Hello, blog! I know I was gone for a little while there, but I’m back now, and I missed you. It was a great vacation, but I learned that it’s essentially impossible to write anything while perpetually surrounded by huge gleaming surfaces on which one can cook many things at the same time. And let’s be honest, if I had to take some time off from constant TV-blogging, the last few weeks were a pretty great time to do it. There was nothing on. I would scan down the night’s TV guide and when presented a variety of action movies, Jersey Shore marathons, and a few scattered episodes of King of Queens, I’d just abandon the whole venture. Seriously, it was bleak.

Things are looking up, though. January is going to be a good month for new television, and I am super excited about a lot of the shows coming out over the next few weeks. Big Love, Damages, LOST, 24, Burn Notice, Caprica, and did I mention Chuck?! There will also be several newcomers, including a new FOX show called Human Target, which I know nothing about except for the millions of ads plastering the NY Subway system. So, blog ahoy.

Before jumping ahead into the midseason premieres, I want to mention one television experience of note over my break. After discovering that the day’s tickets for the Tim Burton retrospective at the MOMA were sold out, my family and I ended up wandering around looking for something to do, and ducked into what was anachronistically labeled the Museum of Television and Radio on my sister’s NYC map. We soon learned that the museum is now defunct, but is now the site of the Paley Center for Media. We walked in, headed up to the front desk, and the woman behind it started to explain what the Paley Center is all about. “This isn’t like a regular museum,” she said. “This is mostly a museum where you’ll sit and watch television.”

I know. I nearly laughed out loud. The building is full of screening rooms where they play a variety of historical and otherwise notable material from their archives, and a scan of that day’s schedule offered everything from the candy conveyor belt episode of I Love Lucy, to a special on great television moments of the last forty years, to an episode of the original Batman featuring Julie Newmar as Catwoman, to a showcase of Super Bowl commercials. We ended up ducking into the pilot of Bewitched, where Samantha waits until their wedding night to tell Darrin she’s a witch, vows to give up witchcraft for good, and then inevitably succumbs to temptation and terrorizes an awful woman who invites them both to a dinner party. The episode is pretty cheesy, and there are some seriously stilted timing issues where Samantha wrinkles her nose and then it takes a surprisingly long time for the door to fly open. Still, the experience held up quite well even once you consider that you can just watch that same pilot episode from the comfort of your couch – sitting in a screening room and watching it in the context of a museum makes you think about it a little differently.

The other great thing about the Paley Center is their enormous collection of archived television, which you can browse and watch whatever you like for an hour and a half in their fourth-floor library. Among other things, I flicked through an episode of The Muppet Show with John Cleese as the guest star, an old episode of The Defenders (because they talk about it on Mad Men), and the Chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld. My mom got caught up in a decades-old documentary about school life. I saw someone next to me engrossed in My So-Called Life.

If you’re ever in New York and feel a hankering for some television, the Paley Center is the place to go. It’s an amazing resource for any kind of television you can imagine, and probably innumerable things you would never even think of.

One thing about this blog is that I have this sense I should be writing about topical, recent, or currently airing shows – the second episode of Project Runway from last night, the new season of Top Chef, or maybe Lifetime’s new drama Drop Dead Diva. (Actually, if you’re looking for thoughts on Drop Dead Diva, this is a great place to start.) If I write about stuff that’s happening right now, there’s a much better chance that you’re also watching it, which can only make it more interesting. The problem is, I frequently get pulled off onto long jags of television that hasn’t been on for years, or everyone’s already watched, or is so obscure no one could care less about it. And it’s hard to write about anything else other than whatever it is I’ve been watching for the last day and a half. So, sorry about that. But lately, I’ve been watching Sports Night.

Behind the scenes and the cast of Sports Night, cameras always visible

Yes, Sports Night – the nineties pseudo-not-really half hour sitcom about a sports commentary show, the first major work in Aaron Sorkin’s TV oeuvre. My sister’s just watched all of it for the first time, which then got me back into thinking about it, and Alan Sepinwall’s been doing a summer project where he’s blogging about the whole show in two-episode chunks (with the help of NPR’s Linda Holmes). So it’s been floating around in my head for a while, and there is this to say about Sports Night: there are definitely worse things to have floating around in your head.

For one thing, Aaron Sorkin is one of the few people whose style is so distinct that he could rewrite The Princess Diaries and you’d still know it was him. The dialogue, the timing, the infamous walk-and-talk that were so characteristic to The West Wing are all already in place or in development in Sports Night, and it’s almost disconcerting to see them in a different setting coming from different mouths. Or it would be disconcerting, except that the setting and mouths, while superficially different, are also all practice runs for The West Wing. It seems as though the White House and a TV studio would have radically different atmospheres, but although one space feels a little smaller, the energy and tension are identical.

What makes Sports Night so fascinating for me is that it’s so obviously flawed. It’s a great show, and well worth watching, but it’s a swirling primordial soup of disconnected ideas that Sorkin is still trying to polish. Use trivial moments to metaphorically deal with giant problems. What does it mean to be female in a masculine landscape. Depiction of powerful male friendship. Build several plot lines that collide over one crucial issue. All of this stuff is in place already, and when Will shouts “is there a civilization?!” I can hear Josh and Toby shouting “do we have a civilization?!” five years down the road, but in Sports Night, the content is too big for the form. It’s just absurd to have all these sports anchors running around debating politics and social reform, a half hour isn’t nearly long enough to build the relationships in a plausible way, and in the first several episodes, there’s a laugh track! Somebody wryly cracks a joke, and suddenly there’s a laugh track, completely at odds with everything about the tone, pacing, and content of the show.

Martin Sheen as Jed Bartlet, President of the United States on The West Wing

Sports Night is that rare creature – a completed version of something that’s not quite done. Without Sports Night, it would be easy to see The West Wing as leaping fully formed onto the screen, like Athena out of Zeus’ forehead, but it’s clear that’s just not the case. Some things translated almost unchanged. Dana became CJ, Jeremy became Charlie, Dan and Casey morphed into the three-way brotherly love fest of Sam, Toby and Josh. But with The West Wing, suddenly Sorkin was able to give his coterie of focused, driven people a moral center to look up to. In the structure of a television studio, the chain of command keeps going up and up and up, and there’s no ultimate authority to love or respect. Isaac Jaffey is meant to be the mentor/father figure of Sports Night, but every time he has to kowtow to the network, that authority slips away. With the emotional and bureaucratic hierarchy of the White House, Sorkin could give everyone a loving, benevolent leader who both reflected their humanity and occasionally resembled divinity. Suddenly, with The West Wing, the form and concept fit the content.

When you’re studying literature, you often have a chance to look at early manuscripts or read rough drafts with annotated notes in the margins. Those resources are invaluable, and can tell you so much about what the author thought, the intention and process and assessment. Some of my favorites are from Charles Dickens, who made intense outlines of each chapter of Bleak House and then wrote notes to himself like “Kill Jo! No, not yet!” Margin notes just aren’t often available for television. Sometimes we get directors’ commentary on a DVD set, or hints through Entertainment Weekly and Variety about casting changes or new writers being brought in, but on the whole, it’s hard to find a rough draft of a television show. (Unless you’re actually in the writer’s room and working through various versions of a script. And if anyone out there has that kind of access – hook me up, guys!) This is why Sports Night is so priceless for me. As a show about a TV show, it’s a beautiful illustration of how television gets made, both fictionally and in real life.

As someone whose job is ostensibly to think deeply and at great length about literature, I end up spending a lot of time thinking instead about why I find television so appealing and worthwhile. Among other things, there’s the bald fact that I love it and always have, but I’d like to point to two recently published pieces that illustrate the issue a little bit better than that.

The first is an op-ed by Porochista Khakpour that came out a few days ago in The New York Times. Written while working on her second novel at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, NY, Khakpour describes obsessively watching the show Thirtysomething rather than working on her book. She writes first about watching it as a child and holding it up as a symbol of American adulthood, something she actively strove for in her own life as a child of immigrants. Now, watching it again as a thirty-one year old, Khakpour feels a “stew” of mixed emotions: “it is true, it is real, it is me, it is not me, it is horrible, and I love it.” Despite the show’s obvious distance from the world she sees around her, Khakpour sees Thirtysomething’s “devotion to the naturalism of everyday details and all the microcosms of absolute, roller-coaster intimacy” as “the real reality TV, every bit as boring and dazzling as the real ‘real life.’”

The other piece I found particularly engrossing was a blog post by Josh Friedman, the showrunner of the now-defunct show The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Friedman’s piece was written as a part of io9.com’s weeklong “TV that ate my brain” coverage (for which they made an awesome banner), and he writes about the role television has had in his experiences with therapy. Not only has television created unreasonable expectations for the therapeutic process, (“I want each session to be a closed-ended episode of CSI, and in truth it’s closer to a badly written soap opera that’s been stripped of the sex and the betrayals and the evil twins and replaced with a meandering, repetitive monologue”), the television Friedman writes plays an important role for his therapist. “When she watches Sarah Conner she doesn’t seen robots and Skynet and John Connor, she sees cancer dreams and death fetishes and the psychological damage done by the absent and perfect father.”

Khakpour and Friedman are essentially enacting the same process while watching and creating television. For Khakpour, something made for mass audiences and viewed by millions of people becomes a personal object, relevant to her life in specific ways and available for study and interpretation. For Friedman, the process is much more fully integrated in his life – like Khakpour, he uses television as a tool to interpret himself, but those personal revelations are re-embedded into television and produced for mass consumption. Television shows are simultaneously accessible for an audience of millions and for an incredibly personal audience of one. Of course literature can do that same thing, and has been doing it for centuries. But the idea that television can play the same role in shaping our identities and perspective of the world is something we haven’t thought about as much.

For me, I wish I could say the show most closely equivalent in my own life to Khakpour’s Thirtysomething was Sex in the City, but I really didn’t watch it until college, when my perception of adulthood was much clearer. Alas, the show that signified adulthood and forbidden topics of discussion was that other show about young Manhattanites searching for love and success. Yes, when I was twelve, I thought life as an adult meant a life like the one on Friends. I vividly remember my babysitter debating with herself about whether it would be okay to watch it in front of me, and then hurriedly changing the channel when Ross and Rachel had sex on the floor of an exhibit in the Museum of Natural History. I remember her looking at me guiltily, as if she’d exposed me to something I was not yet ready to see. It never became something I went out of my way to watch, or anxiously looked forward to (unlike Babylon 5, to which I was passionately devoted), but whenever I happened across a rerun, I would store away ideas and vocabulary for future consumption. Rent control. Lesbian life partner. Spray-on tanning. Coffee shops. Blind dates. Being “on a break.”

Watching Friends now, it is hopelessly absurd and unreal. For one thing, apparently everyone in Manhattan is white (until Joey dates Charlie near the end, but that’s about it). The stupid jokes that come at carefully spaced intervals, the characters that quickly become caricatures, the absence of any problem that lasts more than 22 minutes – the entire sitcom format is antithetical to realism. But I remember watching it and thinking “one day I’ll live in an apartment!” So I sit now in my apartment and am glad to find people writing about television as a personal medium. It always has been for me.

Slings & Arrows deserves much more thought than I gave it yesterday, because it really is well-made and smart and funny and dark and ambitious and all of those lovely things. I wouldn’t call it particularly fun, because it’s uncomfortable to watch the main character go mad and carry on full conversations with the theater’s former, deceased artistic director. Still, it’s uncomfortable in a sharp, intelligent way, which allows the viewer to feel certain that the unpleasantness is worthwhile, and will be made up for by a deeper satisfaction in the end.

Aside from the show’s incredible writing, the large and talented cast, and its dedication to praising Shakespeare at every turn, my primary impression turns out to be way more trivial. Every other minute, I am just blown away by how Canadian it is. The whole fictional New Burbage Festival is self-consciously engaged in the perpetuation of culture in a way that seems incomparable with any single American institution. There is actually a Minister of Culture who shows up every few episodes and has to be convinced to continue funding the festival. The perception that New Burbage Festival has a responsibility to Canadian citizens extends throughout the inner festival workings, so that every decision about what play to put on, what actor to cast, what it means when Americans are on stage, and whether or not to dilute the festival with musical, becomes a gesture of Canadian selfhood.

A popular New Burbage hotspot: Yong's Canadian and Chinese Food

Plus, everyone constantly apologizes for everything. Okay, it’s an easy and possibly unfair point to make, but you would not believe how often these characters say “sorry!” to each other. Ellen Fanshawe, the diva lead company actress, goes on stereotypical actress rampages, shows up late to rehearsal, and has knock-down blow out fights with her directors, but still finishes each tirade with “Sorry, everybody. Sorry!” Not only is it sort of a revelation to watch a show where people manage to disagree while also being decent human beings, the constant focus on civility highlights one of the show’s most interesting themes – the relationship between art and business.

New Burbage Festival's leadership: Artistic director on left, business director on right

One of the original things about Slings & Arrows’s depiction of the New Burbage theater company is the focus on acting as a profession. The characters are all artists, devoted to the stage and constantly feeding off the emotional intensity necessary to perform well, but they’re also business colleagues who have to live and work with each other year after year. The art vs. business theme continues into the sillier side of the show, which involves many clashes between the festival’s business director and the artistic director and frequently revels in the business director’s secret love of musical theater. The debate adds a real-world component to the fancy literary premise, and I think it’s a debate Shakespeare would have been engaged in himself. In an American show, it would seem disingenuous for art to win out in the end, but from the Canadian perspective, where culture has its own dedicated minister in the government, it’s almost believable.

There are a lot of great things to be said for hulu.com, and I am completely in love with any legal, free service that allows me to watch television on demand. Sure, there are some problems with availability and expiration dates, but I’m choosing to blame that on networks that haven’t fully embraced online distribution. One aspect of the website that I think gets underappreciated, though, is its collection of vintage television. Despite the fact that I’ve watched an amount of TV that might be categorized with words like “excessive” or “ridiculously unhealthy,” I have a relatively limited exposure to television before 1990. Which is why it’s been a revelatory experience for me to slowly sift through hulu’s older TV catalogue. Quantum Leap, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, What’s Happening!, Miami Vice, Hill Street Blues, Remington Steele, The Facts of Life, Welcome Back Kotter – this is a wide world of the unexplored for me. So at the very least, if anyone has suggestions about what will change my worldview and what’s so awful it deserves a good laugh, please help guide me.

As I’ve tried to sort through the wide array of options for retro viewing, I did stumble across one show that I immediately snickered at and then started browsing. I’d never seen an episode of this show, but the name called to mind a whole world of feminist disgust, unrealistic Americana, Chryslers with enormous fins on the back, and the necessity of wearing pearls while baking: The Donna Reed Show. Below, I present you with my recap of a single episode of The Donna Reed Show, chosen solely for its title (“The Ideal Wife”), which seemed likely to be full of absurdities as well as personally topical. (I got a little excitable, so I’m putting the full recap after the jump). read more…

Yesterday, Jason Kottke of kottke.org did a cool project in honor of Walter Cronkite and the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He set up a page with just a vintage television on it, and then aired the CBS coverage of the moon landing at the same times during the day it was originally broadcast. It’s a great way to remember both the moon landing event and Walter Cronkite’s legacy as a journalist, but it was also an incredible method to simulate the experience of a mass television audience on the internet. The footage was hosted on youtube, but the video just turned on when it was time, with no control from the user, and if you wanted to leave, you couldn’t rewind or start it over again. The images were grainy and hard to make out, several times the image flipped upside-down or reversed polarity, and the audio was crackly, but I was pretty mesmerized.

The feeling was amplified by how mesmerized the announcers were as well. There were a lot of great moments from the astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin reporting that he was going to make sure not to lock the LEM door on the way out, but one of my favorites came from Walter Cronkite. “Oh, thank you television, for letting us watch this one,” he said, just as Neil came into view. “Isn’t this something.”

Watch the moon landing coverage:

Kottke’s TV

You can watch all of the coverage on youtube – I particularly recommend the moon landing, and the moon walk clips one (“One small step for man”), three (making sure not to lock the door), and six (planting the flag – “nothing more is needed here,” Cronkite says, “but it does seem that there oughta be some music.”)

Digging through the library today, I found several other images of the telephonoscope as it was imagined in the late nineteenth century. These are all from a book called La vingtième siècle (The Twentieth Century) written and illustrated by Albert Robida in 1883. Written as a speculative account of the year 1955, The Twentieth Century is full of impressively prescient futuristic devices like subways, public telephones, submarines and helicopters. Robida also imagines female emancipation and military service, correspondents reporting live from war zones, and the ability to see and hear projected images of women doing sexy things in the privacy of your own home. Quite the visionary, that guy.

Telephonoscope: a necessary item for your boudoir

Some big screen telephonoscope options.

Ooohhh, she’s rolling down her garter…

Meanwhile, in the twenty-first century, I’ve been fascinated this week by a different kind of futuristic speculation about the possibility (necessity?) of new liberal arts. Written and published by a bunch of new-mediay people, the entire text is available as a free PDF, and makes for an entertaining, semi-snarky, thought-provoking browse. Among other recommended courses of study, these new liberal arts include attention economics, photography, reality engineering, and inaccuracy. I’m not sold on attention economics as a new liberal art, but I’d love to sign up for video literacy.