Back in November, the 90-year-old Newton Minow made a brief return to the news, receiving the Medal of Freedom from President Obama. Minow had been chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the early 1960s, and he is probably most famous for that far-too-often-referenced speech he gave to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961—the speech in which he described television as a "vast wasteland."
The reaction was not as positive as he might have hoped. The S.S. Minnow, the little boat that went out for a three-hour tour and was shipwrecked to begin the story of Gilligan’s Island, was ironically named after Minow, just so the scriptwriters could show him that television was actually populated with good programming (which has an irony that only grows the more one thinks about it).
The thing is, Minow was basically right. We should be grateful for Hulu and Netflix and Amazon and YouTube, all the online video sites, if only because they allow us to see old episodes of such television programs as I Love Lucy or The Rat Patrol or M*A*S*H or Magnum, P.I. And we should be grateful for those old programs because they teach us that, man, TV was awful, back in the day.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at some old episodes of, say, MacGyver, which ran from 1985 to 1992. I remember watching MacGyver when it aired. At the time, it seemed a fun program filmed around a gorgeous actor playing a character with the nice hook of a talent for improvising useful tools from whatever odds and ends that chance placed in his way. And surely this is what everybody recalls about the program—generally forgetting that the plots were hokey, the signature inventions absurd, the acting hammy, the filming spotty, and the sets amateurish.
We put up with it because we didn’t know better at the time. And that’s how the image of Angus "Mac" MacGyver endures, as MacGyvering entered the language of Hollywood scripts as a term for quick inventions cobbled together from common household ingredients. But we do know better now what television can look like, and MacGyver ain’t it.
Neither is The A-Team, The Brady Bunch, or Bewitched. The endless spate of recent movies based on old comic books proves that it is possible to resurrect and more professionally present old attempts to tap into the archetypes, the mythopoeic roots, of storytelling. But television has generally failed us in this regard, and I am hard pressed to name a movie based on an old TV idea that succeeded.
Now, two thoughts follow from this—one about the specific improvement of television in recent decades, and the other about the general nature of the medium as a device for storytelling. The first of these thoughts drives, for example, David Bianculli’s new book, The Platinum Age of Television. Bianculli is, by any measure, an establishment figure—as typical of the talking-head middlebrow public commentators of his time as Newton Minow was of his day in the early 1960s. A longtime TV critic for NPR, founder of the website TVWorthWatching.com, and a college professor of video art, the man reeks of the established position, the received opinion, on such matters these days. And in The Platinum Age of Television, he insists that we live in the greatest age of television since the medium was invented.
He’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just that, by taking the title of The Platinum Age of Television (subtitled How TV Became Terrific) and putting it together with Bianculli’s establishment hipster credentials, just about anyone could predict what the book has to say, from page 1 all the through to page 592—almost 600 pages of received opinion, with hardly an unexpected insight or searing criticism in sight.
There’s an implied criticism built into the book, of course. Bianculli thinks that TV became "terrific" when The West Wing and The Sopranos began in 1999, which suggests that TV maybe wasn’t so terrific before that. The author of Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, Bianculli is loath to censure any successful television program, but to carry his thesis he has to argue for the sudden bettering of the 2000s. His organization is mostly by genre, with a chronology of the genre revealing the improvement—as when he walks from Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Sometimes his work offers a helpful nugget, as when he asks us to consider the importance of Perry Mason to the later exploding genre of shows about lawyers. Mostly, though, he just gives us the notion that television was filled with nearly "wonderful" shows, almost "masterpieces," for a long time, and now it’s filled with, um, just plain "wonderful" shows and "masterpieces."
What’s lacking through it all is a coherent account of the second thought we need to have when considering what used to be dismissed as the wasteland of the boob tube—the thought about the general nature of the medium as a device for storytelling.
Yes, the technology has vastly improved since Sid Caesar broadcast Your Show of Shows from 1950 to 1954. The acting is definitely better since the disappearance of the old 1960s stigma that insisted on a class distinction between movie and Broadway actors, on the one hand, and television actors on the other. Script-writing has become far more powerful since the early 1990s, when the network heads ruined Twin Peaks by forcing a reveal—out of fear that the audience wouldn’t like not knowing who the murderer was. For that matter, television used to have an allergy to symbolism so profound that not even The X-Files could cure it.
What hasn’t changed, however, is the nature of the storytelling. To use a metaphor from novels, television is essentially Samuel Richardson rather than Jane Austen. Richardson’s Pamela is almost the model of a dramatic, serious TV season: episodic, operating on a long narrative arc but always willing to indulge an interpolated tale, and repetitive enough that viewers can reorient themselves after a week-long break between installments. The other kind of novel, developing as an art-form from Jane Austen to William James, was directed at something else: a unified work, as coherent as a Beethoven symphony, in which diction, symbolism, and plot were all aiming ceaselessly at a single end.
The improvement in television since 1999 came from a new willingness to indulge the techniques of the unified novel—but they did not succeed in overturning the sprawling Richardsonian rush of the morality tale or the picaresque comedy. Nor should they have succeeded in creating a new art form. The structure of television, the viewing experience, matches the old 17th century far better than the Victorian high-art form. Television is supposed to be the boob tube. And when it accepts that it is entertainment, at its deepest level, television can blossom as art.
Which it has in the new millennium, the political wish-fulfillment of The West Wing notwithstanding. Or the philosophical musings at the level of freshman-dorm-room bull-sessions in Westworld. Or the laugh track running through The Big Bang Theory, like some bad rerun of Three’s Company. Or even the self-indulgent attempt to revive The Gilmore Girls.