Everything Bad Is Good for You (3 page)

T
HE INTERACTIVE NATURE
of games means that they will inevitably require more decision-making than passive forms like television or film. But popular television shows—and to a slightly lesser extent, popular films—have also increased the cognitive work they demand from their audience, exercising the mind in ways that would have been unheard of thirty years ago. For someone loosely following the debate over the medium's cultural impact, the idea that television is actually improving our minds will sound like apostasy. You can't surf the Web or flip through a newsstand for more than a few minutes without encountering someone complaining about the surge in sex and violence on TV: from Tony Soprano to Janet Jackson. There's no questioning that the trend is real enough, though it is as old as television itself. In Newton Minow's famous “vast wasteland” speech from 1961, he described the content of current television programming as a “procession of…blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder”—this in the era of Andy Griffith, Perry Como, and Uncle Miltie. But evaluating the social merits of any medium and its programming can't be limited purely to questions of subject matter. There was nothing particularly redeeming in the subject matter of my dice baseball games, but they nonetheless taught me how to think in powerful new ways. So if we're going to start tracking swear words and wardrobe malfunctions, we ought to at least include another line in the graph: one that charts the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers. That line, too, is trending upward at a dramatic rate.

Television may be more passive than video games, but there are degrees of passivity. Some narratives force you to do work to make sense of them, while others just let you settle into the couch and zone out. Part of that cognitive work comes from following multiple threads, keeping often densely interwoven plotlines distinct in your head as you watch. But another part involves the viewer's “filling in”: making sense of information that has been either deliberately withheld or deliberately left obscure. Narratives that require that their viewers fill in crucial elements take that complexity to a more demanding level. To follow the narrative, you aren't just asked to remember. You're asked to analyze. This is the difference between intelligent shows, and shows that force you to be intelligent. With many television classics that we associate with “quality” entertainment—
Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, Frasier
—the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters onscreen. They say witty things to each other, and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom clichés, and we smile along in our living room, enjoying the company of these smart people. But assuming we're bright enough to understand the sentences they're saying—few of which are rocket science, mind you, or any kind of science, for that matter—there's no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. There's no filling in, because the intellectual achievement exists entirely on the other side of the screen. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge your body watching
Monday Night Football.
The intellectual work is happening onscreen, not off.

But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Recall the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half century of television's dominance over mass culture, programming on TV has steadily increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. The nature of the medium is such that television will never improve its viewers' skills at translating letters into meaning, and it may not activate the imagination in the same way that a purely textual form does. But for all the other modes of mental exercise associated with reading, television is growing increasingly rigorous. And the pace is accelerating—thanks to changes in the economics of the television business, and to changes in the technology we rely on to watch.

This progressive trend alone would probably surprise someone who only read popular accounts of TV without watching any of it. But perhaps the most surprising thing is this: that the shows that have made the most demands on their audience have also turned out to be among the most lucrative in television history.

 

P
UT ASIDE
for a moment the question of why the marketplace is rewarding complexity, and focus first on the question of what this complexity looks like. It involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks.

Multiple threading is the most acclaimed structural convention of modern television programming, which is ironic because it's also the convention with the most debased pedigree. According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival of
Hill Street Blues
in 1981, the Steven Bochco–created police drama invariably praised for its “gritty realism.” Watch an episode of
Hill Street Blues
side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades—
Starsky and Hutch,
for instance, or
Dragnet
—and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot, and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every
Dragnet
episode and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case. A typical
Starsky and Hutch
episode offers only the slightest variation on this linear formula: the introduction of a comic subplot that usually appears only at the tail ends of the episode, creating a structure that looks like the graph below. The vertical axis represents the number of individual threads, and the horizontal axis is time.

Starsky and Hutch
includes a few other twists: While both shows focus almost exclusively on a single narrative,
Dragnet
tells the story entirely from the perspective of the investigators.
Starsky and Hutch,
on the other hand, oscillates between the perspectives of the cops and that of the criminals. And while both shows adhere religiously to the principle of narrative self-containment—the plots begin and end in a single episode—
Dragnet
takes the principle to a further extreme, introducing the setting and main characters with Joe Friday's famous voice-over in every episode.

A
Hill Street Blues
episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands—sometimes as many as ten, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters—and not just bit parts—swells dramatically. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset, and leaving one or two threads open at the end. Charted graphically, an average episode looks like this:

Critics generally cite
Hill Street Blues
as the origin point of “serious drama” native to the television medium—differentiating the series from the single episode dramatic programs from the fifties, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But the
Hill Street
innovations weren't all that original; they'd long played a defining role in popular television—just not during the evening hours. The structure of a
Hill Street
episode—and indeed all of the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from
thirtysomething
to
Six Feet Under
—is the structure of a soap opera.
Hill Street Blues
might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that
Guiding Light
and
General Hospital
had mastered long before.

Bochco's genius with
Hill Street
was to marry complex narrative structure with complex subject matter.
Dallas
had already shown that the extended, interwoven threads of the soap opera genre could survive the weeklong interruptions of a prime-time show, but the actual content of
Dallas
was fluff. (The most probing issue it addressed was the now folkloric question of who shot JR.)
All in the Family
and
Rhoda
showed that you could tackle complex social issues, but they did their tackling in the comfort of the sitcom living room structure.
Hill Street
had richly drawn characters confronting difficult social issues, and a narrative structure to match.

Since
Hill Street
appeared, the multithreaded drama has become the most widespread fictional genre on prime time:
St. Elsewhere, thirtysomething, L.A. Law, Twin Peaks, NYPD Blue, ER, The West Wing, Alias, The Sopranos, Lost, Desperate Housewives.
The only prominent holdouts in drama are shows like
Law & Order
that have essentially updated the venerable
Dragnet
format, and thus remained anchored to a single narrative line. Since the early eighties, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to date—
The Sopranos
—routinely follows a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than twenty recurring characters. An episode from late in the first season looks like this:

The total number of active threads equals the number of multiple plots of
Hill Street,
but here each thread is more substantial. The show doesn't offer a clear distinction between dominant and minor plots; each storyline carries its weight in the mix. The episode also displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from
Hill Street
: a single scene in
The Sopranos
will often connect to three different threads at the same time, layering one plot atop another. And every single thread in this
Sopranos
episode builds on events from previous episodes, and continues on through the rest of the season and beyond. Almost every sequence in the show connects to information that exists outside the frame of the current episode. For a show that spends as much time as it does on the analyst's couch,
The Sopranos
doesn't waste a lot of energy with closure.