Everything Bad Is Good for You (30 page)

Tony's infidelities

 

Hill Street Blues

Jablonski and the woman

Operation Fleabag

Celestine Gray trial

Renko's paternity

The matricidal iceman

The homicide of the old man

The carjacked tourists

Furillo–Joyce romance

 

The first test screening of the
Hill Street
pilot…brought complaints from the viewers:
A telling incident occurred at the end of the show's fifth season, when the production company, MTM, asked Bochco to leave the series. As an article in
The New York Times
reported:

“‘Hill Street Blues,' the NBC police series that has been acclaimed for its complex narratives and ambitious production techniques, will simplify its plots and reduce the number of characters next fall in an attempt to lower costs, according to the show's producers and writers.

“The changes were outlined following the unexpected resignation under pressure last week of Steven Bochco, the show's ground-breaking creator and executive producer. Fewer extras will be used and some regular cast members will appear less frequently than they now do, the show's producers said. They said the changes will help reduce costs and sharpen the image of the series, which in its fifth year reaches 29 percent of the viewers on Thursdays from 10 to 11 p.m.—comfortably above the minimum needed to continue on the network.

“‘The show is probably a little thicker than is good for telling coherent stories,' said Jeffrey Lewis, who along with David Milch was appointed by MTM Enterprises Inc., the producers of the show, to replace Mr. Bochco. ‘The problem with the show is we can't tell stories as fully as we like because we have to tell too many.'” Sally Bedell Smith, “‘Hill Street' to Trim Its Cast and Plots,”
The New York Times,
March 28, 1985, p. C22.

 

First…
The Sopranos
is a genuine national hit:
With the Season 3 premiere (March 4, 2001),
The Sopranos
began to draw higher audiences than most of its broadcast-network competition, despite its being available in only a third of American households. In particular, it started to routinely smash the competition in the key 18–49 demographic, and frequently still does. For the Season 3 premiere, a 5.8 rating in the 18–49 demographic made it the nineteenth-most-watched program of the week on any network. The Season 4 premiere drew more viewers in its time slot than any other show on television, and episodes during Season 4 routinely beat all broadcast competitors on Sunday nights. For the week overall in the 18–49 demographic, the premiere ranked second, directly behind ABC's
Monday Night Football.

 

Today you can challenge…a more complicated mix:
In a 1995 interview, Bochco, referring to
Murder One,
clarified his vision for television drama: “What we're trying to do is create a long-term impact. One which requires its viewership to defer gratification for a while, to control that impulse in anticipation of a more complex and fully satisfying closure down the road. It's the same commitment you make when you open up to the first a novel.” Robert Sullivan, “He Made It Possible,”
The New York Times Magazine,
October 22, 1995, p. 54.

 

Typical scene from
ER
:
Compare the
ER
dialogue (as appears at http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/attic/er510. htm) with this sequence from a
St. Elsewhere
episode titled “Down's Syndrome.” This is the most complicated stretch of medical “texture” in the entire episode, but note how each challenging line is immediately followed by a layperson translation. (The script for this episode, which aired on November 16, 1982, was by Tom Fontana.)

INT. HALLWAY/OUTSIDE MISS TAYLOR'S ROOM—DAY

They stand in the hallway. MORRISON leans against the wall. WHITE is biting his nails.

WHITE: The liver felt hard, real hard.

AUSCHLANDER: What treatment would you suggest?

ARMSTRONG: Radiation therapy.

AUSCHLANDER: It may relieve some tension but has to be limited to doses below two thousand rad.

WHITE: How about chemotherapy?

AUSCHLANDER: Again, it might be used in appropriate but futile doses…Any other ideas?

MORRISON: What about a partial resection of the liver?

AUSCHLANDER: Some of the best answers don't come from textbooks, Doctor Morrison.

The RESIDENTS look blankly at each other and the floor.

ARMSTRONG: I think she knows she's going to die.

AUSCHLANDER waits for her to continue.

ARMSTRONG: We should try to make her as comfortable as possible…. What else can we do?

 

But when you watch…the other sense of “simpler” applies:
“There's a kind of a rule in television,” says Jay Anania, a filmmaker who teaches directing at New York University. “You tell people what they're going to see, you show it to them, and then you tell them what they just saw. In
The Sopranos,
nobody clues viewers in to what's about to happen. As in life, there are loose ends that are never tied up. There are metaphors we struggle to divine. [Creator and executive producer David] Chase has said in interviews that he doesn't zoom in on Tony Soprano's face during the protagonist's therapy scenes because he doesn't want to signal to viewers what's important. He wants them to figure that out for themselves.” Libby Copeland, “The Sopranos' Four-Octave Range,”
The Washington Post,
June 5, 2004.

 

Knowing that George uses the alias Art Vandelay:
Art Vandelay is referred to in the following episodes: “The Stakeout” (episode 2); “The Red Dot” (episode 29); “The Boyfriend,” part 1 (episode 34); “The Pilot,” part 1 (episode 63); “The Cadillac,” parts 1 and 2 (episodes 124 and 125); “Bizarro Jerry” (episode 137); “Serenity Now” (episode 159); “The Puerto Rican Day” (episode 176); “The Finale,” parts 1 and 2 (episodes 179 and 180).

 

According to one fan site…the average
Simpsons
episode includes:
The list of movie references in
The Simpsons
is courtesy the Simpsons Archive website. You can see the entire list at the URL http://www.snpp.com/guides/movie__refs.html. Following is an example of films and their respective references in a “normal”
Simpsons
episode, “Black Widower” (8F20).

The Elephant Man:
Lisa's imagination

Cool Hand Luke:
picking up garbage; the shot of the chief guard's reflective sunglasses; the guard's cane tapping his leg

The Wizard of Oz:
“Snake, I'm going to miss you most of all.”

Gone With the Wind:
“Fiddle-dee-dee. Tomorrow's another day.”

Psycho:

Sideshow Bob turns a chair, expecting to find a corpse, but instead finds Bart. (In the movie, Vera Miles's character turns a chair, expecting to find Mrs. Bates, but instead finds a corpse.)

Sideshow Bob is so startled he hits a swinging lightbulb.

A brief violin sweep shortly thereafter.

The Maltese Falcon:
Mary Astor takes the fall (the sliding metal bars of the elevator doors)

Black Widow:
Nobody believing the hero's knowledge of the villain; marrying for money, then murdering; the final murder done for revenge; the villain getting overconfident and spilling the beans.

 

Survivor
's relationship to reality is much closer:
Salon
's wonderful television critic Heather Havrilesky is one of the few to grasp the fundamental misunderstanding of the “reality” of reality TV: “Many have argued that self-consciousness will be the death of the genre. As more and more contestants who appear on the shows have been exposed to other reality shows, the argument goes, their actions and statements will become less and less ‘real.' What's to blame here is the popular use of the word ‘reality' to describe a genre that's never been overtly concerned with realism or even with offering an accurate snapshot of the events featured. In fact, the term ‘reality TV' may have sprung from ‘The Real World,' in which the ‘real' was used both in the sense of ‘the world awaiting young people after they graduate from school,' and in the sense of ‘getting real,' or, more specifically, getting all up in someone's grill for eating the last of your peanut butter.” Heather Havrilesky, “Three Cheers for Reality Television,”
Salon,
September 13, 2004.

 

Some of that challenge comes from…the rich social geography:
Again, Heather Havrilesky gets it right: “Real people are surprising. The process of getting to know the characters, of discovering the qualities and flaws that define them, and then discussing these discoveries with other viewers creates a simulation of community that most people don't find in their everyday lives. That may be a sad commentary on the way we're living, but it's not the fault of these shows, which unearth a heartfelt desire to make connections with other human beings. Better that we rediscover our interest in other, real people than sink ourselves into the mirage of untouchable celebrity culture or into some überhuman, ultraclever fictional ‘Friends' universe.” Havrilesky, “Three Cheers for Reality Television.”

 

“Although the Constitution makes no mention”:
Neil Postman,
Amusing Ourselves to Death
(New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 4.

 

A decade ago…the phrase “screenagers”:
Douglas Rushkoff,
Playing the Future
(New York: Riverhead, 1999).

 

“Television…encompasses all forms”:
Postman,
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
p. 92.

 

The second way in which the rise:
One way to think about the cognitive challenge of digital media is through a framework that I outlined in my 1997 book
Interface Culture.
What makes these new forms uniquely stimulating is that they require the mastery of interfaces in addition to the traditional “content” of media, and those interfaces are evolving at a dramatic clip. To send an e-mail, you need to think about the process of writing, but also your physical interface with the computer via keyboard and mouse, the interface conventions that govern the e-mail program itself, and the larger interface conventions of the operating system. Compare those different cognitive levels with the more direct system of handwriting a note and you get an idea of the increased cognitive demands of the modern digital interface.

 

On average, Dickens sold around 50,000 copies:
Peter Ackroyd,
Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion
(London: BBC Worldwide, 2002).

 

So this is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve:
If pop music today doesn't appear to be experiencing the same Sleeper Effect that other mass forms have, that's partly because the repetition revolution already transformed the music industry some forty years ago, when it switched in the mid-sixties from a business that revolved around throwaway singles to one anchored in albums designed to be heard hundreds of times. Of course, the great complexification of popular music that occurred in the sixties had other causes as well—from the talents of individual artists to the volatility of the historical period—but that newfound complexity had room to flower because there was a repetition-friendly format available for artists to explore. Ever since the days of the Victrola, popular music had gravitated to songs that would instantly lodge themselves in listeners' heads, but all that changed in the 1960s. Suddenly the top sellers were long-format albums that rewarded repeated listenings, that offered lyrical and musical complexity unimaginable in the jingle-driven markets that had come before.

In private correspondence, Henry Jenkins points out that a comparable increase in visual and narrative complexity can be seen in the world of comics: “The visual complexity of contemporary mainstream comics would have been nigh on incomprehensible fifty years ago. I say fifty because the push towards visual complexity certainly goes back to the 1960s but an artist today like David Mack or Chris Ware push what a comic like further than would have been imagined by Steranko at his most pop-art inflected wildness. But there is also a new form of narrative complexity which emerges through the development of alternative universes and multiple versions of the same characters. Comics used to develop complexity through continuity—asking readers to keep track of 70 plus years of development in the DC universe, say, and pulling back characters that had not been seen in decades. This is impressive enough—as you suggest in showing similar conduct in contemporary television. But now, they are also allowing different authors to construct radically different versions of the same protagonists, each with their own continuities, each with their own interpretations. So if I am a Spiderman fan, I end up keeping track of four or five different universes each month, recalling as I read an issue whether this is the one where Aunt May knows about Peter's other identity or not. At the same time, a series like Elseworlds may bend the stories beyond recognition: so Superman's Metropolis will depict the origins of the Man of Steel through the language of Fritz Lang's German Expressionist classic or Red Sun will explore what would have happened if the ship from Kripton landed in the Soviet Union as opposed to the United States or Speeding Bullets explores what would happen if we blurred together the origins of Superman and Batman. Each of these requires extensive knowledge not only of comics but also [of] a range of other media traditions and the ability to read one against the other.”