My college roommate Neil used to mute the TV during commercial breaks, and it nearly drove me to violence. Neil was from California. He bought peanut butter that needed to be stirred. He refused to eat Taco Bell or drink PBR — FINE. But muting the TV? I was from small town Illinois, and that struck me as some serious, highfalutin bullshit.
He claimed it would “mitigate the influence of advertisers.”
“Fine,” I said. “But if I miss even a second of sound from the show — I’m talking intro music, background noise, a single syllable of dialogue — I get to punch you in the arm and take the remote for the rest of the night.” And so Neil and I would stare, transfixed, at the frantic, jump-cutting pantomime of television ads, his finger perched on the mute button, my white-knuckled fist poised to strike.
I did a little growing up.
I moved away from the Midwest, traveled, then relocated to the Pacific Northwest where I now buy must-stir peanut butter, eat things like kale and chard, and (mostly) drink better beer than PBR. But with the TV, Neil and I differ. I don’t mute the TV — I don’t own one. To go a step further, I don’t watch TV all. Not even the episodes available on Netflix or Hulu without commercials. Why?
Maybe I ate too much kale. Maybe it’s the excessive hops in Eugene beer. But sometime within the last ten years, I came to the conclusion that TV is a fundamentally flawed storytelling medium. At least for the kinds of stories I like.
Yeah, I said it. Go on. Bring the hate. Pile on your Sopranos, your Breaking Bads, your Six Feet Unders and the The Wires and whatever other pieces of intellectual television achievement you want to hold up to the light. It won’t (or hasn’t, up to this point) change my basic issue with television. Namely — television programs can’t focus on bringing you a good story because their first priority is to keep you COMING BACK FOR MORE.
And that was my realization — why Neil’s muting the commercials wasn’t enough. With TV, the program is a clever advertisement for itself. Each show is an ad for the next episode or next season. And it’s never enough. TV is insecure. It’s desperate. It lacks boundaries. TV believes that it really could last forever if it just tries hard enough. It needs to sell, not one product, but a product every week. If it does a good enough job, it will string you along on a nine year stretch before giving you a sense of resolution (maybe). If the series fails, it may well ride the top of an incomplete story arc into a brick wall and shatter into a million cancelled little pieces.
Can a book series do the same thing? Sure. How about a movie trilogy? Absolutely. This phenomenon isn’t unique to TV. But with TV, it’s inescapable. And I hate it.
I want to pay my admission at the ticket counter or the book store and be done with transactional phase of the artist/consumer relationship. I don’t want to keep pumping in more quarters to make the thing run — and I don’t want writers to be concerned about whether or not I’ll keep shoving in coins, because if they’re thinking about me, they’re not thinking about characters or themes or the most authentic way to tell their story.
This week’s topic was supposed to be about how pop culture influences our writing, so here it is: I don’t want my writing to be like TV. I don’t want to end every chapter with a cliffhanger or tease out a piece of romantic tension beyond all conceivable reality just to keep you engaged. I want you to love my story and its characters enough to not need the car dangling over the edge of the cliff or the unexpected knock on the door at the end of every chapter. I want to use devices as they serve the story, not because I need to hook you over, and over, and over again. It feels cheap to me. Disingenuous. I just don’t want to be a full-time hooker. Part-time is exhausting enough.
You probably own a TV and can mount a reasonable defense as to why I’m so terribly, terribly wrong. But don’t worry. This mess will all be cleared up by Wednesday. Bryan’s post will, undoubtedly, tie up the loose ends I’ve left danging and be the best Boys Don’t Read blog yet. Until the next one. And the one after that. So, yeah — don’t touch that dial.
Hm, I started writing out a response, but it was quickly becoming a “tl;dr” kind of thing. So the short version is: I agree AND I disagree.
Too much television is a time-waster, no question, especially in the life of a writer. However, we novelists can definitely learn from television writing, and anyone who says otherwise is just being stubborn. Maybe *you* are beyond the point where TV shows can offer up any new lessons — and I say that without sarcasm — but in a well-written show, there is SO MUCH to take in regarding plotting, pacing, character development, writing in installments (while still contributing to a compelling larger arc), dialogue, emotional beats, etc. Those are the building blocks for any young writer — the tools that we all have to internalize so that they become natural to the way we think and imagine our own stories.
Is reading books a better way to learn this stuff? Probably. But all I’m saying is that TV has *some* merit, and I’m all about giving credit where it’s due.
Well said. I still have PLENTY to learn — and much of it I could learn from TV. There are excellent elements to shows (such as Breaking Bad, which I watched for two seasons before bailing out), but it’s the serial nature — to hook, to draw out, to shift course when the producers demand it mid-season — that most bothers me. Thanks for the counterpoint.
To that point… Producer John Wells was an alum of my school and came to talk to a group of students once. I was lucky to be among them. Anyway, he said that it’s part of his job to know what’s on TV (obviously) but that he didn’t have time to watch every good show or he’d never get any writing/producing done. So he has learned to “skim” TV shows. Watch a sampling of episodes, fast forward through stuff, read summaries online, etc. To get the drift without the full time investment. Doesn’t sound like fun to me — and in fact, it’s not, it’s work for him — but I think what I’m getting at is that by watching 1 season of a good show, you’ve probably gotten enough learning from it.
Besides Buffy, right?
RIGHT?!
Sure, Steve. Sure.
What happened to the boy who had his mother “hold his calls” while Seinfeld was on??
I love that kid.
Whatever happened to the boy who had his mother “hold his calls” when Seinfeld was on??
No, I totally agree, even though I completely addicted to TV . Although now that I think about it, I think I’m mostly addicted to comedic television, which (without investing any serious thoguht into the matter) I’m willing to posit might be just as effective as other types of comedy. What I’ve gathered from this post is that moving out of the Midwest, eating kale, and generally becoming an anti-consumerist neo-hippy is a good detox program that I should probably look into if I want to reclaim my downtime from the tyranny of television.
I agree with your point on comedy. As far as the neo-hippie detox, you should probably watch a few episodes of Portlandia first. You know, so long as you’re still into that TV thing . . .
I like to eat Kale while watching TV. Sometimes I do yoga at the same time. I stir peanut butter during commercials.
You are a living contradiction.
Do comedy shows do this? I suppose there’s the pressure of always having to be funny, but the reason we come back is because we like the jokes and we find the characters generally endearing in their mannerisms and not because of their story arcs. Sure, maybe we want to see what happens between George and his lesbian ex-girlfriend, but that’s not the reason why that show ran nine seasons.
Also, you can’t bring up “Who shot Mr. Burns”, that’s cheating.
Something you didn’t remark at and which I will admit about some comedy shows is that you not only need to write a mega cliffhanger into the end of each episode, but you need to include a mini cliffhanger at EACH COMMERCIAL BREAK which makes the story arc extremely rigid.
Good point. I think comedy shows (Daily Show, Simpsons, etc.) and sitcoms are largely exempt. [See comment: Nikki on December 13, 2011 at 4:53 pm for more history on J.C. Geiger's television history.] This post was mainly targeted to the episodic drama. Though, I’m pretty sure “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” was a Butterfinger advertisement in disguise, which may only serve to prove my argument . . .
Interesting perspective.
Do you consider the shorter runs of British TV a sort of compromise to your objections?
I don’t know enough about British TV to say . . . though I do think a series with a truly defined, finite run would in many ways be immune to the issues I raise in this post.
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Highly enjoyable as usual! That said, I’d say Firefly is an exemption to the TV rule. Then again, maybe that’s why it was cancelled after 14 episodes.