I used to dislike Tango, but this genre seems to grow on you. No doubt some will attribute that to increased wisdom; tango evokes sadness, melancholy, despair -not usually appealing to the very young. It is a reflection, perhaps, of the society in which it was born, and wether good or bad, it seems to have a deep effect on the listener...
I recently learned -completely by chance- of the existence of a country I hadn't even heard of before: Kabardino-Balkaria. I was amazed at my own ignorance -I thought that by know I knew of every country on Earth, at least by name, so I had to look it up. It turns out this former Soviet repubic is not an independent contry but one of the many oblasts (a type of province) that make up the Russian Federation.
I’ve been thinking about a posting dedicated to this mainstream component of our culture for a long time. It turned out much longer than I had anticipated.
As a young child (way before cable or DVRs) I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my time than watching TV. Even when there was nothing I liked, I’d still rather watch TV than do anything else. Why do so many children have this addiction for something so worthless? This question kept nagging at me so I had to try to figure it out.
For somebody relatively new to the world, few things can provide as much effortless information input density as TV. A child’s mind is an avid information sink. Any information is excellent when you have almost none, so even the dullest cartoon is a synaptic feast of new objects, concepts, and interactions; thus the young brain latches on to it. Eventually, however, information density drops, as most of it is no longer new. The increasingly more complex intellect becomes more demanding, and TV loses its preeminence; most information coming out of it no longer has much value even as entertainment, as ninety-nine percent of it is nothing but thinly disguised repetition. At least this was the case with me during my mid-teens (no, I don’t mean I was nothing but thinly disguised repetition) I mean that I started to find TV quite dull and rather a waste of time. Once in a while I’d find something worth watching, but those were the exceptions.
Then, in the past decade or so, TV’s landscape changed. I am talking about entertainment– comedies and dramas. A new generation of TV shows started to appear. I found myself enlightened, moved, or challenged by ideas and situations in a TV show. Suddenly, TV was an enriching experience.
Around the end of the millennium, I had been hearing lots of good things about The Sopranos, I was a bit curious, but never got around to watch it –after all work was an all consuming monster at the time, and that was just a TV show, right? Eventually, though, I found myself with a lot more time than usual in my hands, and I was impressed by the show. All kinds of unexpected things happened. Unexpected and TV show in the same sentence -imagine that. I was hooked. Then I found Six Feet Under, my first dramedy, and I watched the first two seasons. That show was totally groundbreaking back in 2002, and it still hasn’t lost its edge in 2009 (I watched the rest of it recently thanks to an involuntary extended vacation :)
But in my opinion the prize goes to The West Wing, this show has single-handedly risen the bar on broadcast TV by a couple of orders of magnitude -hands down my absolute all time favorite.
Sure, regular and bad TV shows still outnumber good ones, but why the relatively sharp change upwards in the quality curve in the past decade? Part of it is the normal trend on any field –people build on previous advances, and so the bar keeps rising. I wonder if people are becoming more demanding as well. I think it is a fact that the average citizen is less naïve or conventional, society in general has become less static, more open and multi-faceted than it was a couple of decades ago, and it takes some time for writers and producers and studios to catch up to the new paradigms; especially, if as this article suggests and I have no trouble believing, profit margins in broadcast TV became the primary goal of management, creating a downward spiral of declining ratings, followed by declining budgets and quality and so on: http://seekingalpha.com/article/85828-the-end-of-broadcast-tv-nears (I found the comments even more interesting than the article). So the advent of cable must have been a magnet for talented and creative writers and producers, helping to save TV –at least the evidence seems to match this theory.
Finally, the spread of technologies and services like DVRs, Netflix, iTunes, streaming, and file sharing; laptops and mobile devices are allowing people to watch shows at a time and place of their choosing, rather than having to seat in front a designated screen at a designated time –this is really significant, because for the first time, content originally created for TV is independent of TV channels, TV schedules and TV sets, allowing people to watch shows that otherwise they would never get around to see (and BTW, here is yet more proof that freedom is something we can never have too much of).
The really exciting thing about all this, is that producers and writers of TV shows will continue to gain artistic independence from management. Sure, we still need studios and money-people, you can’t (yet) produce something like The West Wing in your garage, but it is pretty clear where things are headed -and it looks like a better place to me.
I recently learned -completely by chance- of the existence of a country I hadn't even heard of before: Kabardino-Balkaria. I was amazed at my own ignorance -I thought that by know I knew of every country on Earth, at least by name, so I had to look it up. It turns out this former Soviet repubic is not an independent contry but one of the many oblasts (a type of province) that make up the Russian Federation.
