A sequel to the sequel post?
We had some friends over recently and talked about whether we are living in the golden age of television. It's not a surprising subject to come up; I think I've seen the thought expressed at several on-line publications. And it clearly is a golden age for our friends. Shows such as Mad Men are exactly the shows for them.
I love Mad Men myself but I cannot believe that we are now in anything like a golden age. I doubt today's shows will age very well.
A big part of the failure is that whole problem of endings.
There was a great moment on The Simpsons years ago when Bart was reduced to despair at how badly things were going only to have Lisa say something to the effect of, "Don't worry, no matter what happens to us, everything will be back to normal next Thursday". And that is the problem really. Television is a static medium. Nothing ever changes on TV and nothing really can. To actually resolve the primary conflicts would be to render the show meaningless.
And thus the nonsense of saying that TV shows are novelistic. In a novel, movie, opera or ballet there is a definite arc to a story. A TV is more like a painting.
Contrary to what my friends and so many TV pundits think, I think the "greatness" of current TV shows is actually a function of the decline of TV. These shows rely so heavily on what they borrow from outside television—whether it be 1950s-1960s high modernism or zombie movies. Without those external references to give them depth, the shows would too obviously be soap operas where nothing ever changes no different really that The Days of Our Lives, 90210 and The OC, which is all they really are.
Nothing has really changed; television is the same cultural wasteland it has always been; your success as a human being is measured in inverse proportion to the number of hours of TV you watch.
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