Charles Dickens, 1859

So Friday’s blog post was not a List of Giant Things entry in the sense that I’ve usually been doing them, but it was a collection of quotes on an issue that’s closely related to that list. The quotes deserve a little additional commentary, which I was going to do yesterday, but Treme interfered. For now, then, back to Charles Dickens, Father of TV.

As I indicated in a comment on that post, one of the most important things to think about that little collection is how many of those quotes misread Dickens, or use him in an extremely limited way. I have a list here that covers some of the primary contexts in which Dickens appears when related to television, but there’s a lot about his work that does not have much impact on the commentary. (For instance: his frustratingly narrow depiction of most of his female characters, his astonishing prolificacy, his presence as a public performer, his role as an editor, his impact on social reform, etc. etc.)

This ended up being sort of absurdly long, so it’s going after a break. Join me for some TV-pertinent iterations of Charles Dickens:

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“One of the things that we talked about early on when doing a big saga was Charles Dickens. Most of his novels were written in one-chapter segments from the newspaper, so that’s why they have that big serialized feel to them. He never knew quite where they were going. He was just writing them one chapter at a time. We’re doing obviously the same thing here, so the art of the coincidence becomes a big part of the show, how people cross, how people’s lives come together, and it’s a very fun way to tell stories”

- Tim Kring, creator of Heroes

Carlton Cuse: [Dickens]’s getting a lot of play on Lost, isn’t he?

Damon Lindelof: He is indeed. He’s a favorite writer of ours. He wrote serialized stories just like we did. He was accused of making it up as he went along, just like we are.

Cuse: That’s right…he didn’t even have a word processor.

***

Cuse: And Charles Dickens was also a wonderful inspiration, because here he was, writing these great, wonderful, sprawling, serialized books…

Lindelof: Also, Dickens, the master of coincidence. Y’know… his stories always hinged on the idea of interconnectedness… in a very strange an inexplicable way.

-       Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, producers of Lost

I found it kind of ironic that in season 5 there are a few really great scenes where you’re mocking the editors of newspapers who are asking for a Dickensian vibe, and then a lot of critics and writers compared The Wire to Dickens.
It was fun goofing on the Dickens comparison because I understood what they meant by Dickensian when they said it. You get this sort of scope of society through the classes, the way Dickens would play with that in his novels. But that’s true of Tolstoy’s Moscow. That’s true of Balzac’s Paris. It’s been done a lot in a lot of different places by a lot of writers. And I’m not the one doing the comparing. I’m just saying if you use those tropes you can go to a lot of places other than Dickens. The thing that made me laugh about it with Dickens was that Dickens is famous for being passionate about showing you the fault lines of industrial England and where money and power route themselves away from the poor. He would make the case for a much better social compact than existed in Victorian England, but then his verdict would always be, “But thank God a nice old uncle or this heroic lawyer is going to make things better.” In the end, the guy would punk out.

Now that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great writer and they’re not great stories. They are. But The Wire was actually making a different argument than Dickens, and the comparison, while flattering, sort of fell badly on us.

- Vice interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire

It’s a leap of faith doing any serialised storytelling. We had an idea early on, but certain things we thought would work well didn’t. We couldn’t have told you which characters would be in which seasons. We couldn’t tell you who would even survive…You feel that electricity. It’s almost like live TV. We don’t quite know what might happen. I’m sure when Charles Dickens was writing, he had a sense of where he was going – but he would make adjustments as he went along. You jump into it, knowing there’s something great out there to find.”

- J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias, Lost, Fringe

“[Shows like Damages are] like Dickens for the 21^st century.”

- Glenn Close, actress on Damages

“[The Sopranos] has a novelistic sweep… Each character is defined multidimensionally. Instead of going back to drama’s theater roots, as TV did in the 1950s, it employs many of the techniques of, say, Charles Dickens and revitalizes them. This has been an interior journey from the beginning. Viewers took that trip with a bona fide sociopath, defying television’s time-honored prohibition against unlikable protagonists. In that regard, (creator/executive producer David Chase) created perhaps the darkest series of all time.”

-  Ron Simon, curator of the Paley Center for Media

Several critics have commented on The Wire‘s “literary” quality. In particular, The Wire has echoes of the Victorian social panorama of Charles Dickens (who gets a mention this season, as an obscene anatomical reference). The drama repeatedly cuts from the top of Baltimore’s social structure to its bottom, from political fund-raisers in the white suburbs to the subterranean squat of a homeless junkie. As with Dickens, the excitement builds as the densely woven plot unfolds in addicting installments. The deeper connection to Dickens’ London is the program’s animating fury at the way a society robs children of their childhood. In our civilized age, we do not send 12-year-olds to work in blacking factories as the Victorians did. Today’s David Copperfield is instead warehoused at a dysfunctional school until he’s ready to sling drugs on the corner, where his odds of survival are even slimmer.

- Slate’s Jacob Weisberg

Driver: [as the coach races down the road after the hearse] Everything in order, Mr. Dickens?
Charles Dickens: No it is not!
The Doctor: What did he say?
Charles Dickens: Let me say this first. I’m not without a sense of humor…
The Doctor: Dickens?
Charles Dickens: Yes?
The Doctor: Charles Dickens?
Charles Dickens: Yes.
The Doctor: The Charles Dickens?
Driver: Shall I remove the gentleman, Sir?
The Doctor: Charles Dickens. You’re brilliant you are! Completely one hundred per cent brilliant. I’ve read them all. “Great Expectations”, “Oliver Twist”, and whats the other one? The one with the ghost?
Charles Dickens: “A Christmas Carol”?
The Doctor: No, no, no. The one with the trains. “The Signalman”. That’s it. Terrifying, The best short story ever written! You’re a genius!
Driver: You want me to get rid of him, Sir?
Charles Dickens: No, I think he can stay.

- Doctor Who, “The Unquiet Dead”

Master Sergeant: Set of keys; one pocket watch, gold plated; one photograph; one book, Our Mutual Friend. Why didn’t you bring that inside?

Desmond: To avoid temptation, brother. I’ve read everything Mr. Charles Dickens has ever written – every wonderful word. Every book except this one. I’m saving it so it will be the last thing I ever read before I die.

- Lost, “Live Together, Die Alone”

So yesterday I was in full swing on procedurals and Why They Work, and I had ended on the conclusion that in order to fully appreciate their fictional value, you have to think about the most obvious aspects of the shows. The pleasure of the procedural can’t just be the thrilling, pseudo-scandalous content (more on pseudo-scandal in a moment) or the very small percentage of each show dedicated to plot development outside the self-contained episode – there has to be some consideration of the underlying, inescapable reliance on predictable, comfortable, familiar, even tedious repetition.

The word “work” is important here. It is the basis of every single procedural I think of – maybe it’s lawyers, or doctors, or cops, or forensic scientists, or mathematicians – but every procedural inevitably justifies its repetition through the rhythms of someone’s job. They’re always exciting jobs that are fast-paced and put the main characters (err, main employees) in constant contact with drama, violence, extraordinary human circumstances, and usually some good gory bits. It’s work nonetheless, and however thrilling each new case may be, our protagonists always remind us that it will soon come to an end. That drive toward resolution seems like it’s just the familiar pressure of an hour-long episode, but the fictional structure of the show embeds that awareness into its main characters just as much as its audience. Our hour will end, and it will be just another episode of Law and Order: SVU, just as for Olivia Benson or whoever, at the end of the day, it’ll be merely another in a long career of crazy days at work. The audience’s familiarity with the rules of the hour-long procedural guarantee that the drama will not bleed over into other episodes, but that assurance also comes from within the show’s fictional premise. Of course this isn’t going to be a life-altering murder investigation that will forever damage your relationship with your family or force you to reconsider your worldview. It’s just work.

Temperance Brennan, just doin' her job. Next to some dessicated human remains.

Let me make sure this is straight. Procedurals appear to be about drama and violence and sexual dysfunction, but they’re actually just about people at work, doing the same tedious examination of the crime scene they always do. At the same time, the procedural format re-inscribes the repetitive rhythms of performing a job. Bones may look like it’s about whether Booth and Bones are ever going to discuss their feelings for one another (and they do sometimes! Last night they totally did!), but even on Very Special Episodes like that one, the solid majority of the hour is just repetition of the familiar formula. We are introduced to a victim, we run through the possible cast of suspects, we investigate the evidence, we do a funny bit with the support staff, and, aha! A murderer is caught! These shows allow us to watch people work, and then build the repetitive, even mind-numbing reiteration of doing a job into the experience of watching.

Why are these entertaining, exactly?

As I mentioned yesterday, the procedural gets a lot of criticism for being aggressively un-lifelike. On the level of an individual episode, and often in terms of the fictional content of those episodes, I think that’s true. No one goes to the bathroom in television shows unless someone is hiding inside a stall to attack them, or they’re about to overhear some vicious gossip. But taken as a whole mass of regular, formulaic stories, the procedural actually does a pretty good job of representing what a middle class, working life might look like. It is repetitive, it is predictable, and for the most part, the major scandals of the day are ultimately pseudo-scandals. The chance that any particular day is going to contain a life-altering event is not very high, and the stuff that fills the day in the mean time tends to seem scandalous or highly dramatic, but is usually pretty trivial in the long term. Just as in life, procedurals allow characters’ personal lives to occasionally interject into the workplace, but it’s always placed inside the framework of their jobs, and always subsumed within the constant, fairly arbitrary delineations of the work’s closure – the end of a workday, a business week, a law suit.

Maybe I’m reaching, here, but I think procedurals are entertaining because we like watching ourselves, or at least, our own lives rewritten into a slightly different perspective. First, the job itself, which contains all sorts of taboo subject matter that rarely shows up in a cubicle. But that’s really just a side benefit of the bigger project: procedurals valorize work. It helps when that work is exciting and has obvious real-world impact, but the form of the procedural affirms any sort of work. It transforms the negative aspects of any job – repetition, tedium, conventionality – into positives. The procedural (your life) is not conventional; it’s familiar. It’s not tedious; it’s comforting. Repetition may be boring, but it’s also knowable and controllable.

Bones and Booth, walking back to work

This is the beating heart of every procedural, even the ones that make the exception appear more important than the rule. Last night’s episode of Bones was all about understanding the foundation of Bones’ and Booth’s relationship, which is ostensibly the story of how they met and were attracted to each other, how their personalities conflicted, how they negotiated their opposite worldviews. They kissed! They kissed not just in the flashback I teased yesterday, but they kissed again, in the current timeline of the show! This show is a romance!

But it’s not. Booth and Bones met because Booth needed help with his job. They liked each other because they were good at doing the job together, they fought when one person’s approach to the job opposed the other person’s, and at the end, after daringly suggesting that they try to have a relationship, Bones shoots Booth down. “I’m a scientist,” she says. “I can’t change, I don’t know how.”

Note: Once I started writing this, I quickly realized that it was going to be quite long, and that I needed more time than I have today. So this post will continue tomorrow, which will have the added benefit of being able to actually use the 100^th episode of Bones rather than just try to talk about in a stupid spoiler-free way.

The 100^th episode of Bones is airing tonight, and as often happens on the momentous milestones of long-running shows, there will be some extra-special events that I’m sure will get fans all riled up about Booth and Brennan.

Temperance Brennan (Bones) and Seeley Booth on Bones

I don’t usually write about shows like Bones, partly because they’re not the types of shows that are considered great fiction worthy of extensive critical attention. Bones’ creator Hart Hanson has described the process of writing Bones as being more like craftsmanship than artistry, and it’s easy to see where that argument comes from. Unlike art, which we usually associate with words like “new,” “innovative,” “unique,” “unusual,” “genius,” – words defined by singularity and novelty – procedural dramas like Bones are carefully built around constant, predictable repetition. That certainly doesn’t mean they’re easy to make. There are good procedurals and bad procedurals, and I promise, if you think about it, you’ll be able to tell the difference. But the process of creating them is about thoughtful re-combinations of familiar elements; it’s a craft of arranging things you already recognize into slightly altered, unexpected patterns, so that even if you’ve never seen an episode before, you already sort of know what’s going on. They’re partners with opposite personalities. They solve murders. They have a team of wacky sidekicks who help them. They are perfect for each other, but they will never get together. This happens over, and over again – in fact, on Bones, it’s happened 100 times already.

In this sense, it’s pretty obvious why I don’t devote a weekly blog post to the new episode of Bones, or any procedural. Every post would be essentially the same, and once every few months, there’d be an “oooh, Booth said something sexy to Brennan. I wonder if this is finally going to make something happen between them!” paragraph. Nevertheless, these shows are worth talking about, because it’s clear they’re doing some kind of important cultural work. Procedurals have an audience, often much bigger than the number of people who watch Mad Men or even Lost. It’s not unusual for the ratings on a repeat of CSI to beat up anything else airing in that timeslot. One way of attacking the problem is thinking about the standard content of a procedural, which is certainly compelling. They’re almost always about crimes, so you can look at Law and Order and talk about how comforting it must be to watch a show cram the senselessness of violence into a pat, conclusive, hour-long drama and force it to fit inside some kind of logic once a week. Procedurals usually take place from the perspective of a cop or lawyer, so there’s probably something pleasurable about seeing things from the side of People Who Can Do Things About It rather than the typical, mundane Other People Are Supposed To Do Things About It viewpoint.

When thinking about procedurals, though, I’m much less interested in the content than in the perpetual, unvarying repetition. Maybe it’s fun to watch a fiction that draws black and white lines around tricky, subtle, frustratingly ambiguous problems, but how can it be fun to watch a television show that does that in the same way, in the same timeframe, with the same main characters, every single week? One of the oft-repeated criticisms about crime procedurals is their total lack of realism. Detective work or forensic science requires massive amounts of tedious, unexciting work that never gets depicted on television – it’s squashed into a montage of banging on doors and peering fixedly at test tubes. And yet oddly, the form of a procedural makes it so that even though these shows may not be depicting tedious repetition, they are actually reenacting it, carefully and without variance, every single episode.

What to make of this weird contradiction? Why do we find it pleasurable to watch something that, in its repetition and predictability, seems more like work than entertainment?

Yeah, this picture is sort of a spoiler. But, spoiler!, it's a flashback, so don't get too antsy. And plus, this episode will be airing in *three hours* on the East Coast. C'mon now.

Tonight’s 100^th episode of Bones is part of the solution. As I said when I described what my weekly blog post would look like, every few months there’d be an added line about how Booth said something suggestive to Bones, or about how they held hands. The show is entertaining because in the midst of the work (in the case of Bones, the murder investigation), occasionally there are glimpses of other, bigger, personal things. At the end of last season, Booth had brain surgery, and it has forced him to deal with his feelings for his partner and re-think his own character. These life-changing moments don’t happen in every episode, so most of the time, you’re just going to get the same old murder investigations, with some co-worker jokes thrown in. But every once in a while, gestures toward change and development pop up. They are suspenseful, or scary, or exciting, or hopeful – they are pleasurable. And they’re as pleasurable as they are because they take place against a largely unchanging backdrop.

Procedurals have a hard time balancing this stuff; if you introduce too many new elements, the formula changes. Either you figure out a way to start repeating the new formula, or you refuse to let any of your changes have long-term implications for the show. Bones does the former – when Bones’ favorite intern was found to be guilty of a particularly gruesome (and cannibalistic!) crime, the show introduced several new quirky interns, and built a repeating cycle of reappearing interns into the show’s everyday routine. House uses the later system, which I find to be far more frustrating. At the end of last season, House undergoes a significant character shift, has a mental break, and spends a long time in a mental institution, where he figures out how to cope with his Vicodin addiction. While he vows to become a better person, this season has allowed him to slip back into all the old obnoxious foibles, and rebuild the show’s initial formula.

This, by itself, cannot be sufficient explanation for the strength of the procedural form. For one thing, while the Very Special Episode where they kiss is always everyone’s favorite part, it happens so rarely that you have to wonder how a show could hold an audience’s attention while they wait for those events. More importantly, claiming that the special 100^th episode comprises the dominant appeal of the show is to ignore the thing that actually takes up 98% (okay, maybe 95%) of the show’s running time – the repetitive, formulaic aspects. Any argument about why these shows are so appealing has to include the impact of the shows’ most distinctive element: the procedural.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of On Procedurals!

It’s List of Giant Things day!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had one of the strongest presences in academic writing about television, or at least, it did until The Wire was crowned “the best show in television history,” and it became popular to fret over urban violence and the inevitable failures of modern institutions. Do not mistake me – I am all in favor of jumping on the “best show in television history” bandwagon, because The Wire just blows everything else out of the water.

Still, Buffy holds a special place in the development of academic television criticism, because while The Wire was catapulted quite quickly into canonical status (is now the subject of classes at Ivy League universities, has become a benchmark against which all other television is compared, is constantly perceived in relation to Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, etc. as way of solidifying its high-culture position), Buffy grew into its position slowly, and the whole process was accompanied by persistent navel-gazing. There are dozens of books, but take for example Buffy Meets the Academy, a collection of essays broken into sections: Power and the Buffy Canon, Buffy Meets the Classics, Buffy and the Classroom. My favorite essay titles in the book include “Buffy Never Goes It Alone: The Rhetorical Construction of Sisterhood in the Final Season” and “Buffy’s Insight into Wollstonecraft and Mill” – the text is constantly reaching toward the language and references of a standard critical discussion, but is ever self-conscious about making a popular network television show with an audience of teenage girls its subject.

Buffy became an academic hit largely because it turns several favorite gendered tropes on their heads, and dramatizes the reclamation of the Gothic as an empowering female genre. Where the vampire story traditionally narrates the travails of lovely, victimized women, dangerously attractive vampires, and chaste, heroic male saviors, Buffy re-cast the role of Awesome Vampire Destroyer as a far-from-helpless heroine, known for her roundhouse kicks and her attraction to Bad Dudes. It’s not hard to read all sorts of gender politics, role reversals, high school metaphors and sexual commentary into Buffy. But it needs to defined against not just Gothic genres, but also earlier high school-focused television.

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HBO’s new Band of Brothers-inspired miniseries The Pacific premiered last night, and although I will be watching it, I probably won’t be blogging about it until the end. (This, by the way, is one of the biggest differences between the miniseries and standard American television productions: miniseries are written with an end in mind, and usually, the whole thing is produced at once. Writing about it without seeing the whole thing is like writing a paper about the first half of a novel. In contrast, television series are a piecemeal business, and the final episode mostly likely isn’t even written by the time the first episode is filmed. They’re built over a very long period of time, often with no definite end in sight, so writing about them while in progress makes much more sense.)

Phew, where did that come from? In any event, although I’m pretty sure The Pacific is going to be amazing and make me weep and cover my eyes, I don’t want to think about it critically until the end. I do want to talk a little about its opening credits, though. (Note: this is the director’s cut version, so it is slightly longer than the one on the air. Only slightly, though.)

They’re gorgeous. The dominating images are super close-up sequences of someone drawing with charcoal – so zoomed in that the dust from the charcoal piles up like dirt, and the textures of the pencil, the paper, and the charcoal lines resemble a rocky, uneven landscape. The lines are stark, but occasionally zoom out into soft, shaded images of soldiers’ pensive faces, and restrained red tinting illustrates violence with more emotional nuance than actual gore. As the pencil moves across paper, fragmenting pieces of dust and charcoal are visually linked to images of battle, so that debris from a drawing looks much like shrapnel. It’s a lovely, persuasive sequence.

There’ve been two diverging trends in opening title sequences. For many network shows, they’ve all but disappeared, led no doubt by the influence of shows like Lost, with its minimalist, two second long, slowly spinning black and white title. The once longer version of the Grey’s Anatomy title sequence has been reduced to a clean, brief appearance of the title, and newer shows like The Good Wife , FlashForward, and Castle never even had a longer versions of their very short opening sequences. 24 has always had its succinct timer BEEP….BEEP… title, and even some sitcoms, once the bastion of the TV theme song, have abandoned traditional opening credits for an abbreviated animation and a creator credit (How I Met Your Mother, Community).

The reverse has also been true, largely for high-brow cable and premium cable programming. Over the past decade, it’s become the norm for HBO shows to come stamped with trademark artsy title sequences, sometimes nearly two minutes long. The best of these are completely gorgeous little films that tap into the show’s thematic content and organizing aesthetics – Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Rome and True Blood all have powerful opening sequences that go a long way toward establishing the shows’ tone. True Blood in particular has an opening sequence that does an immense amount of atmospheric work. Those ninety seconds build an entire fantasy world, connect it with the politics, racial history, and cultural battles of our real world, and then anchor it all in a detailed, distinct American South. (The best embedded version I could find has an HBO watermark on it.) Showtime’s Dexter also must go on this list: never, ever have I seen creepier footage of food, and a jaunty, devil-may-care music that accompanies images of coffee beans being pulverized, a knife cutting into a runny egg yolk, and fingers clenched to pull shoelaces tight sells the show’s juxtaposition of quotidian horror as effectively as Michael C. Hall’s performance.

Oddly, these opposing methods of building framing devices for television shows are seeking to address the same realities of TV viewership. The supershort title credit builds a show’s brand while also making it far too short to skip – there’s no point in reaching for the fast-forward button on the TiVo if you know it’ll only be five seconds long. You may not get a whole lot of establishing information about the cast, characters, or tone, but at least you can’t skip over what little there is. On Community, for example, the thirty second sequence often gets clipped into a pithy title bit that blasts you with a brief melodic phrase, one line of a song, and a nice animation of a cootie catcher with funny doodles in it. The word “Community” appears in block, collegiate text, annnnnnd we’re done. You get a hefty dose of COLLEGE, a whiff of snark, and you’re launched into the episode. Conversely, the ultralong HBO-style credits open themselves up to skipping because they are so long, but if you do sit through them, you’re rewarded with a surprisingly rich little meditation on what you’re about to watch.

The ultralong title sequence also serves an important purpose for weekly viewing – certainly this is not always the case, but over the past decade, the cable shows with super long credits have often also been narratively complex, multi-plotted shows. Sitting down to a new episode of The Sopranos a week later, a minute and a half of Tony driving through the Holland tunnel may not remind you of precisely what was happening in the episode last week, but it helps pull your mind back into the show’s aesthetic, its tone, its atmosphere. It also establishes the episode as an event, something that requires some introduction and unpacking. It’s cinematic – this hour of your life is a separate experience, encapsulated from whatever you were just doing, and you need this title sequence as a bridge between the two spaces. Conversely, the long credits have the opposite effect in DVD viewing. I am much more likely to skip one of those long title sequences when watching several episodes at a time (which, ahem, happens not infrequently), because they interrupt the rhythm and immersion of the storytelling. I don’t need a ninety second reminder of what the show’s like if the thing I was doing two minutes ago was watching the show.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good title sequence. But I wonder if their presence at the beginning of every episode in the DVD format makes the rhythms of the show a little too pat, and the endings and beginnings of each segment super conscious reminders of time passing. A title song that’s familiar quickly becomes canned, and then annoying, and then it breaks you out of the duration of the show when you hit fast forward – the equivalent of skipping that one paragraph that’s repeated in every Nancy Drew novel (oh Bess, you always were a little plump). If nothing else, the title sequences are enduring markers of one way television will always be different than a novel, even when it’s at its most literary. The methods of production are much closer to the surface.

It’s hard to propose talking about what’s generally going on in television this week without mentioning the enormous block of programming dedicated entirely to sports that seem, by and large, designed to make it easier to die in a dramatic, icy way. As the whole world knows now that NBC stupidly and tactlessly spent hours replaying the footage, one athlete died last week on a training run for the luge, and there have been countless spills and crashes already this week.

I deeply respect the accomplishments and drive of Olympic athletes, but as my own athletic feats tend more toward the book-carrying-through-the-stacks, sitting-still-for-many-hours-at-a-time arena, I am among the least capable sports commentators one could possibly imagine. Thankfully, then, I am pleased to report that the Olympics are also about something with which I have far more experience: narrative.

Take, for instance, Lindsey Jacobellis, a snowboarder whose bravado in the 2006 Olympics cost her a gold medal. Without fail, every sports headline featured her return to the 2010 Olympics as an opportunity for redemption, building a story arc into her career that assumes all sorts of things about Jacobellis and her performance (including, of course, the type of moral underpinnings that go with a word like ‘redemption.’) In returning to the Olympics, Jacobellis was given the chance to achieve a classic, cinematic resolution to her Olympic plotline, and when she was unable to complete the event (and actually disqualified from the race when she slid out of bounds), she fell out of the feel-good conclusion we want to get out of sporting events. She failed in her quest for redemption, and that is a much heavier burden than if that story weren’t laden with those narrative implications – in her first Olympics, she won a silver medal, and when she returned four years later, a mistake disqualified her from finishing. Not great, but hardly a tale of deliverance.

Lindsey Vonn, after her gold medal downhill run

The inverse storyline of last night was Lindsey Vonn, whose narrative got an ecstatically happy ending after she overcame injuries to claim a gold medal in alpine skiing. I watched and was moved by how thrilled she was, how painful the other athletes’ wipeouts were, how impressive it is to hurtle yourself down a vertical slope and try as hard as you can to make yourself go even faster. But for someone who’s really not that into sports, the thing that fascinates me most is how readily these events slip into pre-packaged plotlines. Sporting events are a space where narrative and real-life lay right on top of each other. Because there are conclusions, firm endings, unambiguous victors, and real-life heroes, the Olympics is a moment where we can label someone’s life a failed redemption narrative and not immediately get caught up in irony, subtlety, or doubt. It’s no wonder there are countless adaptations of famous moments in sports – the event comes preloaded with all the required narrative paraphernalia.

None of this is new or original observation, but it has seemed especially pertinent during these games. It’s not just that the sports themselves are nearly always dangerous, and thus lend themselves to drama and high-stakes. In California, the programming is tape-delayed (even though it’s happening in our time zone! NBC!!! *fist shaking*), and although the local news makes the results available before NBC actually airs the events, the news anchors let you stay in the dark if you so desire. “If you don’t want to know the results of tonight’s Olympic sports,” says a big, silver-haired news guy, “just turn away from your television. We’re going to play some music here, and when the music stops playing, you’ll know it’s safe to look back.” In other words: spoiler alert! Don’t read this if you don’t want to know how the story ends!

And that’s really why I watch the Olympics. Even though I intellectually understand that it’s just a ski race and I can look the results up online, if someone shouts “spoiler alert!”, I’m always on board.

The most fascinating thing I read this weekend was not David Copperfield (as, ahem, it probably should have been), but actually this transcription of a keynote address given by Hart Hanson at the “Future of Story” conference at Edmonton. (Things going on in Canada other than the Olympics: a “Future of Story” conference). The talk seems to have been fairly colloquial, as the transcription isn’t exact and Hanson sometimes trails off into “…”s and “?”s, but it’s nevertheless one of the more thoughtful discussions of network television I’ve seen in a while, and especially interesting coming from Hanson’s perspective.

Hanson is the creator and showrunner of the Fox series Bones, an impressively popular mash-up of forensic procedural and romantic comedy starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz. In the keynote, Hanson talks at length about the differences between the kind of television he makes and shows like The Wire, and he describes the process, moral content, and careful calibrations required to make truly mass audience programming.

If you know The Wire, they never reset the plot for you, they never explain the dialogue, it’s really difficult to follow. There’s no effort made to explain anything, and characters who are weak [?] and horrible triumph, and good men die like dogs in the street. That’s not entertainment, but it’s awesome to watch… for a very small group of people. The Wire seldom gets above a million viewers.

My show – and this is not boasting, it’s just a difference – my show, that one [pointing at the screen] gets around twelve and a half million viewers. So, it’s much better than the one… [laughter]

The question is, is it better than The Wire, and that’s a crazy question: the answer is definitely yes and definitely no.

Hanson draws distinctions here and elsewhere between television that entertains, which Bones certainly does, and television that does… something else. He doesn’t get too bogged down in defining that “something else,” but relates it to that old debate about the artist vs. the craftsman. Hanson sees himself as a craftsman, a guy whose job is to get 12 million people to enjoy what he makes, and he’s clear about what that entails. He has to mirror their own values back to them and walk the careful line between what they desperately want (an ending, a romantic conclusion between Bones and Booth), and what they actually need as long-term viewers (further complications, endlessly spinning out the tension between the two leads). Unquestionably, he does his job very well.

And yet, as thoughtful, down-to-earth, and common sense as Hanson’s keynote is, there are all sorts of assumptions hidden inside his comments. Saying that The Wire and Bones have completely different audiences is accurate, but doesn’t take into account the fact that you can watch Bones for free by simply buying a television and plugging it in, whereas HBO isn’t even a part of the standard cable package. Sure, you could never put The Wire on a network because there would be an enormous audience outraged by its obscenity and immorality, but it would also find viewers it didn’t reach on a premium cable channel. Hanson also glosses over any argument that an audience can gain pleasure in more than one way. Without question, the show he writes is entertaining, but he doesn’t accept that The Wire is also an admittedly different form of “entertainment,” even though he describes his own “great delight” in watching it. That same contradiction appears again as Hanson insists that he writes Bones because it’s what he’d want to watch, and yet The Wire is one of his favorite shows in spite of its total failure to be “what America wants to watch on TV.”

The whole keynote is worth a read through, and he goes on to discuss a world-changing episode of Magnum, PI and slipping a line about Jesus being a zombie into his show. I came away from it equally intrigued about his refusal to view himself as an artist and frustrated by the contradictions between his imagined audience for Bones and himself as a viewer. If Hanson likes to watch both Bones and The Wire, why shouldn’t the rest of his audience? I could keep going on this for a long time, but I’ll leave with this, which seems to be at the center of Hanson’s conflict.

You have to be proud of what you do if you want to entertain a lot of people. This is why I instantly forgive and even admire the pulp writers – they don’t like it when you call them that – the pulp writers who somehow believe they are Proust or Mann or Stegner, when they’re writing crime novels or law novels or forensic novels. They are giving us what they want. They are appealing to a huge audience. I try my hardest to provide what I like to watch on television, on network television.

This is the time of year when we all reflect on what happened in our recent past, and as it’s the end of the decade as well, there’s a particularly strong inclination toward navel-gazing and list-making. Before I launch into some posts about holiday-themed television, I want to (participate!) highlight some of the interesting thoughts floating around about the 2000s.

I’m particularly fond of this Emily Nussbaum piece from the NYMagazine, which discusses this decade as the moment when television became an art form and we collectively began to understand TV as an object for study and analysis rather than lowbrow pabulum. She highlights all the shows you’d expect, The Wire and The Sopranos especially, but also talks about the importance of shows like Slings and Arrows and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and gives one of my favorite characterizations of The West Wing ever – “a liberal holodeck”). The piece also has a thoughtful mention of the way technology like DVDs and DVRS have made all of this artful TV possible, which I agree has been crucial in our appreciation of television as a form.

The Nussbaum piece is polished to a high sheen – on the other end of the spectrum, there’s this great discussion between several television critics about some of their favorite shows. Only the first of its three parts has been released so far, but it deals with Lost and its many issues in a thoughtful and pleasantly casual way. Like the Nussbaum article, this conversation touches on fandom and its role in television appreciation.

And now for some lists – here are Maureen Ryan’s, James Poniewozik’s, and Alan Sepinwall’s absurdly comprehensive List of Lists. The best thing about list projects like these is the inevitable contentious decisions and subsequent fallout from blog commenters. As Alan Sepinwall described, list making is always a process of explaining that while you like Thing 1, you like Thing 2 better, and then watching the entire internet explode in outrage over your snub of Thing 1.

I think this post plus yesterday’s comments on the Golden Globes is plenty of meta-commentary for now, and tomorrow I’ll begin discussing holiday television. My plan is to meander through whatever occurs to me as well as hitting some of the greats – last year’s A Colbert Christmas, the perpetual A Charlie Brown Christmas, the awesome Angela Lansbury made-for-TV movie Mrs. Claus if I can find a copy – with the ultimate goal of landing on that holiest of holy grails, the Star Wars Holiday Special. I’ve never seen it, but have often heard of its awesome, gut-wrenching power and look forward to experiencing the horror. Let me know if you have a favorite and I’ll try to get to it.

Like so many others, I spent several hours over the past week sitting in an improbably aloft tin can while a stranger’s hairy elbows encroached on my personal space. Unlike most previous flights I’ve been on, however, this trip included the experience of individual television screens on the back of each seat, and the option to pay six dollars so that I could watch live television. From the sky. And yet, despite my intense TV addiction, my complete helplessness as a captive audience, and an oh-so-easy credit card swiper right in front of me, I resisted the urge to pay. On four separate occasions.

Of course, this did not deter me from watching the full ten-minute preview and frantically flipping through each channel to see if Chef Academy was airing, and because I have previously found Chef Academy completely un-interesting, I started to wonder why a show that is terrible when on the ground suddenly becomes fascinating mid-air. I can barely muster the enthusiasm to sit through an episode of Law and Order on my couch, but in a tiny, cramped airplane chair, I’m riveted. “Who could possibly have committed such a heinous crime?” I wonder. Obviously some of the answer is mere novelty – it’s not just Law and Order, it’s Law and Order in a plane! Look how many channels there are! (Twenty-five). I am old enough to remember what it’s like to sit on a plane before any accessible electronic device had the capability or battery life to play a full movie, so my residual sensation of awe probably still remains. Even so, I have long been able to pull out my laptop and watch whatever I have stored on my hard drive, and it seems like technology is not enough of an explanation for my pleasure in watching Sandra Lee (most despised of Food Network stars) whisk packaged white sauce mix into white wine.

My working theory on why airborne television is so freshly fascinating comes from this two-year-old slate piece on SkyMall. After considering why SkyMall has so many unnecessarily fancy watches, Ron Rosenbaum suggests that it has “something to do with the fact that when one is up in the air, however familiar, on some limbic level of the brain, one is aware of how absurd it is to be suspended eight miles high in a metal container” and the many fancy watches allow us to capture and tame the time we suddenly feel is on the brink of slipping away. Rosenbaum also close reads an ad for a chicken-wing caddy with the title “Where the Wings Have No Shame,” and comes to the conclusion that we need a place to hide away our discarded chicken bones because “the more one thinks of wings, not chicken wings or airline wings, or even the wax wings of Icarus, or the waxwings of Nabokov, the more one thinks rather of Andrew Marvell’s phrase for the onrush of mortality, ‘time’s winged chariot.’” In other words, somewhere deep on our brains, being in an airplane reminds us that we’re actually quite close to death, and SkyMall both capitalizes on and assuages that fear.

I’m convinced that something like this, although not necessarily related to swiftly-arriving death, happens with airplane television. Despite its ubiquity, air travel still requires a suspension of disbelief – it forces us to turn off the deeply-held fear of falling and just accept that we can calmly sit eight miles up while sipping ginger ale. It is a fictional space, and once you buy into that fiction, all other fiction becomes similarly plausible. Chef Academy, which I object to largely because it seems far more scripted than other reality shows, suddenly contains a persuasive, compelling competition. Law and Order, the most codified formula television available, becomes unpredictable because you’re watching TV in the sky! Who knows what could happen!

I’m sure that some people, including one person in particular who was sitting next to me on the plane, might feel moved to remark that air travel is fully explicable and no more fictional than sitting on the couch. That may be true, but I’d like to point out that said person was watching Chef Academy just as closely as I was. There must have been some kind of magic happening.