Daily Blague

The Biscuit family watches next to no television. biscuit husband had no TV at all until evil biscuit wife-to-be brought hers into their joint household and insisted upon watching, of all things, beverly hills 90210 every week. (biscuit wife was 22, give her a break.) Anyway, I agree with most of your recommendations about breaking the TV habit.

However, some television shows are in fact worth watching, for example, the work of Joss Weedon: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, a Buffy spinoff, and the short-lived but absolutely brilliant Firefly. All are now available on DVD (although I think the last season of Angel has not yet been released). So there is a very good argument to be made that, these days, you can just wait till the series is released on DVD and rent them, to watch commercial-free at your leisure.

In practice, the wait-and-DVD-it approach works quite well for a show that you've just discovered and you want to catch up on previous seasons, or for shows that are decent enough to watch but that you are not absolutely obsessed about, or shows that are no longer playing except in bastardized rerun format (why, oh why would anyone bother to watch Sex and the City in rerun? You get all the pain of commercials and none of the sex.).

It does not work quite well for a current show to which you are already addicted. So I would add a rule to deal with this case: finish out the run of the show to which you are addicted. Do not cast about for another show once the show to which you are addicted has ended. This will be difficult, as you will suffer terrible cravings and your immediate response will be to find a replacement, however poor, for your lost program. Buy the DVDs for your series when they come out and watch the DVD 'reruns' instead.

At present the Biscuit family has no such show, as our last addiction ended last May with the sudden cancellation of Angel. We do not seek a replacement, as there is no Joss Weedon series available now to fill the void, but if there were, we would watch it.

So: why would we take up television again for Joss? You must watch the shows to understand, and not just one episode, but several. His shows are small-screen, high-quality, serial novels. The experience of watching a Joss Weedon series on TV, as the episodes come out, is, I think, what it must have been like when the ship carrying the latest installment of the latest Dickens serial came in. To sit down with the new episode, when you've been thinking and thinking and talking and talking and dreaming the characters; to see what happens next, and what scenes in previous episodes (sometimes in previous seasons) foreshadowed events in the current one -- this experience simply can't be replicated with a full season's DVD in hand (instead you binge, and find you have not fully digested what you saw), and it is not available at all from movies.

The problem is that the television industry has no interest in the serial show as an intensely satisfying form of art. It wants cheap, and quickly popular, and easy for uncommitted viewers to watch. Which explains why there is no Joss Weedon series on television right now. Viewers don't pay for the shows (except in the very real, but not at the moment relevant sense, of advertising absorption as payment), so they don't get to choose. Some Joss Weedon fans are trying to push a subscription-based model of production: subscribe to have a show produced, receive an episode every week in the mail or streaming. This seems unlikely to take off any time soon.

Wow, this was a very long comment that may do nothing but convince readers I am a crazed Joss Weedon fan. Which is fine, because I am. My main point, however, is that a good filmed serial CAN really be worth watching, that it is part of the experience of such a show to have enforced waiting periods between episodes, and that for the moment only the television industry offers the means to produce and distribute such serials (which it does only rarely and as if by accident).

And I'm sorry about all the extra whitespace. That was unintentional.

Biscuit's comment reminds me of how taken I was by Entourage last summer. I haven't been able to convince anybody that it's a good show; I suspect that people get stuck on the surface. What I see is an anatomization of the difficulties of being young, male, and cool. This isn't to say that I feel sorry for any of the characters, but I do feel their pain. And as for Jeremy Piven...

So I'm waiting for the series to come out on DVD. Whether I'll watch it in installments, I can't say. I don't really see a movie until the third or fourth time; I have found that the suspense elements of a plot, while very effective, get in the way of really enjoying any narrative art-form, and I'm happy to trade in the shock of novelty for the richness of anticipation. (I'm always amazed by the force with which I can actually hope that, just this once, Judy Barton won't be scared by the nun into backing through the belfry and falling to her death.)

TiVo is supposed to manage the rescheduling of shows - has anyone had any experience with it? One of my principal objections to television as a medium, distinct from any possible content, is the control it assumes of people's schedules. Or rather the remorselessness with which it pins schedules (lists of things to do) to clocks. That is no small part of its power, something that I will address in another installment: assuring viewers that millions of other people are watching the same show at the same time.

The tube is a bore, Newton M. was very correct years ago, it, broadcast and cable programming, is a vast, vast wasteland. What with the Net and vendors like NetFlix who really needs it for other than the occassional glimpse of local news or a short shot of PBS. I guess it's like smoking in a way, but then I prefer a different route of adminstration for my nicotine addiction, generally the pipe, occassionally the dip, but not cigarettes, well, not anymore the route of adminstration is just debilitating, if not deadly. The most frightening aspect of nicotine use recently is the preliminary research that might indicate that nicotine is a genetic trigger for cancer, if this proves out, we will be ditching this dear old drug right away. Over three decades ago studies conducted by my old grad school prof in neuropsych showed that even moderate TV watching produced a synchronized theta wave state typical of trance like conditions. My experience in the hospitals over a span of fifteen years and recently with my own aged parents and in-laws bears up the idea that chronic, passive, extended TV watching simply destroys the intellect. And, I suspect that the same thing applies to the Net. It's the passivity that is the problem, the absolute lack of motivation to gain and guide one's own pleasure. Radio, God bless it, does not have this problem, nor does reading, both activities require active image generation to really gain any pleasure. There are of course the mindless readers and radio listeners, and that's it in a nut, mindlessness, that's the issue. Are you going to bear the pain necessary to even entertain yourself or not. And, to that end TV is very dangerous, it simply lends itself too well to the mindless passing of time and a lifetime, if you're not careful. Too much of the old bomb thrower in me to even think of scheduling my life around some TV event on a regular basis, but many people do and they pay the price with a blunting of the intellect that affects every aspect of their lives. It's simple you either take charge of your life or you don't. And, if you don't you only have the bitterness of wishing you had done better. And, if you do, well, it may work out for the best, and if not, you at least have the satisfying pain of having tried, eh? Perhaps, we should redo "Bubba Shot the Jukebox" as "Buba shot the TV". Remember to stress that last sound and shorten the first one, T VEEE. Enough of this high toned musing, we have radiators to flush and recharge and firewood to split in prepartion for what may be one hell of a storm, overnight lows in the single digits and daytime highs in the low twenties, through here Thursday and Friday. Onward and upward, nearer my God to Thee, and a good warm fire.

George, I know that I asked for full paragraphs, but you are speaking like somebody with an antenna stuck in his head. Discipline!

I have not used TiVo myself since it's always seemed to me that the people who have it end up watching MORE TV, not less (it automatically records programs that are 'like' the ones you usually watch, so every time you are bored, there's something new on Tivo that you will probably like well enough to watch IT too. At least you don't have to watch the ads, though (although that might change soon, the tv industry is obviously not at all in favor of not having to watch the ads) In any case, pourover, you have heard of VCRs, right? ;-) They are not as impossible to program these days as they used to be, although it still helps to have a full Quality Assurance plan in place and have someone else review your programming, especially if you are going away for 2 weeks and Buffy just kissed Spike.

In any case, I think the much greater danger from TV is leaving it on for good portions of the day, or being bored and turning it on just to see what's there. A single program once a week at a certain time has not, in my experience, led to hard-core addiction.

I have only one word: SPORTS!!!!!
Baseball, Tennis, Golf, ESPN.......

Not to mention Sopranos, Law and Order, Lucy, Honeymooners, MTM, Cheers etc. over the years.

I think the phrase judicious viewing is the right one for this discussion: 95% of what's on is utter shit, but there are some shows that merit attention.

Actually, the antenna is stuck on the foil hat that sheilds me from the alien mind control waves. TV is too lame to merit much discussion, but the rest of this site speaks volumes about what else can be done with your life besides watching TV. I'll be back. And, thanks for all your hard work we see here.