In Defense of Shitty Television

Last month, Stephen Marche wrote a short but fascinating article on popular television for Esquire magazine.  Today, Marche says, the small screen is producing more fresh, smart material – and more venues through which to access that material – than ever before.  Shows like Mad Men and Girls are seamlessly melding entertainment with prescient social commentary, while companies like Netflix and HBO GO are democratizing our access to such quality programming.  TV seems to be in the midst of a new “golden age.”

So there’s the bait.  Now comes the switch.

How bad could it be? [image source]

According to Marche, the problem with this narrative is that it’s not reflective of actual viewing data.  Mad Men and Girls might be great shows, but their audience pales in comparison to that of network television.  Indeed, he says, “[i]f you take away sports and reality television, the shows in the ratings’ top ten are NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, and two Chuck Lorre comedies, The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men.”  And these shows suck.  They are, for Marche, the cultural antithesis of Mad Men or Girls, dispiritedly rehashing jokes and plots that would have seemed familiar twenty years ago.

So why do so many people watch them?  Because, Marche concludes, change is scary.  In a world of constant transformation, the average viewer wants security.  We want to know that everything will be all right, that the perpetual modifications of our world won’t end up washing us away.  And so we seek refuge in the warm glow of stale TV programming, knowing that it won’t make us partake in anything we haven’t seen or heard before.

The argument makes sense.  It seems right.  It would be difficult to argue that Two and a Half Men is quality programming, and impossible to counter the viewing data (at least the raw numbers).  Still, I would like to offer three points of caution.

First, Marche's conclusion is itself somewhat stale and rehashed.  The notion that popular culture is a form of mass and mindless escapism goes back as far as eighteenth century.  For William Godwin and Edmund Burke, it was the newspaper that dulled the public consciousness.  For nineteenth century thinkers like Matthew Arnold, it was the novel.  By the early and mid-twentieth centuries, German political philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were excoriating radio, film, and jazz music.  Since its inception, popular culture has always inspired the criticism that it lobotomizes the masses.  Of course, just because this argument is old doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.  But it is important to acknowledge that Marche’s observations have their own particular history.  He is following a well-worn script here.

The second and related caution is that, precisely because Marche is following a script, his argument comes off as a bit simplistic.  Sure, it’s possible that watching bad TV helps us escape from reality.  But to make that causal narrative stick, one has to pass over a number of thorny issues and questions.  How are people watching these bad TV shows, for instance?  Do they channel surf?  Is this programming on in the background while they eat dinner?  Or are they six inches from the screen, desperately lapping up every poorly scripted joke and plot twist?  Basic viewership data doesn’t tell us much about what these programs mean to people, or how they're used.  Another issue: Marche seems to think that if a television program is “drab and tepid,” then its content and context don’t matter.  But I would be careful here: the comedy of Two and a Half Men or 2 Broke Girls might be painfully obvious, but the shows are still tracking some contemporary social anxieties, however dimly, such as familial (in)stability and the recession economy.  Popular television programming might not be good, but that doesn’t mean its content tells us nothing about current concerns and sensitivities.  Conversely, there’s nothing inherently non-escapist about “quality” culture, whether that be creative television programming, canonical literature, modern art, or whatever.  How exactly is Mad Men, for instance, a show about the advertisement industry in the 1960s, preparing us to better deal with the uncertainties of 2013?

Still, it could be that Marche is totally right.  The world is a scary place, and TV helps turn us away from that reality.  And so this state of affairs reflects a certain mass mindlessness.  People turn on TV to turn off the outside world, saying: “I don’t know what I want in my life but I know I don’t want that; anything but that.”  It is on this note that Marche concludes his essay.  It seems to me, however, that this is precisely where we need to begin.

If these sentiments indeed capture our mindset today, then some exciting conversations need to follow.  Because I don't hear apathy or disinterest here – not, “I want nothing at all” – but rather a desire to talk back to the confines of our contemporary social and political reality: “I cannot accept what my world is offering me.”  There is a fundamental difference between these two outlooks.  True, both share a certain anxiety about the future; Marche might be right about our collective worries on that score.  But being anxious about the future doesn't mean that we don't want any future at all.  And that's the thing I worry his article overlooks. 

Criticizing and even condemning television is fine, if not downright needed.  But it's a mistake to assume that its viewers have nothing to say.  And this, unfortunately, is the attitude that has long united controllers and critics of television alike.