Contemporary TV Modes

Asshole Drama

House, M.D. appeals to people who admire the attitudes of patriarchal authority; House is imperious, dictatorial, possessing an implicit conservatism effaced only by his distaste for organized belief. Temperance Brennan, protagonist of the knock-off drama Bones, is identical but female; Emily Deschanel’s performances bring less archness, swap instead for naive shock at the inadequacy of others’ logic. Tim Roth in Lie To Me plays a smug deception expert who makes unilateral decisions based on his superior knowledge of human nature (hence FOX’s decision to schedule him next to Hugh Laurie). Glee, too, features a hard-ass front and center; the idea is that even sincere, spirited “good kids,” like the kind mythologized in the “high school musical” genre, could use the teachings of a know-it-all jerk. On the further end of the spectrum, these are joined by Dexter, about a know-it-all serial killer cop, and 24, about a know-it-all serial killer cop. The M.O. of the “asshole drama” is that people are inadequate, and the reason assholes exist is to teach us to be better. It’s a low-key kind of emotional fascism, which borrows the attitudes of the nihilistic comedy but dispenses with nihilism; its covert message is the promotion of various forms of authority.

New Sincerity

Doctrine has it that postmodern excesses leave Millennials with a new mandate for sincerity in the arts (where that tends to mean optimism) and a new license to be grandiose. The West Wing, arguably the first TV show in this mould, turned the political genre on its head by presenting politics as a lot of basically decent people (!) doing the best they can. Since then, the same logic gave us everything from the frankly spiritual Lost to the frankly dispiriting Cold Case, whose producers signal their hope for the inner city by playing U2 all over it. The danger for this genre is that with hamfists like the authors of Cold Case making grandiose gestures everywhere, sincerity (and optimism) could acquire the stink of chauvinist, majority naiveté.

Neoclassicism

In my mind, this is the bellwether for the era’s defining Boomer conservatism. Neoclassicism is a movement currently gaining momentum in the pop arts that prioritizes such qualities as traditional content, formal elegance, restraint and “class.” This is the secret to the The Sopranos’ critical success. More than its story, its formal qualities appealed to critics’ inarticulate sense for canonicity; naturally, it was quick to canonize. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing neoclassicist show is AMC’s Mad Men, which extends the mandate for tradition to actual nostalgia, and makes formal elegance such a byword that its setpieces often resemble living paintings. The trouble, I suppose, is that formal elegance is intoxicating when it frames a story like The Sopranos, which is compelling and well-told, but is easily imitable and dulls in application to the half-assed and the ill-conceived.

Hyperrealism

Hyperreal shows blur the boundary between fiction and reality, generally by fitting wholly fictional elements into a milieu that’s deliberately as realistic as possible. The realism is achieved either by meticulously low-key storytelling, or (more commonly) by the insertion of recognizably real elements (like real landmarks or celebrities) into a more fictionalized narrative. Hyperrealism has a long working history with nihilistic comedy (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Head Case, etc.) but is now being appropriated by dramedy too (Entourage), to occasionally striking effect. Baudrilliard would argue that the hyperreal is aimed at supplanting reality, but to my feeling, the true silliness of this genre is in the way it makes reality a mere product placement; the fiction is often no more believable for the inclusion of realities than it would be without them. In other words, the tools of postmodernism do wear out: the mind becomes habituated to these anomalies and it no longer seems disorienting. Then what? I’m guessing the cheeky celebrity guest spots start to look pretty stupid.

New Naturalism

Not to be confused with hyperrealism, this is a cousin of both neoclassicism and New Sincerity; like those, its rise is intimately connected with the decline of postmodern dogma. The degree of naturalism varies. The Wire and The Thick of It are as naturalistic as possible, going to elaborate lengths to “rough up” the speech with dialect and found idiom, and whenever possible depict stories taken from the news. Others shoot for impressionistic naturalism; Deadwood uses deliberately anachronistic profanity to convey the gritty, underclass feeling of the American frontier. Strict diegetic sound is popular in this genre. Naturalism is a strange thing on US television, which has tended to skew toward the imaginary; for an example of the weaknesses of this dogma, look toward British TV, where naturalism reigns and even so, actual insight can be elusive.

Irritating Ad Trends

1) Seemingly everyone, from Visa to Cricket, now has an ad full of gangly, tone-deaf people singing pop songs in public, with jump cuts to connect their snatches of awkward mewl together. Actually, this is probably meant to signify “togetherness” and “spontaneity” and other things GenY consumers supposedly shell out to feel associated with. Thing is, most of these “singers” are excruciatingly bad, the sort of people who’d cause actual pain if they sang in actual public. Cricket claims you’ll get respect online.

2) Next up: auto insurers and their mascots, whether they be Progressive’s simpering, uncanny Cusack byblow, Geico’s triptych of uninspired corporate symbols, or SafeAuto’s remarkably graceless references to The Office. The idea may be that auto insurance is a faceless industry that consumers need personified; true or not, these are living spambots.

3) “My life is unique.” Preferred pitch for free checking accounts and Axe products. Usually features a series of rapid-fire beats depicting quirky, unique activities like partying with teenagers, flirting with girls, riding a truck, eating a sandwich, dancing with a sweatband, having sex with people in rabbit suits, taking pictures with friends, taking pictures with eccentric strangers, playing on a giant metal dinosaur, climbing stairs, having sleepovers, high-fiving, and so forth, in order to establish that the protagonist needs special accommodation or products with unusual resilience just for being so goddamn on all the time.

Cold Case

Cold Case is The Wire with maudlin in place of brains.  In other words, it’s nothing like The Wire.

Roger Waters

Pink Floyd’s The Wall was an attempted dissection of the incipient fascism of arena-rock, a topic of frequent discussion in the rockcrit of the late 1970’s. If it comes across as an indulgent letter of complaint by lyricist Waters, it’s only because he didn’t spare himself or his own band from critique. That is admirable. Even when The Wall goes too far, is graceless or overwrought, the often discomfitting personalization in the lyrics is a mark of artistic commitment.

Because he’s associated with prog, a peculiarly unreflective “thinking person’s genre,” Roger Waters is often dismissed as an obscurantist. This seems unfair. Waters is an unusually frank and personal lyricist; he reveals uncomfortable feelings other artists might well avoid. His caricature as self-indulgence personified glosses over how rarely he fails to take responsibility for the crimes his lyrics confess.

The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking weathered a shitstorm when it came out, thanks to a cover feminists interpreted as degrading of women. Okay, so it’s a little tasteless, but it’s also an adequate summary of the concept: an examination of the adultery fantasy, its shallowness and its eventual consequences. The protagonist does demean and objectify women, but Waters identifies with this character only provisionally. In the end, his grandiose womanizing stands revealed as immaturity and fear – of loneliness, and mortality, and what happens when you let someone in. His cardinal sin is lack of empathy, a theme that returns again and again in Waters’s art.

Fiction writers often agree provisionally with someone they mean to expose later. Waters personalizes his subjects to understand them, and make us understand them. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking contains plenty of ugly thoughts, no doubt thoughts he’s had in real life. That the art treats them so darkly should be enough evidence, with or without the come-clean coda at the end, that the aim wasn’t to valorize them.

Now, don’t go taking the above as a full recommendation; I’m defending Waters against the charge of sexism. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking is still a lousy rock album. It may be worthwhile if you’re in a downer mood and have the patience to lose yourself in a piece of audio theater; otherwise, the most charitable description of most of it is “nonmusical.” When Waters deigns to put song to his verse, it’s all obvious-unto-death. Blues cliché merges with blues cliché, aided by Eric Clapton, for whom cliché is a specialty, and who fails to bring any life to this stagnant opera.

Radio KAOS is the opposite. Songful, even catchy, it reduces the laborious conceptual staging down to its smallest possible footprint: segues, plus a Floyd-like audio collage at the emotional climax. The story is more populist and frankly, much stupider: a poor working stiff taking care of his catatonic son loses it one day, breaks into a hi-fi shop and accidentally kills a guy. The son is sent away with a stolen cordless phone, and uses his radio mind-powers to stage a fake nuclear war, to scare the powers that be and make the people reconsider ruthless capitalism.

The production is baroque 1980’s, complete with drum machines, slap bass, bell piano, saxophone, shakahachi – it’s not far from Dave Gilmour’s own Momentary Lapse of Reason. The key here is the songs, which are direct, emotive and singable, even coverable. I hate to admit it, but as stupid as the plot is, you really start to feel for these characters. That makes Radio KAOS a success in rock opera terms, where the telescoped stories fail without a compensating weight of emotional identification via the music.

Amused to Death is his final, most grandiose, most Floyd-like and in many ways, mushiest and least fulfilling album. Musically, it attempts to marry the chorus-oriented songwriting on Radio KAOS with Hitchhiking’s elaborate prose. Lyrically, it’s a trans-apocalyptic story about television, war and humanity’s demise, though the details are left unclear; Waters speaks in allegory whenever possible, as on the three-part “What God Wants” and “Too Much Rope,” apparently about the experience of being moved to tears by a TV movie. “Watching TV,” a song with Don Henley about a Tiannamen protester’s physical beauty, is too much to stomach.

Amused to Death is nearly saved in its dénouement, where at last the songs begin to connect. “Three Wishes” works a surprisingly touching point about the melancholy beneath material desire; “It’s a Miracle” is the kind of croaking dirge Waters used throughout Hitchhiking, but here, his rebuttal to Reaganomics is more focused and funnier; “Amused to Death” proceeds leisurely from morning TV to the extinction of civilization over a power ballad that works both as satire and song.

Neither these, nor the spottily brilliant “Perfect Sense,” are enough to redeem the album of its worst moments. Neither do they make a convincing case for Waters as more than a noteworthy lyricist. The whole project remains risibly middlebrow. They do, in my opinion, prove Waters as an artist who learned from his errors, enjoyed partial success with unreasonably ambitious goals, and possessed more than a modicum of empathy for his subjects.

Pink Floyd’s The Wall was an attempt to dissect latent fascist impulses in arena-rock, a topic of frequent discussion in the rockcrit of the late 1970’s. If it comes across as an indulgent letter of complaint by lyricist Waters, it’s only because he didn’t spare himself or his own band from critique. That is admirable. Even when The Wall goes too far, is graceless or overwrought, the often discomfitting personalization in the lyrics is a mark of artistic commitment.

Because he’s associated with prog, a peculiarly unreflective “thinking person’s genre,” Roger Waters is often dismissed as an obscurantist. This seems unfair. Waters is an unusually frank and personal lyricist; he reveals uncomfortable feelings other artists might well avoid. His caricature as self-indulgence personified glosses over how rarely he fails to take responsibility for the crimes his lyrics confess.

The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking weathered a shitstorm when it came out, thanks to a cover feminists interpreted as degrading of women. Okay, so it’s a little tasteless, but it’s also an adequate summary of the concept: an examination of the adultery fantasy, its shallowness and its eventual consequences. The protagonist does demean and objectify women, but Waters identifies with this character only provisionally; in the end, his grandiose womanizing is revealed as a banality, as the rationale for immature fears. Like Pink, his cardinal sin is lack of empathy, a theme that returns again and again in Waters’ art.

Fiction writers often agree provisionally with someone they mean to expose later. Waters personalizes his subjects to understand them, and make us understand them. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking contains plenty of ugly thoughts, no doubt thoughts he’s had in real life. That the art treats them so darkly should be enough evidence, with or without some come-clean coda at the end, that the aim wasn’t to valorize them.

Now, don’t go taking the above as a recommendation; I’m defending Waters against the charge of sexism. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking is still a lousy album. It may be worthwhile if you’re in a downer mood and have the patience to lose yourself in a piece of audio theater; otherwise, the most charitable description of much of it would be “nonmusical.” When Waters deigns to put song to his verse, it’s all deathly obvious. Blues cliché merges with blues cliché, aided by Eric Clapton, for whom cliché is a specialty, and who fails to bring any life to this stagnant opera.

Radio KAOS is the opposite. Songful, even catchy, it reduces the laborious conceptual staging to its smallest possible size: segues, and a Floyd-like audio collage at the emotional climax. The story is more populist and frankly, much stupider: a poor working stiff taking care of his catatonic son loses it one day, breaks into a hi-fi shop and accidentally kills a guy. The son is sent away with a stolen cordless phone and uses his radio mind-powers to stage a fake nuclear war, to protest the barbarity of ruthless capitalism.

The production is baroque 1980’s, complete with drum machines, slap bass, bell piano, saxophone, shakahachi – it’s not far from Dave Gilmour’s own Momentary Lapse of Reason. The key here is the songs, which are direct, emotive and singable, even coverable. I hate to admit it, but as stupid as the plot is, you really start to feel for these characters. That makes Radio KAOS a success in rock opera terms, where the telescoped stories fail without a compensating weight of emotional identification via the music.

Amused to Death is his final, most grandiose, most Floyd-like and in many ways, mushiest and least fulfilling album. Musically, it attempts to marry the chorus-oriented songwriting on Radio KAOS with Hitchhiking’s extended prose. Lyrically, it’s a trans-apocalyptic story about television, war and humanity’s demise, though the details are left unclear; Waters speaks in allegory whenever possible, as on the three-part “What God Wants” and “Too Much Rope,” apparently about the experience of being moved to tears by a TV movie. “Watching TV,” a song with Don Henley about a Tiannamen protester’s physical beauty, is too much to stomach.

Amused to Death is nearly saved in its dénouement, where at last the songs begin to connect. “Three Wishes” works a surprisingly touching point about the melancholy beneath material desire; “It’s A Miracle” is the kind of croaking dirge Waters used throughout Hitchhiking, but here, his rebuttal to Reaganomics is more focused and funnier; “Amused to Death” proceeds leisurely from morning TV to the extinction of civilization over a power ballad that works both as satire and song.

Neither these, nor the spottily brilliant “Perfect Sense,” are enough to redeem the album of its worst moments. Neither do they make a convincing case for Waters as more than a noteworthy lyricist. The whole project remains risibly middlebrow. They do, in my opinion, prove Waters as an artist who learned from his errors, enjoyed partial success with unreasonably ambitious goals, and possessed more than a modicum of empathy for his subjects.