Letters to the Editor
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Boring richies
TCinLA confirms what I have suspected and what is was hinting at in my earlier post. The shows are written by entitled insiders who have no clue. Hollywood is like our politics. Aagh!
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TV's Triumphant Overclass
I just want to put in a little shout-out for "Everybody Hates Chris", working class to the bone.
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You need to pitch to your audience better
Some Saloniks would tell you that having electricity and a car is a fat white racist Republican man's luxury. Yeah no one believes that but it's the necessary cred from the faux neo filthy hippy squad. I'm sure they're logged on from a PC made from coconuts like the radios the Professor on Gilligan's Island made, too.
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Reality TV
Being good is tantamount to being powerless, a nobody, the kind of person who fetches coffee for the women on "Cashmere Mafia" or the men on "Big Shots," the kind of person who loses on "Big Brother."
...and this is fictional, how?
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Sometimes people want to see the top of the mountain
For thousands of years, all over the world, the poor residents of many a metropolis have thrilled to watch the construction of a huge, ornate palace or a breathtaking cathedral. The awe of this societal achievement can sustain those with no prospects of personal wealth.
Sometimes it's better to see that at least a few people at the top of society can live in splendor. That vicarious pride and pleasure can be better than the depressing thought that no one at all lives well.
That America should be arriving at such a point now only shows how far we have already fallen. Yet we have so much further to fall, and down we must go, like any dominant civilization past its peak of glory.
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Worse?
NineNine: I gotta say, by anybody's standards, American TV has never been better. If you look at a standard lineup today compared to twenty years ago, the quality of writing and acting on almost every show is simply superior today. Crazy!
Which doesn't mean that I at all disagree with Havrilesky's assessment. Just like everything else, TV has niched out and a certain kind of glossy, aspirational entertainment has definitely bloomed. Really makes you yearn for the good old days when all we were bitching about was that pop culture endorsed a bourgeois, Brady Bunch blandness. Which wasn't as toxic as it was made out to be, I think.
But either way, the brave new world hasn't bloomed because 'TV is getting worse'. I think it's obvious that TV, now freed from having to meet a mass market taste, is getting better on average.
This essay is really about something that is wrong with American culture in a larger sense, and is merely reflected on the tube. Doesn't matter a bit if you tune it out, because it's what your neighbors believe. And what their kids believe, too. It'll wash up on our shores one way or another.
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all about the Sponsors
Rich people wear rich products. TV shows can charge alot of money to put their actors in a Lexus or a Land Rover, have them get out wearing Bruno Malis or Dolce sunglasses.
Follow the money folks. Not only does it encourage consumption, but it also makes the networks a good chunk of change.
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Electric mirror
But isn't this just art imitating life? That being the rise, validation and consolidation of the filthy rich in the face of a shrinking middle class whose struggle seems to be unfilmable or at least not attractive enough for a tv show to make.
Such theorical show would have to deal with the political climate and economical consequences of the american way of life, not just the glamour and you'll NEVER see that on tv. Way too much real. Like Traffic, but without the moral ambivalence against addiction or it's origins.
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One Sure Way To End This
Turn off the television. Permanently.
You'll feel much better without the primary source of military-industrial propaganda and general discontent interfering with your Zen.
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The occasional letter
There is nothing inherently contradictory, hypocritical or elitist about an occasional letter to the editor from someone who does not watch television, and who says so.
One would have to take precious time away from watching television to compose the presumably devastating rejoinder that there is worthwhile television, and that those who lacked the patience for television were necessarily snobs who were depriving themselves of the ultimate cultural and intellectual offerings of the medium.
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Ok, Ikuiku
"Wrong again.
You and Heather must have grown up in the same suburb.
Firemen and policemen are pretty much all blue collar, whether they've got the criminal law degree from So-and-so State University or not.
-- ikuiku"
OH Christ....kind of hair splitting, dont you think?. I went back and forth on that one a lot...blue collar or working class, sure....fine line and depending on the area.
But...
...a character on that show in the first season sold their home for half a million......This suggests a decidedly middle class neighborhood...I don't know too many working class folks who own half a million dollar homes.
Traditional designations or no, I was speaking of those characters....on that show.
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Uberfemme
Depends on the location, of course.
A 500K house in Fargo---a near-mansion.
A 500K house in San Francisco--->>> a tent on an abandoned lot!
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touche, Shadow...
You are right, of course..but..
Again.. I will point out that I am speaking of particular characters, in a particular area, on a particular show...the parameters were there, no?
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"WhoNvitedHim" how'd you get "presumably" from that???
"David Sugarman notes that "since i think heather probably has a nice car and a nice house and never had to accept second-tier health care, i think she's in the same boat." (The same boat, presumably, as many of the rich, "overclass" characters in the subject shows.)"
here's what i wrote (way back on page 2) "alain de botton, whom heather quotes is a multi-multi-millionaire (his father, gilbert, founded Global Asset Management (whatever it is, it sure sounds rich)). here's another quote from him, “It can seem like the only way to be respectable is to achieve as much as the founders of YouTube or Google”. since i think heather probably has a nice car and a nice house and never had to accept second-tier health care, i think she's in the same boat." - the direct antecedent is the subject of the letter, alain de botton. in other words, she is DISSATISFIED, though far from the working class she ostensibly champions. i dislike journalist's pretentions of poverty. you like her, fine.