Podcast: The Golden Age of Television

Lev says:

Great discussion! Y’all covered a lot of great points. Here are some random observations:

I think one of the major drivers in our Golden Age of Television–and one that is only glancingly touched on in the podcast–is the rise of the internet. It used to be that if Frasier had an off year, well, maybe their ratings would dip a bit and the showrunners would have to figure out a way to kick things back into gear. Now the feedback is continuous, and it can provide showrunners with a direct line to their most ardent fans’ psyches, and sometimes that can even be helpful (I think it’s fair to say that Lost only had the impetus to start righting itself once the nerds got loud enough), and it can often set the conventional wisdom about shows (like Battlestar Galactica, which I’ll hit in a little bit). It seems to me that the whole online comment idea is itself indebted to shows like Beavis and Butt-head and Mystery Science Theater 3000, as an example of the odd sorts of metafeedback loops developing among different media. But anyway…

I agree with what was said about 30 Rock–I like the show but I think it’s been rather overblown, and I find that It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is more reliably good as well as more sharply satirical of mass media culture in a way that I rarely see, by basically presenting its characters as filtering reality entirely through the lens of pop culture and being completely foiled by it. 30 Rock occasionally lobs a satirical grenade here and there, but Sunny is my choice for the best comedy currently on television, both in terms of its ambition and just how darn funny it is.

As one of those incessant boosters of The Wire, I definitely think it’s the best show of the decade. I’ll grant that its last season was pretty inconsistent, and that a show like The Shield was more consistent and accomplished its goals pretty well, but I really felt like The Wire was trying to do something much harder than what The Shield was trying to do, and I felt that the times when The Shield tried to spiral out its focus and look more broadly at society were easily its weakest (the part in season seven where the locals took part in the gang contest being a principal case in point). Now, obviously, creating a show like The Shield that is good for seven seasons is pretty amazing in and of itself, but The Wire was much more ambitious than any other show and, as a result, had successes greater than practically any other show ever. I guess it depends on your priorities as a viewer, and there’s no right answer to be had here.

As someone who really loathed late-period BSG, I tend to agree that the creators didn’t really have a plan (as they insisted), but I just generally think that BSG was actually two shows: one was an action-suspense-mystery space opera which mostly dealt with military and political questions that paralleled real life concerns, and another was a show that was obsessed with its own mythology, religious questions, and identity. Obviously, all of that stuff was present at all stages of the show, but the show shifted its focus from the first group of concerns to the second right after the Pegasus storyline more or less answered all the questions the show initially asked about security/military/political stuff post-9/11, and that was the point where the show’s decline began. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that Ron Moore clearly understood enough about show #1 to make it interesting to people, and clearly didn’t understand enough about show #2 to do the same.

And, with respect to British television, I’ve always generally felt that our cousins do a better job at comedy mostly because they don’t feel the need to make characters perfect and likable. In fact, many of the funniest Britcoms were based around complete assholes–Blackadder, Alan Partridge, and The Office, to name my favorite three. Ultimately, humor has to come from self-deprecation, but making characters completely likable presents a problem since people generally don’t like to see bad things happen to good people. So in these shows bad things happen to bad people, while there are usually some more likable peripheral characters. On American comedy, the darkest you really see is Michael Scott, who is generally likable anyway (and I’m excluding some shows, like Sunny, from this analysis as they’re admittedly cult phenomena).Report