is it just me or did tv get good all of the sudden

stole from http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/gilding-small-screen-just-tv-get-good-sudden

lol "all of a sudden."

Also it's interesting that so many of those descriptors mention narcissism, which is one of the reasons that reality tv gets routinely dismissed.

if a show's gonna have protagonists seems kinda natural for them to be narcissists on tv, all you gotta do is demote all the other characters and let the natural seasons-of-episodes formatting confine them to secondary roles in the protagonists' lives

most of these shows aren't very good, fuck the "golden age" platitudes

the wire's good tho lol i'm that asshole

"the spurned children of humanity form a weird monotheistic cult and then come back to burn down their parents’ home with nuclear weapons" is best on paper, and for at least the first season and a half.

i didn't get that one at first, hah

the article by Grillo-Marxauch isn't bad actually

Why all the cops be 'philandering'?

'cops are dogs' - some wire character

After graduating with a screenwriting degree from the same school as George Lucas .... I blundered into a position as a junior executive in current programming and drama development at NBC.

*grumble* How do you blunder into such a great job?

sounds like a job from hell to me

well nbc

"the spurned children of humanity form a weird monotheistic cult and then come back to burn down their parents’ home with nuclear weapons" is best on paper, and for at least the first season and a half.

― jmm, Friday, September 26, 2014 3:24 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what is this, i haven't seen it and it sounds tantalising

Battlestar Galactica

the thing that always disappoints me with both tv and film is that SO MANY PREMISES SOUND INCREDIBLE and don't follow through bc they play it safe or clichéd or #problematically. some of these shows are good tho

hey guys, you could read the article if you want to know what the shows are. Also the "all of a sudden" line is a quote from the mid '90s.

where the great middlebrow drama of the Chayefskys, Footes, and Serlings mingled

or as ILX calls it, "TV before it was any good at all."

The West Wing, a fantasy in which the world’s ultimate patriarch is an almost preternaturally moral man who actually grapples with the idea of compromise

^kudos on this

huh i dont watch the good wife or know anything abt it but this sounds good in like a revolutionary rd or updikean way 2 me, is it like that y/n ?

a case study in the preservation of a marriage for the sake of appearances

BSG is not problematic as far as I remember. It's set in a future where sexism, racism, and homophobia appear to have been largely overcome, and I don't remember any cases where the show completely betrayed that ideal. It mostly resists cliché until maybe the third season, when you start noticing a certain ratings-oriented ~mystery~ element being increasingly emphasized. It's one thing to make a mystery out of who might be an enemy infiltrator, another thing to count them down as though the mystery is the whole point of tuning in.

Tv didn't get good all of a sudden, but because of technological advances (p2p, netflix etc.) cultural consumption changed which all of a sudden led to a lot of bullshit justifications of the aesthetics of tv series.

I'm annoyed by how a show like Breaking Bad seems to present its premise as controversial or provocative. Can't see it as much more than a superficial moral dilemma.

The dramaturgy of tv is undermined by the commercial premise that extends the narrative forever which means nothing can happen in an episode because when the plot develops the show is over. I think Aristotle had a point when he suggested a narrative should have a beginning a middle and an end and this is distorted in tv series where the middle never ends.

I prefer a sitcom that doesn't pretend to have an overarching story but presents small, well-composed 30 minute narratives (like classic Simpsons).

huh i dont watch the good wife or know anything abt it but this sounds good in like a revolutionary rd or updikean way 2 me, is it like that y/n ?

I guess I'm playing ILX TGW advocte today. It is good, and quite sneakily subversive in a lot of ways, but it's a rare case of a show not really living up to its full potential until its 4th or 5th season (S6 just started).

The dramaturgy of tv is undermined by the commercial premise that extends the narrative forever which means nothing can happen in an episode because when the plot develops the show is over. I think Aristotle had a point when he suggested a narrative should have a beginning a middle and an end and this is distorted in tv series where the middle never ends.

this is absolutely a huge problem with long-form narrative arcs - good shows know to fight for a definite ending and plan it out ahead of time (Sopranos, Breaking Bad, apparently Mad Men) but this is not the norm.

I was intrigued by the David Chase interview done by Bogdanovich on the Sopranos s1 DVD (it was done after shooting s2, i think) where Chase said he didn't care at all, at least at that point, about the 'soap opera' aspect of the series, i.e. What's Gonna Happen Next? He liked stand-alone shows like the "College" episode, and they had Big Pussy disappear at the end of the first season without any idea for resolving it.

when a show is just starting and they don't know if they're going to get renewed its totally understandable, but once you're a success and a few seasons in you better have a plan.

"College" is one of the best episodes of the series

something like utopia really felt like it came to a natural, satisfying end after two seasons...but those seasons were such a success that they couldn't NOT renew?

i don't think it's right to apply old timey narrative/dramaturgicological categories to tv, it's a different medium (so it works in ways that are not yet given, they have to be discovered by finding out what can be done on/in tv).

like without the highly constrained nothing-changes-but-occasionally-some-things-change dynamic, nypd blue could not have ended after a dozen years with its main character, having survived x y and z, tentatively becoming the boss.

since shows do end, it's not so much a matter of fighting for a certain ending as it is being able to make the best of the ending you end up having to accept.

re: planning - To me, part of the fun of watching TV is detecting the way writers bob and weave around (or smack headfirst into) limitations (budget, cast, change of showrunner, etc) and expectations as they change over time. Or just the way they change strategies: S2 of BBad was 100% mapped out in advance, while S3 was written in a much looser fashion, then AFAIK the remaining seasons tried to balance those approaches.

something like the walking dead - as terrible as it is in so many aspects - gets this right imo, in that the entire show is predicated on a there-is-no-ending hopelessness, and which also means that it has the potential to mutate into different shows with different characters and different narratives as it progresses

(this is why network tv is better than prestige drama, it doesn't have to contrive tragic/ironic/ambivalent/omg 'endings' to match highly narrativized material, it just has to end well like normal jobs, people, etc. do)

(this is probably why l o s t was so awful, they couldn't see a way to end a show that in certain ways fully understood the episodic/cyclical imperative of network tv)

also i feel like watching week-by-week vs binge-watching are such different but equally common modes of watching now and a lot of scriptwriters end up trying to cater to both?

this is why network tv is better than prestige drama

ok, by prestige drama do you mean cable, or Euripides?

something like the walking dead - as terrible as it is in so many aspects - gets this right imo

Have you tried The Leftovers yet lex? It has a similar open-ended sense of its emotional reality, with less smdh (although definitely some.)

i mean post-sopranos (basic or premium) cable, morbz

Personally, I find something like Brideshead Revisited immensely more satisfying than any 'Golden Age' drama, inasmuch as it's able to have a novelistic arc where the ending is not compromised by lack of foreplanning.

Though I don't know, probably plenty of novels are conceived on the fly as well.

Have you tried The Leftovers yet lex? It has a similar open-ended sense of its emotional reality, with less smdh (although definitely some.)

no, the premise got me pretty hyped and then i saw the name LINDELOF and fled

yeah thankfully I think Tom Perotta's involvement has helped to keep Lindelof in check (at least so far). S1 was surprisingly disciplined for the most part.

many classic 19th c. novels were planned in advance but not totally, and thus written/composed on the fly (sometimes in connection with serialized publication, begun before the novels were completely finished)

i think the totally-conceived novel, down to the level of systems of symbol and lexical choice, psychological nuance, etc., somehow harmonizing with narrative mode, plotting, etc., is of more recent vintage, or at least late 19th c into mid-20th (flaubert, joyce, pynchon), and it has not been the predominant mode of novel-writing, just because it's not feasible to invest that much in a novel beforehand. and once writers get going the imperatives of career tend to keep them on their toes, without the kind of time to worry over perfection.

re: the leftovers, the premise made me think more of the returned, which also so far - albeit only one season in - has a sense that we're not heading for closure as such

It's definitely not dissimilar from The Returned in that way

i think the totally-conceived novel, down to the level of systems of symbol and lexical choice, psychological nuance, etc., somehow harmonizing with narrative mode, plotting, etc., is of more recent vintage, or at least late 19th c into mid-20th (flaubert, joyce, pynchon)

Ulysses (at least the early chapters) was serialized!

yeah i was thinking he was a weird case. he also has the distinction of total-planning his last two books but having to kind of rush them off to press in a hurry (just to get the things of his hands iirc)

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i've been bothered by this author's master-narrative-mongering, and i think i know a bit better why after a few weeks - many of these shows have something veeeeeeeeerrry 'premisey' about them, the kind of thing that at its limit would be explained from week to week at the show's opening and in the first act, just to make sure the audience doesn't get lost on the level of the basic buy-in, though of course many of them are shows of a time when tv seems to have become more and more premisey, like a premise is indispensible (maybe it always has been, in some way, for most tv). (less so before, maybe, where say a show like 'er' could get by on realism alone.)

BUT. by trying to trade in nu-master-narrative theorizing about the nu-wave of nu-tv, the author is really kind of mashing a different mode of premised-narrative-interpretation up with some cases where the premising is very explicit (and thus seems to call for a different approach, rather than just being read as straight-up convenience for show creators seeking a satisfying way to re-tell the underlying master narrative). and it's a psychological narrative - what would in other circles be recognized as mytho-poetic itself. 'ok, here's the idea - it's about this guy. let's call him hugh mann. and everywhere he goes, he meets people and, like, for some reason, i don't know why, we can have a voiceover during the credits that explains it, every time he meets someone he's afraid they're going to leave him!'

Walking Dead is pretty much a western, as was Deadwood ... there are a lot of examples of "nu golden age tv" that don't fit his theory.

And "these narratives are due to the high divorce rate of their creators' generation" is pretty bogus -- that is some gladwellian bullshit

how is that not a thread title on ILAFL

oh yeah i assume any nu-tv malarkey is

i just like excuses to theorize about tv

No Rome, no Deadwood, fuck this shit

I like theorizing about tv too, it's just that a lot of this guy's theorizing is shit

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