[ SECRET POST #2433 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2433 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 073 secrets from Secret Submission Post #348.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I kind of do not understand how people can think that one or another TV series is amazeballs!!!11 and made by a bunch of geniuses. TV things, especially long TV things, are made to be aired. They don't get enough people interested=they are cancelled. This means a lot of cliches, lazy tropes, fanservice, and so on. This is not bad, but it certainly prevents TV shows from becoming 'high art' the way books or films or paintings do.

This is not true.

It's absolutely true that television is a commercial thing, and that television shows are aired (for the most part, although not entirely) for commercial reasons. But being commercial does not mean that something cannot be high art. If it is true that most TV is created to get viewers and make money, it is not significantly different in that respect from most of the most well-known works of art of the last century. What do you think the people who published Hemingway and Fitzgerald, or JD Salinger, or the people who made The Godfather were thinking, except that they wanted to make profit - and all of those things were enormously popular and successful and profitable, in addition to being really good.

The thing is that just because something is intended to find viewers and make a profit does not mean that it must necessarily pander to the lowest common denominator and be full of cliches and lazy etc. It's perfectly possible for the people making the show to have a different intent than the people publishing the show and to want to make art even if at the same time the finance guys want to make gobs of money, and it's completely possible for someone to attempt to go after niche markets who care about quality or to have a business model for TV different from pushing advertisements to the most viewers possible.

And if we look at the last 15, 20, 25 years, we see that this is in fact the case and is becoming more and more the case. It's even true on basic cable, where you can have stuff like David Milch working on NYPD Blue and you can have Hill Street Blues and you can have fucking David Lynch making Twin Peaks and you can have comedy shows like The Simpsons and Seinfeld, but it's especially true outside of broadcast.

Look at HBO if you want an example - they are a subscriber service, rather than advertisement funded free TV. Look at premium cable channels like FX and AMC, who basically make their money from cable providers as much as from ads. These are not business models that necessarily need to focus on the lowest common denominator - and in fact, they don't. These channels have all realized that as long as they can do really well with some people, they don't need everybody, and that has spurred them on to make legitimate, uncompromised quality programming. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood - you may not like these shows, but the idea that they are unserious, or that they are fatally compromised by the commercialistic intent behind them, is totally wrong. The people making these shows are people who are interested in making great work and they are being given the freedom to do it. Again, whatever you think of the outcome, but there is absolutely nothing stopping people from attempting to make high art, and even having it run for a long time.

I'm sorry I just wrote like a million words but, I mean, come on. I honestly don't understand how someone can look at the past 20 years and look at the extremely interesting developments in television and still say this kind of thing.

[dreemyweird]

You just made a very good argument and, frankly, I have nothing to answer. I feel like there's something amiss, but I don't think I can pinpoint the difference between literary "series" and TV shows? It's not just "eww TV go away literature is the only truly highbrow kind of art", I simply cannot bring an example of a TV production as technically good as, say, Hemingway's stories. It could have something to do with the nature of collective art, but then films are also made by many people?

IDk IDK

Perhaps it is the fact that it is a very young branch of arts and is yet to evolve into something greater. You're right that the tendency is there, though.

Thanks for tl;dr :)

[(Anonymous)]

Hahaha, glad I didn't come off as too much of a blowhard. I just think this kind of thing is really interesting!

I do think a lot of what you're seeing is that it is still quite a young medium. It's also possible that you just don't like the things that have come out and don't think that highly of them, which is perfectly okay - but even if they're not that good, that doesn't mean they can't be high art. They would just be high art that you don't think is very good.

And it is worth pointing out that Hemingway is a fairly high standard. The guy was pretty OK at writing.

(Also, in passing, one correction: I wrote that shows like Hill Street Blues, NPYD Blue, and Twin Peaks were aired on basic cable; obviously this is incorrect, and they were aired on broadcast TV)

[agnes_bean]

More TL;DR from a TV fan!

I wonder if what you're responding to is the fact that -- aside from being a young art, which I do think is part of it -- TV is by its nature an ongoing art. Its Dickens, not Hemingway. Unlike most films and novels these days, the creator inherently cannot create an entire series first and then edit it to be "perfect." Even those few creators who do plot the entire thing out first are still only working off of an outline.

On top of that, it generally has more budgetary constraints than a film (at least a big studio film) and, with that, more time constraints, and obviously novels are not limited by budget in the same way -- words all cost the same.

Now, I personally think this just makes it a DIFFERENT art, not a lesser one, but it does mean even the best TV is less finely tuned than the best novel or film -- but OTOH you get something else in return. Yes, TV is more likely to show its flaws, but it also allows for a different kind of creativity -- for example some of the best episodes of TV are "bottle episodes" with only a few characters and locations. Created to save money, but those limits force the writers to think outside the box. Because creators and actors and writers are continually working on shows for what can be years and years and YEARS, you can watch both shows and characters grow into things that no one ever would have imagined when the idea was first dreamed up.

I think the thing about TV is because of the stuff described above, you'll probably never get an ENTIRE series -- at least one that lasts more than a season -- that is as tight as a Hemingway story or as perfectly crafted as The Godfather, but I don't really think that's a fair comparison. As someone who responds really well to TV, I personally think there are EPISODES of television that are as good as the best short story out there (I would argue that the TV show Louie alone has at least two or three), and I think there are seasons of TV that are as good as almost any novel (Season 4 of The Wire is one of the most satisfyingly crafted things I have ever consumed). But a series as a whole? Yeah, there are going to be flaws in a way that there won't be for the best of the best of the best in lit and film. But I personally think the fun and interest of watching a story and characters grow organically makes up for that.

(Plus, as a fan of characters specifically over perfectly crafted art as a whole, I actually think TV is one of the BEST mediums to get what I like most from stories. All but a handful of my favorite characters are from TV, because you just get so much time with them, PLUS the benefit of amazing actors.)

(This isn't to say you need to feel the same -- I just think it's interesting to must on the differences between different kinds of art.)

ETA: Though I would say that one thing I think is inarguable is that there ARE some creative geniuses working in TV. Not as many as fandom likes to claim, but they exist. Beyond the fact that some of the best acting in the world is happening on TV, there are certain showrunners who are just objectively amazingly talented. No one writers dialogue like David Milch. Very few people can blend acute social commentary and compelling stories and characters like David Simon. Louis CK is just straight up one of the most creative, insightful, and funny comedians alive. Etc. etc.*


* Though from that list of names I would acknowledge that there's a big gender problem in TV production, but that's a whole other thing. (I personally think Shonda Rhimes is am indisputable genius at creating addictive stories, but is that high art? blah blah blah).

[(Anonymous)]

David Milch is my favorite example of this, because he is, by any measure, a legitimate, serious writer - he went to Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and he was a protege of fucking Robert Penn Warren. His mainstream credentials are unimpeachable (not to mention that he's incredibly talented) and he's a TV writer.

[ariakas]

In their defense, though, while HBO might not have commercial pandering it definitely panders to its (primarily older, male) audience with gratuitous and unnecessary T&A. Rome, The Sopranos, and even Game of Thrones would have been much improved if they didn't have an obligatory titty quota. It's a different kind of pandering than the advertising format of commercial pandering, to be sure, and results in fewer shortcuts in terms of narrative quality, but it's pandering all the same in the name of keeping up subscriptions and many people find it galling.