LUDIC LOG

I don't watch a lot of television.

Now, don't get me wrong: I have a television. Several of them, in fact. One of them is on at this very moment, because baseball's post-season has just begun. I've never really understood people who say they don't watch television; it's a medium of cultural expression, just like any other, and people seem to confer on it a sort of sinister magic. You never hear anyone say that they won't listen to music, or they won't see movies, or they won't read books, but there's alway a few people who will pop into a conversation in which the 20th and 22nd letters of the alphabet are used and loudly decry the whole notion. Television has changed our society, and not always for the better, that's true; as Neil Postman correctly has it in Amusing Ourselves to Death, it has quite literally changed the way we think -- profoundly altered the way we process information. But so what? So has the internet. So did the printing press. So did the development of speech. You don't hear a bunch of self-congratulating intellectuals priding themselves on not being able to talk, do you?

On the other hand, there is something to the argument that, well, television really sucks. I've tried to give it a chance; I've taken a fair shot at dozens of shows that are hailed as the saving grace of the medium over the last 20 years or so. With only a few notable exceptions, though, they're not really worth my time. Which isn't to say that they're bad; some are, sure, but others are certainly of a very high quality, at least as compared to their competition. But they're almost inevitably not good enough to draw my attention away from reading, listening to music or whatever other cultural opportunity presents itself at the moment. Despite all my best intentions of liking television, it remains in my life exclusively a broadcaster of sports, Simpsons reruns and whatever doomed show certain to be cancelled in a matter of months I've taken a shine to at the moment.

One of the most perplexing things about television is how little quality programming there is, given hundreds of networks broadcasting 24 hours a day. The proliferation of mass communication and the need to fill space has made room for plenty of great art in media ranging from comics to literature to the internet, but somehow television seems to have progressed little from the "vast wasteland" of the 1950s. If anything, the massive amount of airtime that needs filling has led to less quality, not more; on the upper reaches of the cable dial, in the middle of the night, you'll find not daring, adventurous, experimental programming the networks take a chance on, but ridiculous dross whose only value is camp and unintentinal mockery.

Why is this? There's a number of reasons, but they all grow from the same rancid field: commercials. Television is, more so than any medium besides film, incredibly expensive; unlike with books, with theatre, with magazines and web sites, even with music, it's next to impossible for an independent-minded creator on a budget to make his own television program. And even if he did, distributing it would be a practical impossibility. Due to a fluke of American law, the television airwaves are entirely dominated by people granted licenses to use them, which are exclusively hypertrophied corporations and institutions. There are independent publishers, independent record labels, independent filmmakers; there is no such thing as an independent television network. As a result of the vast expense (and a more-than-usual amount of good old-fashioned greed), television networks are dominated by the bottom line, the demographic and the will of the advertiser to an extent literally unmatched by any other artistic medium. Even magazines, which exist for no other reason than as a delivery vector for ads, aren't as egregious in their catering to the sponsor dollar, as anyone who has written for television can tell you.

What's more, the commercial nature of television subverts its very potential as an artistic medium. The demands of American television result in the segmenting of storytelling into seven-minute chunks; this is absolute disaster for drama. No dramatic tension, comedic timing or coherent narrative can be sustained under this time-framework, and yet it is universal to the medium. Only pay television suspends this requirement, leaving one to wonder what its advantage is over film. Writers must adhere to creativity-killing formalist guidelines; directors are given far less play than in film; actors are locked into bewildering routines; producers are handcuffed by studios to an appalling degree. Even programming brought in from other sources -- from a big-screen movie to a live sporting event -- must be made to conform to the iron laws dictated by advertisers.

The constraints of time, of standards & practices, of studio interference, of advertiser demands, of the seemingly insurmountable limitations the medium has allowed to be imposed on itself, add up to an extremely disappointing whole. It's not that there are never good TV shows; it's just that the ratio of good vs. bad is far, far lower than in any other medium, due to the unfortunate and self-abnegating realities of the medium itself. Maybe someday something (I don't know what; I spot problems, not solve them) will happen to free television from its comfy ad-driven prison; until then, I'll be here, listening to music and watching baseball with the sound off.