from the show formula. It creates monotony, fatigue, and boredom.

Because the mantra is “This is something you can only get on pay cable,” somehow this means that you can’t do anything that could appear on just any old television station. You can’t have a show like Friends, you have to twist it into a show like Friends with Benefits.

So when I see shows like Dexter, all I see is marketing and formula. I don’t see creativity. I don’t see something interesting. I just see plain old television.