Tuesday, October 6, 2015

The quotable curmudgeon

Sometimes a truth goes unspoken for so long that when someone points it out, regardless of how well or poorly, you just kind of have to say, "At last, someone fucking said it." So it is with Alex Beam's quesstioning of the propaganda so often heard on behalf of the new Golden Age of TV. I'm not sure if his reasons are quite the same as mine. To wit, mine begin with the fact that so much of TV connoisseurship is based on class anxiety and all out class snobbery. Watching "quality shows" on cable or better yet, streaming services and then gabbing about them with anyone who'll listen reassures everyone involved that they're at least middle class, even if they're not.

Worse, TV is being called on to educate and edify that portion of the populace who tune into the prestige stuff. The dirty little secret is that watching television is still an essentially passive activity. If you want to watch it intelligently, you also have to do other things that might be harder. Read a book for example. And this all involves developing a critical perspective too, which is usually lacking.

Keeping all this in mind, I find it especially amusing that Beam is writing for the Boston Globe, which publishes the TV writing of Matthew Gilbert. As a critic Gilbert seems convinced that if he just guides a few more viewers away from 2 Broke Girls and toward Transparent, he will save Western Civilization. A task made all the more Sisyphean by the fact that the premise is so illusory.

Moving further back in time I also like Mark Greif's "Against Exercise", This was published about eleven years ago and reprinted in the next year's The Best American Essays volume, which also has a nice Jonathan Lethem piece on a subway stop near where he grew up..

But I digress. Here's some of the meat.
It may be a comfort to remember when one of your parents' acquaintances dies that he did not eat well or failed to take up running. The nonexerciser is lumped in with other unfortunates whom we socially discount. Their lives are worth a percentage of our own, through their own neglect. Their value is compromised by the failure to assure the fullest form of possible physical existence. The nonexerciser joins all the unfit: the slow, the elderly, the poor, and the hopelss. "Don't you want to live?" we say. No answer of theirs could satisfy us.
While some are paranoid about government regulations, I suspect the true nanny state is within..

3 comments:

semiconscious said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
semiconscious said...

well, any article that actually asks you to imagine your parents discussing an episode of 'sea hunt' just has to be worth a read, & this one was indeed. very funny...

wasn't aware of this 'golden age of tv' thing at all, tho a discovery i made a few months ago likely should've tipped me off. we'd finished watching the first season of 'walking dead', which i found disappointing, & so i decided, before going further, to check out reviews of season 2. well, much to my amazement, there weren't just a number of reviews of season 2 out there, there were also loads of reviews of every single episode, & not just of season 2, but every season. i'd had no idea up till then that not only was watching tv still a big deal, it was apparently even a bigger deal, in some ways, than it ever used to be...

now, afa the 'class snobbery' aspect you mention, that i can relate to, & not simply on the level you mention. for example: a portion of the intelligentsia for whom it's acceptable to watch, & openly discuss, say, 'game of thrones', but who'd never openly admit to watching 'walking dead' even if they enjoyed it? not really sure of the rules used to determine these do's & don'ts (i mean, certainly there's no one that would claim that the one (got) is more 'realistic' than the other?), & but pretty sure i don't really need to know :) ...

regarding the 'against exercise' essay, all i ever have to do is register the pained, unhappy looks on many of the jogger/runner faces that pass us by each day to remind myself that, while a long, happy life will always be the best case scenario, when it comes to second best, i'll take happy over long any time :) ...


personal disclosure: we are currently most of the way through the first season of 'gotham', a series that i'd say anyone with even a slight familiarity with the lore of batman could have fun with. while oswald cobblepot easily steals the show, well-realized 'child' versions of bruce, selena, & ivy (& even poor jonathan crane :( ), combined with the weird 'pseudo art deco version of the eighties' ambiance make for a pretty entertaining bit of fluff (or, if you prefer, 'quality television')...

Ben said...

The episode by episode recap of TV shows has become pretty standard. It can be a kind of fun to read if you've been watching and if the author of the article has what you find to be an interesting voice. On the other hand I can't imagine reading more than a couple of these per week.

Game of Thrones has that aura of Britishness that still reads as class over here. This despite it being based on a series of novels by a guy who lives in New Mexico. The thing about George RR Martin is that I'm sure he worked hard on the books they based the show on, but I have to wonder if it ever wears on him that so many of his fans don't know anything else he's done.

I want to emphasize that I'm not against physical activity. What's distressing is this rush to write people off as self-destructive for non-approved lifestyle choices. First it's smokers, then it's drinkers (and not just heavy drinkers), then it's people who eat pork, unless the Atkins diet is in that week. At some point do you conclude that everyone who doesn't have a Spartan physique is throwing their lives away?

While the episode quality of Gotham varies from week to week, I do have a soft spot for the show. Selina and Bruce, especially. It turns out that the Batman/Catwoman dynamic is most engaging when she's a tough gal from a musical and he's a soft kid in vigilante training. Alfred's good too, taking the Michael Caine approach and running with it. Interestingly enough that actor is the son of the fellow who starred in Doctor Who before Tom Baker.