![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhLast fall, I made the conscious decision not to pick up any new shows; this fall I didn't even look at what the new shows were. While I've talked about this to many of you in person and on chat, I just wanted to set down in something like a clear way how I came to this place. Partly, to be honest: I just want everyone to stop haranguing me to watch their show, very especially if they are completely dismissive of whatever I like. I find that sort of thing to be incredibly inconsiderate. I'm trying to assert who I am and what I want more forcefully these days, and I reckon this is part of it.
When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of television. In my home growing up, the TV got turned on in the morning, usually by me as I was up first, and turned off at night by my father when he went to bed. We sat in front of the TV and ate dinner. We sat in front of the TV and had conversations. We sat in front of the TV and read books. My mother used Guiding Light to teach me about sexual morality. When I was in college and someone was doing a project about TV watching I would always beg off being a subject, because I was an outlier; people who grew up watching 8-10 hours of TV a day did not generally end up at Ivy League schools. I worked for many years in advertising, where knowing what was on TV and who was watching it was my job. I was known by a lot of people as "that girl who watches a lot of TV."
Now, for those of you who weren't watching much television in the 70s and 80s, I'll take a step back and talk about the evolution of the sitcom and the drama. Older sitcoms tended to be based either in the family home or the workplace (or sometimes, in a small town) and were lighthearted and insubstantial. In the 70s, there was a move to put more political content into the sitcom, but leaven it with humor: All in the Family, MASH. During this period, dramas were not very serious, and were tightly formulaic. They were westerns, or cop shows, or legal dramas, or mysteries, or medical dramas. These shows rarely delved into the personal lives of the characters, and they were episodic, rather than having any kind of continuing plot. The exceptions were nighttime soaps, but after Peyton Place in the 50s they had mostly moved to daytime.
This all changed in the 1980s. First, the nighttime soap came back in a big way, but unlike the nighttime soaps of the 50s or anything on daytime which centered on scandal in suburbia, they were all about wealthy people doing ridiculous things to each other in fabulous clothing. But second, and more importantly, Hill Street Blues premiered. It was a cop show, but it had plenty to say about the personal lives of its characters, and wove them into the cop-show action. And it had a continuing plot, story arcs that went across several episodes or an entire season. It also had a very large cast, 15 or so regularly appearing characters. It was like a soap, but without the added layer of the absurd that soaps usually have. It was such a big hit that it started NBC's ownership of Thursday nights, something that only ended with the rise of CSI.
So in the 80s there were some of these story-arc shows, like St. Elsewhere, alongside shows that had a vague ongoing arc but were primarily episodic, like Remington Steele. When I was in college, we gathered to watch LA Law, Next Generation, and Murphy Brown. And I liked those characters, but in a way, I didn't care all that much about what happened, because while it had an ongoing story, it didn't add up to anything, nor was it supposed to. It wasn't going anyplace.
There were a few shows that seemed to be headed someplace, and failed to get there, either because of the inability of the writers to get there, or because of some other problems with actors and such. Moonlighting is infamous for dying after David and Maddy got together, but that isn't actually what killed the show. What killed the show is that Dave and Maddy got to the place where they should be together, where nothing was really standing in their way, and the writers punked out. They had Maddy marry some astronaut we'd never seen, and put in another year of pointless frustration, as opposed to the fun frustration of the earlier seasons. The show was based on old movies, and there were plenty of old movies of bickering couples who were together--why they couldn't have just cribbed The Thin Man is beyond me, because that movie absolutely shows that couples that are established can be just as fun to watch as ones that are coming together.
Northern Exposure had similar problems. The magical realism of the show seemed to be saying that the entire universe conspired to bring Joel and Maggie together--until Rob Morrow left the show, and they put Maggie with Chris-in-the-morning, and the entire thing fell apart. And that sucked, because it's hard to even watch the earlier episodes of the show, knowing what happened later.
I was even more irritated by all this because you know all that television I was watching as a kid? Most of it was old movies--that's why I do so well on those movie memes. I adored classic romantic comedies, and big romantic musicals, and because of them I have a very refined sense of what works in a romance. I like them, yes, but they have to be good, and they have to work, and the number one thing they have to convey is, why are these people perfect for one another? Because that is the question a romance is there to answer.
(By the way, the whole conceit of being perfect for someone is what the romance is about; that's the dream, just like hero adventures are about the dream of vanquishing evil, and mysteries are about the dream of re-establishing order. All are overly simplified. But that's why romance is a genre, just like SF/F.)
Anyway, in the 90s, we had an explosion of so-called "good" television as the people who had watched Hill Street Blues and the like started working in TV. The drama changed into something closer to what we see now, and the sort of thing that brings the fandoms. If you look at the outstanding drama emmy nominees, it's a list of shows that have fic someplace, and this continued into the 00s, only with a lot more SF "genre" in the mix. I was admittedly ambivalent about this, mostly because the struggle between good and evil leaves me a bit cold. If it's framed within a coming-of-age story, or a romance, or disparate people learning to work together to vanquish a common foe, I'm in. But I don't enjoy "genre" for its own sake, and action, I have to admit, kinda bores me in a just-tell-me-who-won-the-fight kind of way.
But what we also got in the 90s is a change in the sitcom. Much as the sitcom had pushed the drama toward more seriousness and political awareness, the drama pushed the sitcom into a more continuing story. Seinfeld had that self-referential season that was about writing the Seinfeld pilot and getting it sold. Friends had long ongoing interpersonal arcs, one done in the most tiresome way possible (Ross and Rachel) and the other becoming close to my favorite romance on television, ever (Chandler and Monica). Like others, I dropped out of Seinfeld after Susan died; it seemed to get a little too mean for me, a little too pointless. I hate dropping shows, by the way; I really love seeing things to their conclusion.
So what have we learned?
Lesson 1: In a continuing story, endings matter.
Lesson 2: If you're going to bother with a romantic storyline, you'd better do it well.
Lesson 3: Action is fine, "genre" is fine, as long as the story is more about the characters than about the "plot."
Next: The bad summer of 2007, when Clio's heart was broken into a million little pieces.
When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of television. In my home growing up, the TV got turned on in the morning, usually by me as I was up first, and turned off at night by my father when he went to bed. We sat in front of the TV and ate dinner. We sat in front of the TV and had conversations. We sat in front of the TV and read books. My mother used Guiding Light to teach me about sexual morality. When I was in college and someone was doing a project about TV watching I would always beg off being a subject, because I was an outlier; people who grew up watching 8-10 hours of TV a day did not generally end up at Ivy League schools. I worked for many years in advertising, where knowing what was on TV and who was watching it was my job. I was known by a lot of people as "that girl who watches a lot of TV."
Now, for those of you who weren't watching much television in the 70s and 80s, I'll take a step back and talk about the evolution of the sitcom and the drama. Older sitcoms tended to be based either in the family home or the workplace (or sometimes, in a small town) and were lighthearted and insubstantial. In the 70s, there was a move to put more political content into the sitcom, but leaven it with humor: All in the Family, MASH. During this period, dramas were not very serious, and were tightly formulaic. They were westerns, or cop shows, or legal dramas, or mysteries, or medical dramas. These shows rarely delved into the personal lives of the characters, and they were episodic, rather than having any kind of continuing plot. The exceptions were nighttime soaps, but after Peyton Place in the 50s they had mostly moved to daytime.
This all changed in the 1980s. First, the nighttime soap came back in a big way, but unlike the nighttime soaps of the 50s or anything on daytime which centered on scandal in suburbia, they were all about wealthy people doing ridiculous things to each other in fabulous clothing. But second, and more importantly, Hill Street Blues premiered. It was a cop show, but it had plenty to say about the personal lives of its characters, and wove them into the cop-show action. And it had a continuing plot, story arcs that went across several episodes or an entire season. It also had a very large cast, 15 or so regularly appearing characters. It was like a soap, but without the added layer of the absurd that soaps usually have. It was such a big hit that it started NBC's ownership of Thursday nights, something that only ended with the rise of CSI.
So in the 80s there were some of these story-arc shows, like St. Elsewhere, alongside shows that had a vague ongoing arc but were primarily episodic, like Remington Steele. When I was in college, we gathered to watch LA Law, Next Generation, and Murphy Brown. And I liked those characters, but in a way, I didn't care all that much about what happened, because while it had an ongoing story, it didn't add up to anything, nor was it supposed to. It wasn't going anyplace.
There were a few shows that seemed to be headed someplace, and failed to get there, either because of the inability of the writers to get there, or because of some other problems with actors and such. Moonlighting is infamous for dying after David and Maddy got together, but that isn't actually what killed the show. What killed the show is that Dave and Maddy got to the place where they should be together, where nothing was really standing in their way, and the writers punked out. They had Maddy marry some astronaut we'd never seen, and put in another year of pointless frustration, as opposed to the fun frustration of the earlier seasons. The show was based on old movies, and there were plenty of old movies of bickering couples who were together--why they couldn't have just cribbed The Thin Man is beyond me, because that movie absolutely shows that couples that are established can be just as fun to watch as ones that are coming together.
Northern Exposure had similar problems. The magical realism of the show seemed to be saying that the entire universe conspired to bring Joel and Maggie together--until Rob Morrow left the show, and they put Maggie with Chris-in-the-morning, and the entire thing fell apart. And that sucked, because it's hard to even watch the earlier episodes of the show, knowing what happened later.
I was even more irritated by all this because you know all that television I was watching as a kid? Most of it was old movies--that's why I do so well on those movie memes. I adored classic romantic comedies, and big romantic musicals, and because of them I have a very refined sense of what works in a romance. I like them, yes, but they have to be good, and they have to work, and the number one thing they have to convey is, why are these people perfect for one another? Because that is the question a romance is there to answer.
(By the way, the whole conceit of being perfect for someone is what the romance is about; that's the dream, just like hero adventures are about the dream of vanquishing evil, and mysteries are about the dream of re-establishing order. All are overly simplified. But that's why romance is a genre, just like SF/F.)
Anyway, in the 90s, we had an explosion of so-called "good" television as the people who had watched Hill Street Blues and the like started working in TV. The drama changed into something closer to what we see now, and the sort of thing that brings the fandoms. If you look at the outstanding drama emmy nominees, it's a list of shows that have fic someplace, and this continued into the 00s, only with a lot more SF "genre" in the mix. I was admittedly ambivalent about this, mostly because the struggle between good and evil leaves me a bit cold. If it's framed within a coming-of-age story, or a romance, or disparate people learning to work together to vanquish a common foe, I'm in. But I don't enjoy "genre" for its own sake, and action, I have to admit, kinda bores me in a just-tell-me-who-won-the-fight kind of way.
But what we also got in the 90s is a change in the sitcom. Much as the sitcom had pushed the drama toward more seriousness and political awareness, the drama pushed the sitcom into a more continuing story. Seinfeld had that self-referential season that was about writing the Seinfeld pilot and getting it sold. Friends had long ongoing interpersonal arcs, one done in the most tiresome way possible (Ross and Rachel) and the other becoming close to my favorite romance on television, ever (Chandler and Monica). Like others, I dropped out of Seinfeld after Susan died; it seemed to get a little too mean for me, a little too pointless. I hate dropping shows, by the way; I really love seeing things to their conclusion.
So what have we learned?
Lesson 1: In a continuing story, endings matter.
Lesson 2: If you're going to bother with a romantic storyline, you'd better do it well.
Lesson 3: Action is fine, "genre" is fine, as long as the story is more about the characters than about the "plot."
Next: The bad summer of 2007, when Clio's heart was broken into a million little pieces.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-23 06:54 pm (UTC)This is so true - I got the box set for Christmas or something and was having so much fun with S1, but at some point I was like, wait, I don't remember how this ended - and then I DID and it just... sucked all the fun out of the enterprise.
In August a first draft of a script showed up for the series finale of due South and it's really interesting to read the threads about that script, because so many people were sad they'd even READ it - because that originally written ending was not consistent with the magical realism of the show but also just sort of put everybody right back where they were at the beginning, and it was just far too sad to come so far with these people and have your viewer experience made void by hitting the reset button at the end. What I found interesting, though, was how even knowing that that first draft was out there changed the experience, and made me appreciate that (really absolutely wonderful, if slightly loopy) finale experience so much more.
Oops, I think I took a tangent and ran with it. Sorry. Looking forward to reading the next part of this. Is that where CSI makes you want to cry, and not in the good way? *old, sappy icon is old and sappy*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 09:48 pm (UTC)I envy people to whom endings don't matter. I am not one of them.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-23 07:08 pm (UTC)Writers get extremely lazy once they get the couple together. It's as if they don't know how to write anything else, so they come up with reasons to break them up/get them apart. Lois gets amnesia! There, now we can go back to writing romantic tension! argh!
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 02:10 pm (UTC)Northern Exposure had similar problems. The magical realism of the show seemed to be saying that the entire universe conspired to bring Joel and Maggie together--until Rob Morrow left the show, and they put Maggie with Chris-in-the-morning, and the entire thing fell apart.
i sort of agree with this, and sort of don't. i think that's because joel's last episode, and in particular the last ten or so minutes of joel's last episode, is up there with my favorite things ever. i remember pulling out the videotape to watch it after september 11. it's all worth it, to me, for that. i just wish they'd taken the show to a close without feeling they had to hook up chris and maggie.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-26 02:29 pm (UTC)it's just...i can't even. the marilyn bit alone, my spine still chills. and the music, the bit of gershwin and then the latin playboys song at the end.
i do understand what you mean, and i'm scattered right now but if i sat and thought about it i could absolutely supply you with couples/teams i was pissed shows/movies broke up. i do think, though, that my primary focus is different? and the theme of this, it's the oz theme, really, and that, the HOME theme, the this-is-my-place theme, that's maybe mine above everything else. like, again, scattered re supplying examples, but the thing where the couple, united, goes off on their peripatetic adventures, never quite so satisfying to me.
soap opera is my narrative, maybe, and the constant is the place and the extended family. the enduring couples are part of that bedrock (and when one of them reunites after a long time it's just devastating payoff, angie and jesse on amc had me sobbing for WEEKS) but the most satisfying thing is the endlessly growing locked network of interconnections.
so on this particular show, i was OK with it. it's funny because now that you mention the universe bringing maggie and joel together i see it, but i never saw it that way when i was watching the show. i have never watched sex and the city, but i remember reading about one season finale in which sjp wandered the streets with "moon river" playing, and the reviewers seemed to agree that the romance of the show in the end was her and new york. something similar, here...he had to go on his quest, but it was always leading him home, transformed.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-26 05:32 pm (UTC)But you know, that's what comes from watching all those classic romantic comedies as a child, because that absolutely is my favorite ending, if there was a romance plot at all, like, the walls of Jericho coming down at the end of It Happened One Night. Or, really, the end of Little Miss Sunshine where the family drives off into the distance with the horn still honking--but there was no romantic b-plot there! Just family and personal stuff! So I think that's what I'm saying.
As for SATC, you know, it isn't that I needed her to end up with Big, although I wanted Big to work out his shit, and I felt that the movie actually made the ending of the show more real to those two characters, because of course Carrie gets weirdly carried away about stuff, and of course that's the part of her that freaks Big out, while he loves the normal everyday part of Carrie. That's how he was different than that artist "luvah" Baryshnikov played, because the artist was entertained by the Carrie that was ridiculous and over the top but didn't have that much respect or patience for everyday writer Carrie.
So yes, I totally agree that the satisfaction is the interconnections, and I love friendship stories and all of that. What I can't stand is romance that is sort of half baked or badly done or weirdly abandoned or couples broken up for no good reason. (Luke and Lorelei also come to mind, actually.)