sorkin 2
It is decreed by the Chapo Central Committee that, seeing as Sorkin’s ethos completely and utterly missed the mark and led to a bunch of greasy, half-literate tristate area slobs occupying the decorated halls of the White House, Sorkin should be legally mandated to remake his entire series—same dialogue, same camerawork, same music—but swap out the liberal philosopher kings for people like Donald Trump, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, and the Hamburglar.
VIP TV
Sorkin, too, however, is a symptom of a bigger problem.
At the turn of the twentieth century, America had a problem: polio, sure, but, even worse, the lack of opportunities to laugh at the high jinks of a fat guy and his hot wife. Yes, there was vaudeville, but the scarcity of theaters where you could spend an evening chuckling at a portly gentleman and his incongruously attractive spouse as they threatened each other with violence left millions of rural Americans out of the fun. There had to be a better way.
Thanks to the spirit of American ingenuity that never allows a need to go unanswered for too long, that better way was unveiled in 1928 when inventor Philo Farnsworth debuted his all-electric televisual network. “With this miraculous device,” Farnsworth said, “Americans from coast to coast will be able to observe the merry antics of a rotund workman and his comely helpmate from the comfort of their own homes!”
The device caught on among a public hungry for scenes of domestic gaiety between comically mismatched romantic partners, and by the 1950s, the television set was a staple appliance in the American home. Each night, families would settle in and enjoy wholesome programs like The Honeymooners, Texaco Presents: The Oaf and the Dish, and The General Electric Obesity Hour. While situation-based comedies such as these remain a mainstay of television, over time, increasingly sophisticated audiences began to demand a greater variety of programming, such as rigged game shows, blackface shenanigans, and the adventures of horny doctors, horny lawyers, and horny cowboys. None of it was good, mind you, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Real, challenging art was to be found in books and at the theater (the latter is still boring, though). TV was for shutting off your brain and basking in a sea of banal amusement after a hard day’s work. This upset highbrow nerds like FCC chairman Newton Minow, who famously called television a “vast wasteland” in 1961, but most Americans were happy to reply, “Shut up, bitch, Car 54, Where Are You? is on.”
And so, network television existed for decades in a state of tranquil stasis: sitcoms, soap operas, lawyer shows, doctor shows, cowboy shows. The only major changes were that the cowboys eventually turned into cops and networks began to allow actual minorities to appear on-screen. Suddenly, in the 1990s, there was a burst of innovation. Chief among the new types of programs was the “reality show,” which, by the turn of the century, was threatening to consume civilization with increasingly dystopian offerings. The low overhead and huge viewership of lurid, vérité programs like Billionaire Bride Auction and Celebrity Ape Hunt ate into the market share of scripted programming. For a moment, it seemed the networks had found a solution to the rising competition from cable. They seized upon this silver bullet, and it looked as though soon the only things on prime-time TV would be public executions and Regis Philbin. But then The Sopranos happened.
David Chase’s show, broadcast on the pay-cable channel HBO and thus freed from the content and commercial restrictions of the broadcast networks, combined the thematic and character complexities of literature with the mature, stylized visual content of film on the small screen. Narratives stretched across seasons, not just episodes. Clear-cut resolutions were replaced by lingering ambiguities. Characters underwent the sort of personality transformations that would have alienated previous generations of TV audiences, who cherished the soothing familiarity of archetypes. It turned out that television wasn’t just a place to zone out and chuckle at cloddish husbands; it could produce art just as challenging and thought-provoking as any other medium.
Inspired by Chase’s accomplishment, a whole generation of creative heavyweights set to the task of putting their own mark on the tube. The next two Davids, Milch and Simon, empowered by an HBO hungry to replicate the overnight phenomenon that was The Sopranos, created a pair of shows, Deadwood and The Wire, respectively, that failed to match The Sopranos in viewership but achieved posthumous critical canonization. It was AMC, a network that had previously specialized in showing old Hollywood movies to a small audience of nostalgic geriatrics, that really managed to copy the Sopranos formula with Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. These shows achieved levels of popularity and critical acclaim that had never been seen before, and certainly not on basic cable. Television got so good, in fact, that it wasn’t long before the dominant opinion among cultural tastemakers was that TV had surpassed film as the most vital popular narrative art form.
With books deemed a dying medium and cinema dominated by superhero pablum, it wasn’t unreasonable to seek intellectual and creative stimulation elsewhere—and with TV outlets and streaming services multiplying like toadstools after a rainstorm, the sheer volume of serialized storytelling meant you don’t have to leave your couch to find it.
This line of thought soon calcified into its own orthodoxy, with its own shibboleths: we’re living in the “Golden Age of Television,” don’t you know, and the shows we watch aren’t just shows, they’re Prestige programming. The premise of this cant was to assure people that they didn’t have to bother with challenging literature or indie cinema; television could provide all their cultural vitamins and minerals without their having to strain their eyes or leave their houses.
This Golden Age of Television heuristic was created and enforced by a new class of television critics who got their start in digital media outlets that, not coincidentally, sprang into being just as TV shows started getting “good.” The explosion of Web traffic in the early 2000s led to a huge demand for content, and media reviews were the cheapest, easiest content to crank out. This created a recap economy, in which poorly paid content creators put out instant reviews of television shows hours after they aired, and gave the people who’d just watched those shows space in the comments section to have the conversations about those shows they weren’t having with their nonexistent real-life friends. It was a faulty critical model (books aren’t reviewed by the chapter, films aren’t reviewed by the act), but it was perfect for the audiences of those websites: bored cubicle workers with Internet connections at their desks and no energy to do anything after work but sit down and watch television. Everyone involved in this cycle, from the website owners to the writers to the eager comment-section dwellers, had a vested interest in framing TV as the most important, most thoughtful, most artistically satisfying medium.
It wasn’t long after Prestige TV became a buzzword that the term began to be defined less as embodying any particular standard of “quality” (which, after all, is a mostly subjective concept) and more as a collection of surface-level signifiers. These proved much easier for networks and producers to replicate than the lightning in a bottle that was The Sopranos—so that first generation of prestigious television gave way to a second wave that mimicked the content, style, and mood of its forebear without the point of view or craftsmanship. Shows like House of Cards and Westworld sport the high production values and cinematic atmosphere that signify Prestige but the characters, dialogue, plots, and themes of a tryhard freshman fiction workshop. Even higher-quality shows like Fargo strain so hard to be legible to reviewers by underlining each episode’s themes so that they can be pointed out in recaps that feel contrived and flat. Even the best of them tend to recycle tortured male antihero tropes and rely on genre conventions because audiences love a guy with a gun.
And more enervating than the cynicism and relentless sameness of Prestige TV is the way the concept serves as a brainlessly proud monument to techno-capitalist exhaustion. Viewers, worn down by draining and unfulfilling work lives, socially and emotionally isolated, priced out of expensive movie theaters, attention spans and reading ability obliterated by the informational overload of the Internet, reach for any available confirmation that zoning out on the couch counts as cultural enrichment. Poorly paid content-mill providers are charged with providing that confirmation, treating every new show with decent production values and an angsty protagonist as an Important Commentary on Our Times.
This is ice cream for dinner. Television is an inherently middlebrow medium, and dressing up shows with blockbuster production values and Big Social Themes won’t change that. Aside from surreal ten-minute comedies shown at 4:00 a.m. on Adult Swim and stuff by brand-name weirdos like David Lynch who made their reputations in film, there’s no real TV avant-garde. Movies and books, as one-off, take-it-or-leave-it pieces of art, can challenge and provoke in ways that TV shows, always angling for viewers to tune in to the next episode so they get renewed, simply can’t.
The idea that a thing like Prestige Television exists spreads the poisonous notion that these shows, which at this point are blurry copies of the original article, are sufficient cultural nourishment. We need better than that if we’re going to learn how to live in the burning circus tent we call twenty-first-century America. Instead of taking what’s offered to a demoralized, dispirited population by people whose precarious livelihoods require us to keep watching and sounding off in the comments and calling it “good enough,” we need to demand to live in a world where the burdens and alienations of modern life are lightened, allowing us to watch movies in the morning, read books in the afternoon, and critique TV after supper.
VIP TV
Sorkin, too, however, is a symptom of a bigger problem.
At the turn of the twentieth century, America had a problem: polio, sure, but, even worse, the lack of opportunities to laugh at the high jinks of a fat guy and his hot wife. Yes, there was vaudeville, but the scarcity of theaters where you could spend an evening chuckling at a portly gentleman and his incongruously attractive spouse as they threatened each other with violence left millions of rural Americans out of the fun. There had to be a better way.
Thanks to the spirit of American ingenuity that never allows a need to go unanswered for too long, that better way was unveiled in 1928 when inventor Philo Farnsworth debuted his all-electric televisual network. “With this miraculous device,” Farnsworth said, “Americans from coast to coast will be able to observe the merry antics of a rotund workman and his comely helpmate from the comfort of their own homes!”
The device caught on among a public hungry for scenes of domestic gaiety between comically mismatched romantic partners, and by the 1950s, the television set was a staple appliance in the American home. Each night, families would settle in and enjoy wholesome programs like The Honeymooners, Texaco Presents: The Oaf and the Dish, and The General Electric Obesity Hour. While situation-based comedies such as these remain a mainstay of television, over time, increasingly sophisticated audiences began to demand a greater variety of programming, such as rigged game shows, blackface shenanigans, and the adventures of horny doctors, horny lawyers, and horny cowboys. None of it was good, mind you, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Real, challenging art was to be found in books and at the theater (the latter is still boring, though). TV was for shutting off your brain and basking in a sea of banal amusement after a hard day’s work. This upset highbrow nerds like FCC chairman Newton Minow, who famously called television a “vast wasteland” in 1961, but most Americans were happy to reply, “Shut up, bitch, Car 54, Where Are You? is on.”
And so, network television existed for decades in a state of tranquil stasis: sitcoms, soap operas, lawyer shows, doctor shows, cowboy shows. The only major changes were that the cowboys eventually turned into cops and networks began to allow actual minorities to appear on-screen. Suddenly, in the 1990s, there was a burst of innovation. Chief among the new types of programs was the “reality show,” which, by the turn of the century, was threatening to consume civilization with increasingly dystopian offerings. The low overhead and huge viewership of lurid, vérité programs like Billionaire Bride Auction and Celebrity Ape Hunt ate into the market share of scripted programming. For a moment, it seemed the networks had found a solution to the rising competition from cable. They seized upon this silver bullet, and it looked as though soon the only things on prime-time TV would be public executions and Regis Philbin. But then The Sopranos happened.
David Chase’s show, broadcast on the pay-cable channel HBO and thus freed from the content and commercial restrictions of the broadcast networks, combined the thematic and character complexities of literature with the mature, stylized visual content of film on the small screen. Narratives stretched across seasons, not just episodes. Clear-cut resolutions were replaced by lingering ambiguities. Characters underwent the sort of personality transformations that would have alienated previous generations of TV audiences, who cherished the soothing familiarity of archetypes. It turned out that television wasn’t just a place to zone out and chuckle at cloddish husbands; it could produce art just as challenging and thought-provoking as any other medium.
Inspired by Chase’s accomplishment, a whole generation of creative heavyweights set to the task of putting their own mark on the tube. The next two Davids, Milch and Simon, empowered by an HBO hungry to replicate the overnight phenomenon that was The Sopranos, created a pair of shows, Deadwood and The Wire, respectively, that failed to match The Sopranos in viewership but achieved posthumous critical canonization. It was AMC, a network that had previously specialized in showing old Hollywood movies to a small audience of nostalgic geriatrics, that really managed to copy the Sopranos formula with Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. These shows achieved levels of popularity and critical acclaim that had never been seen before, and certainly not on basic cable. Television got so good, in fact, that it wasn’t long before the dominant opinion among cultural tastemakers was that TV had surpassed film as the most vital popular narrative art form.
With books deemed a dying medium and cinema dominated by superhero pablum, it wasn’t unreasonable to seek intellectual and creative stimulation elsewhere—and with TV outlets and streaming services multiplying like toadstools after a rainstorm, the sheer volume of serialized storytelling meant you don’t have to leave your couch to find it.
This line of thought soon calcified into its own orthodoxy, with its own shibboleths: we’re living in the “Golden Age of Television,” don’t you know, and the shows we watch aren’t just shows, they’re Prestige programming. The premise of this cant was to assure people that they didn’t have to bother with challenging literature or indie cinema; television could provide all their cultural vitamins and minerals without their having to strain their eyes or leave their houses.
This Golden Age of Television heuristic was created and enforced by a new class of television critics who got their start in digital media outlets that, not coincidentally, sprang into being just as TV shows started getting “good.” The explosion of Web traffic in the early 2000s led to a huge demand for content, and media reviews were the cheapest, easiest content to crank out. This created a recap economy, in which poorly paid content creators put out instant reviews of television shows hours after they aired, and gave the people who’d just watched those shows space in the comments section to have the conversations about those shows they weren’t having with their nonexistent real-life friends. It was a faulty critical model (books aren’t reviewed by the chapter, films aren’t reviewed by the act), but it was perfect for the audiences of those websites: bored cubicle workers with Internet connections at their desks and no energy to do anything after work but sit down and watch television. Everyone involved in this cycle, from the website owners to the writers to the eager comment-section dwellers, had a vested interest in framing TV as the most important, most thoughtful, most artistically satisfying medium.
It wasn’t long after Prestige TV became a buzzword that the term began to be defined less as embodying any particular standard of “quality” (which, after all, is a mostly subjective concept) and more as a collection of surface-level signifiers. These proved much easier for networks and producers to replicate than the lightning in a bottle that was The Sopranos—so that first generation of prestigious television gave way to a second wave that mimicked the content, style, and mood of its forebear without the point of view or craftsmanship. Shows like House of Cards and Westworld sport the high production values and cinematic atmosphere that signify Prestige but the characters, dialogue, plots, and themes of a tryhard freshman fiction workshop. Even higher-quality shows like Fargo strain so hard to be legible to reviewers by underlining each episode’s themes so that they can be pointed out in recaps that feel contrived and flat. Even the best of them tend to recycle tortured male antihero tropes and rely on genre conventions because audiences love a guy with a gun.
And more enervating than the cynicism and relentless sameness of Prestige TV is the way the concept serves as a brainlessly proud monument to techno-capitalist exhaustion. Viewers, worn down by draining and unfulfilling work lives, socially and emotionally isolated, priced out of expensive movie theaters, attention spans and reading ability obliterated by the informational overload of the Internet, reach for any available confirmation that zoning out on the couch counts as cultural enrichment. Poorly paid content-mill providers are charged with providing that confirmation, treating every new show with decent production values and an angsty protagonist as an Important Commentary on Our Times.
This is ice cream for dinner. Television is an inherently middlebrow medium, and dressing up shows with blockbuster production values and Big Social Themes won’t change that. Aside from surreal ten-minute comedies shown at 4:00 a.m. on Adult Swim and stuff by brand-name weirdos like David Lynch who made their reputations in film, there’s no real TV avant-garde. Movies and books, as one-off, take-it-or-leave-it pieces of art, can challenge and provoke in ways that TV shows, always angling for viewers to tune in to the next episode so they get renewed, simply can’t.
The idea that a thing like Prestige Television exists spreads the poisonous notion that these shows, which at this point are blurry copies of the original article, are sufficient cultural nourishment. We need better than that if we’re going to learn how to live in the burning circus tent we call twenty-first-century America. Instead of taking what’s offered to a demoralized, dispirited population by people whose precarious livelihoods require us to keep watching and sounding off in the comments and calling it “good enough,” we need to demand to live in a world where the burdens and alienations of modern life are lightened, allowing us to watch movies in the morning, read books in the afternoon, and critique TV after supper.
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