A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (9 page)

It’s undeniable, nevertheless, that watching television is pleasurable, and it may seem odd that so much of the pleasure my
generation takes from television lies in making fun of it. But you have to remember that younger Americans grew up as much
with people’s disdain for TV as we did with TV itself. I knew it was a “vast wasteland” way before I knew who Newton Minow
and Mark Fowler were. And it really is fun to laugh cynically at television—at the way the laughter from sitcoms’ “live studio
audiences” is always suspiciously constant in pitch and duration, or at the way travel is depicted on
The Flintstones
by having the exact same cut-rate cartoon tree, rock, and house go by four times. It’s fun, when a withered June Allyson
comes on-screen for Depend Adult Undergarments and says “If you have a bladder-control problem, you’re not alone,” to hoot
and shout back “Well chances are you’re alone
quite a bit,
June!”

Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture, though, seem both to take TV very seriously and to suffer
terrible pain over what they see. There’s this well-known critical litany about television’s vapidity and irrealism. The litany
is often even cruder and triter than the shows the critics complain about, which I think is why most younger Americans find
professional criticism of television less interesting than professional television itself. I found solid examples of what
I’m talking about on the first day I even looked. The
New York Times
Arts & Leisure Section for Sunday, 8/05/90, simply bulged with bitter critical derision for TV, and some of the most unhappy
articles weren’t about low-quality programming so much as about how TV’s become this despicable instrument of cultural decay.
In a summary review of all 1990’s “crash and burn” summer box-office hits in which “realism… seems to have gone almost entirely
out of fashion,” it takes Janet Maslin only a paragraph to locate her true anti-reality culprit: “We may be hearing about
‘real life’ only on television shows made up of fifteen-second sound bites (in which ‘real people’ not only speak in brief,
neat truisms but actually seem to think that way, perhaps as a result of having watched too much reality-molding television
themselves).”
⁴
And one Stephen Holden, in what starts out as a scathing assessment of the pass pop music’s come to, feels he knows perfectly
well what’s behind what he hates: “Pop music is no longer a world unto itself but an adjunct of television, whose stream of
commercial images projects a culture in which everything is for sale and the only things that count are fame, power, and the
body beautiful.”
⁵
This stuff just goes on and on, article after article, in the
Times.
The only Arts & Leisure piece I could find with anything upbeat to say about TV that morning was a breathless article on
how lots of Ivy League graduates are now flying straight from school to New York and Los Angeles to become television writers
and are clearing well over $200,000 to start and enjoying rapid advancement to harried clipboarded production status. In this
regard, 8/05’s
Times
is a good example of a strange mix that’s been around for a few years now: weary contempt for television as a creative product
and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product
and projecting that force.

Surely I’m not alone in having acquaintances I hate to watch TV with because they so clearly loathe it—they complain relentlessly
about the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the Cheez-Whiz resolutions, the bland condescension of the news anchors,
the shrill wheedling of the commercials—and yet are just as clearly obsessed with it, somehow
need
to loathe their six hours a day, day in and out. Junior advertising executives, aspiring filmmakers, and grad-school poets
are in my experience especially prone to this condition where they simultaneously hate, fear, and need television, and try
to disinfect themselves of whatever so much viewing might do to them by watching TV with weary contempt instead of the rapt
credulity most of us grew up with. (Note that most fiction writers still tend to go for the rapt credulity.)

But, since the wearily contemptuous
Times
has its own demographic thumb to the pulse of readerly taste, it’s probably safe to assume that most educated,
Times
-buying Americans are wearily disgusted by television, have this weird hate-/need-/fear-6-hrs. -daily gestalt about it. Published
TV-scholarship sure reflects this mood. And the numbingly dull quality to most “literary” television analyses is due less
to the turgid abstraction scholars employ to make television seem an OK object of aesthetic inquiry—q.v. part of an ’86 treatise:
“The form of my Tuesday evening’s prime-time pleasure is structured by a dialectic of elision and rift among various windows
through which… ‘flow’ is more a circumstance than a product. The real output is the quantum, the smallest maneuverable broadcast
bit.”
⁶
—than to the jaded cynicism of TV-scholars who mock and revile the very phenomenon they’ve chosen as vocation. These scholars
are like people who despise—I mean big-time, long-term despise—their spouses or jobs, but won’t split up or quit. Critical
complaint seems long ago to have degenerated into plain old whining. The important question about U.S. television is no longer
whether there are some truly nasty problems involved in Americans’ relation to television but rather what might possibly be
done about them. On this question pop critics and scholars are resoundingly mute.

The fact is that it’s only in the U.S. arts, particularly in certain strands of contemporary American fiction, that the really
interesting questions about fin-de-siècle TV—What exactly is it about televisual culture that we hate so much? Why are we
so immersed in it if we hate it so? What implications are there in our sustained, voluntary immersion in something we hate?—are
being addressed. But they are also, weirdly, being asked and answered by television itself. This is another reason why most
TV criticism seems so empty. Television’s managed to become its own most profitable analyst.

Midmorning, 8/05/90, as I was scanning and sneering at the sneering tone of the aforementioned
Times
articles, a syndicated episode of
St Elsewhere
was on TV, cleaning up in a Sunday-morning Boston market otherwise occupied by televangelists, infomercials, and the steroid-and
polyurethane-ridden
American Gladiators
, itself not charmless but definitely a low-dose show. Syndication is another new area of public fascination, not only because
huge cable stations like Chicago’s WGN and Atlanta’s TBS have upped the stakes from local to national, but because syndication
is changing the whole creative philosophy of network television. Since it is in syndication deals (where the distributor gets
both an up-front fee for a program and a percentage of the ad slots for his own commercials) that the creators of successful
television series realize truly gross profits, many new programs are designed and pitched with both immediate prime-time and
down-the-road syndication audiences in mind, and are now informed less by dreams of the ten-year-beloved-TV-institution-type
run—
M*A*S*H, Cheers!
—than of a modest three-year run that will yield the 78 in-can episodes required for an attractive syndication package. By
the way, I, like millions of other Americans, know this technical insider-type stuff because I saw a special three-part report
about syndication on
Entertainment Tonight
, itself the first nationally syndicated “news” program and the first infomercial so popular that TV stations were willing
to pay for it.

Sunday-morning syndication is also intriguing because it makes for juxtapositions as eerily apposite as anything French surrealists
could come up with. Lovable warlocks on
Bewitched
and commercially Satanic heavy-metal videos on
Top Ten Countdown
run opposite air-brushed preachers decrying demonism in U.S. culture. You can surf back and forth between a televised mass’s
“This is my blood” and
Gladiators
’ Zap breaking a civilian’s nose with a polyurethane Bataka. Or, even better, have a look at 8/05/90’s
St. Elsewhere
episode 94, originally broadcast in 1988, which airs in syndication on Boston’s Channel 38 immediately following two back-to-back
episodes of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, that icon of ’70s pathos. The plots of the two
Mary Tyler Moore Shows
are unimportant here. But the
St. Elsewhere
episode that followed them was partly concerned with a cameo-role mental patient who presented with the delusional belief
that he was Mary Richards from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. He further believed that a fellow cameo-role mental patient was Rhoda, that Dr. Westphal was Mr. Grant, and that Dr. Auschlander
was Murray. This psychiatric subplot was a one-shot; it was resolved by episode’s end. The pseudo-Mary (a sad lumpy-looking
guy, portrayed by an actor whose name I didn’t catch but who I remember used to play one of Dr. Hartley’s neurotic clients
on the old
Bob Newhart Show
) rescues the other cameo-role mental patient, whom he believes to be Rhoda and who has been furious in his denials that he
is female, much less fictional (and who is himself played by the guy who used to play Mr. Carlin, Dr. Hartley’s most intractable
client) from assault by a bit-part hebephrene. In gratitude, Rhoda/Mr. Carlin/mental patient declares that he’ll consent to
be Rhoda if that’s what Mary/neurotic client/mental patient wants. At this too-real generosity, the pseudo-Mary’s psychotic
break breaks. The sad lumpy guy admits to Dr. Auschlander that he’s not Mary Richards. He’s actually just a plain old amnesiac,
a guy without a meaningful identity, existentially adrift. He has no idea who he is. He’s lonely. He watches a lot of TV.
He says he “figured it was better to believe I was a TV character than not to believe I was anybody.” Dr. Auschlander takes
the penitent patient for a walk in the wintery Boston air and promises that he, the identityless guy, can someday very probably
find out who he really is, provided he can dispense with “the distraction of television.” Extremely grateful and happy at
this prognosis, the patient removes his own fuzzy winter beret and throws it into the air. The episode ends with a freeze
of the airborne hat, leaving at least one viewer credulously rapt.

This would have been just another clever low-concept ’80s TV story, where the final cap-tossing coyly undercuts Dr. Auschlander’s
putdown of television, were it not for the countless layers of ironic, involuted TV imagery and data that whirled around this
incredibly high-concept installment. Because another of this episode’s cameo stars, drifting through a different subplot,
is one Betty White, Sue-Ann Nivens of the old
Mary Tyler Moore Show
, here playing a tortured NASA surgeon (don’t ask). It is with almost tragic inevitability, then, that Ms. White, at 32 minutes
into the episode, meets up with the TV-deluded pseudo-Mary in their respective tortured wanderings through the hospital’s
corridors, and that she greets the mental patient’s inevitable joyful cries of “Sue-Ann!” with a too-straight face as she
says that he must have her confused with someone else. Of the convolved levels of fantasy and reality and identity here—e.g.
the patient simultaneously does, does not, and does have Betty White “confused” with Sue-Ann Nivens—we needn’t speak in detail;
doubtless a Yale Contemporary Culture dissertation is under way on Deleuze & Guattari and just this episode. But the most
interesting levels of meaning here lie, and point, behind the lens. For NBC’s
St Elsewhere
, like
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and
The Bob Newhart Show
before it, was created, produced, and guided into syndication by MTM Studios, owned by Mary Tyler Moore and overseen by her
erstwhile husband, eventual NBC CEO Grant Tinker; and
St. Elsewhere
’s scripts and subplots are story-edited by Mark Tinker, Mary’s stepson, Grant’s heir. The deluded mental patient, an exiled,
drifting veteran of one MTM program, reaches piteously out to the exiled, drifting (literally—
NASA
, for God’s sake!) veteran of another MTM production, and her deadpan rebuff is scripted by MTM personnel, who accomplish
the parodic undercut of MTM’s Dr. Auschlander with the copyrighted MTM hat-gesture of one MTM veteran who’s “deluded” he’s
another. Dr. A.’s Fowleresque dismissal of TV as just a “distraction” is less naïve than insane: there is nothing
but
television on this episode. Every character and conflict and joke and dramatic surge depends on involution, self-reference,
metatelevision. It is in-joke within in-joke.

So then why do I get the in-joke? Because I, the viewer, outside the glass with the rest of the Audience, am
in
on the in-joke. I’ve seen Mary Tyler Moore’s “real” toss of that fuzzy beret so often it’s moved past cliché into warm nostalgia.
I know the mental patient from
Bob Newhart
, Betty White from everywhere,
and
I know all sorts of intriguing irrelevant stuff about MTM Studios and syndication from
Entertainment Tonight
I, the pseudo-voyeur, am indeed “behind the scenes,” primed to get the in-joke. But it is not I the spy who have crept inside
television’s boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its production, has become my—our—own
interior. And we seem a jaded, weary, but willing and above all
knowledgeable
Audience. And this knowledgeability utterly transforms the possibilities and hazards of “creativity” in television.
St. Elsewhere
’s episode was nominated for a 1988 Emmy. For best original teleplay.

The best TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could ever
have dreamed of. The colors of MTV videos, blue-black and lambently flickered, are the colors of television.
Moonlighting
’s David and
Bueller
’s Ferris throw asides to the viewer every bit as bald as an old melodrama villain’s mono-logued gloat. Segments of the new
late-night glitz-news
After Hours
end with a tease that features harried earphoned guys in the production booth ordering the tease. MTV’s television-trivia
game show, the dry-titled
Remote Control
, got so popular it burst out of its MTV-membrane and is now syndicated band-wide. The hippest commercials, with stark computerized
settings and blank-faced models in mirrored shades and plastic slacks genuflecting before various forms of velocity, excitement,
and prestige, seem like little more than TV’s vision of how TV offers rescue to those lonely Joe Briefcases passively trapped
into watching too much TV.