Ok, so I’m a little perturbed going into this, because I just wasted 15 minutes on CBS.com, verifying what I already knew. I can’t stand the CBS Television Network. To me, it represents pretty much everything that is wrong with the mixture of art and entertainment that truly good TV represents to me. I will say off the bat– I don’t watch any CBS programming, though I have seen a number of their popular primetime shows once or twice each due to the fact that my parents are saps and dupe themselves into watching such unoriginal crap.
The primetime programming schedule for CBS is a minefield of crime dramas, except I’m not talking about a minefield in the real sense that you could walk and widely spread about are explosives that could unwittingly shuttle your leg off. I’m talking like the game, Minesweeper, on the hardest setting and largest board– the one where every 9 out of 10 clicks blows that yellow smiley face dude into a separate orbit. Basically, it blows. Now, generally, I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt here. I mean, who doesn’t like some good crime drama? As a genre it has produced plenty of classics in all sorts of mediums. Heck, even The Dark Knight was a crime drama at heart. Honestly though, what kind of suicide is it to just rehash the same concept over. Instead of a metropolitan homicide team, let’s switch it with an FBI detective and a mathematical savant. Instead of Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump, let’s do the same thing in a different city.. and we can throw in Morpheus from the Matrix! That’ll be cool!
I am reminded of Will Ferrell’s movie career. Now, I think Will Ferrell is awesome, and a very funny man. He has a lot of talent at what he does, but I don’t think anyone is going to deny that a lot of his movies are the same thing masked under a different costume. Forming a loosely constructed premise and plot outline then fueling a lot of the scenes with a strong influx of improv produces a lot of memorable and funny scenes, coupled with plenty of outrageousness, but I don’t think that I’m the only one who has a certain tolerance for it before it loses some of its luster, and there is no coincidence that he had a string of movies that were so highly similar to the other, just with an applied formula. Here is the thing, is it any coincidence that Anchorman is the most quoted and well-known of all of those? It was pretty much the first that truly had the Will Ferrell signature style to it. Maybe it is just better than the others, but it at least begs the question, how much of its success over the others can be attributed to the fact that it was the first to do it?– that when Anchorman came out, the style was at its peak ripeness?
Of course CBS proves me wrong. Dead wrong. Not only are there about 80 different crime drama’s in CBS’ lineup, there are 3 different CSI’s and one CSI crossover, and two NCISes (let’s not forget the fact that Survivor is hitting its bicentennial soon). To top it all off, these shows dominate the ratings. There are a lot of problems I have with all this. For one, it is just plain lazy. Why is imagination so thoroughly punished in our society? I am not saying it always is, but every time I come home at some point I have to sit through at least 5 minutes of one of these trite shows. Of course I never realize that it is a different show, but hey, these shows are all they watch so they are doing something right; exploiting (the elderly).
I think my largest grievance comes from the fact that so many great TV Shows end up overlooked and die off prematurely because by following the same cultural tendencies that music, movies and even best-selling books also follow. We are flooded with a drought– a drought of imagination. We get the same boxes in different wrapping paper every day, every week, every month, every year. You would think that they would occasionally take a risk, at least. For instance, I have never watched Dexter (I plan on it at some point), but I hear a lot about it. From what I can tell, even if I end up not liking it, it is a show that takes crime drama elements and at least incorporates some creativity. I’m not going to look this up, so hopefully I’m not blatantly wrong, but the fact that the main character plays the role of good guy while carrying many elements of a ‘bad guy’ isn’t even light years beyond what we could ever expect to see out of CBS and their plastic bubble-wrap brains, it is in an entirely different universe.
I think this is a good segue too, because I have tons of respect for a show like Dexter– even if I’ve never seen it. To me, it represents a lot of what great TV is supposed to do. It entertains for one. It takes this broad concept (I don’t want to really say genre even) and hones in on it, while adding its unique elements that give the show plenty of space to flesh out the whole premise and also develop it further. Furthermore, it introduces something a little deeper. We have these huge moral implications. You have a forensics dude who is a serial killer of criminals on the side– heck its even ironic. The complexity is almost unavoidable. There will always be various struggles, and I feel like the opportunities to occasionally make the viewer wrestle with the actions, decisions and morality of the characters in the show (specifically main character) and not have it so plainly be this concept of “a criminal did something bad, let’s figure it out, let’s make things right” — because it isn’t that simple. I mean, shoot, this type of stuff has worked in literature and theater since their beginnings.
This isn’t to say that all these other crime dramas have never done this on some level. I’ve seen enough episodes of Law and Order to remember an episode or so that does some highlighting on the fact that our justice system is far from perfect and carries many flaws, but how much room do these shows have? This brings me back to my point. I don’t think that it is necessarily TVs role to really make the viewer work on levels far beyond just watching characters and a plot unfold, because for one there is less investment into each installation in every aspect (time, writing, budget, acting, etc.) than say, film, but on the other hand it is a much more drawn out experience. Because of the stretched out nature, the complexities should be stretched out; thinner or perhaps a more shallow implementation, because of the fact that this element in media are really hard to get right, and because historically, I feel like TV has never been there so much to challenge us as viewers, but more than anything to provide us convenient outlets, escapes and other worlds we can visit for 30 to 60 minutes at a time once a week. There is still a concept of art behind it though, and it is robbery to the masses to just purely entertain; or as I said earlier, it is exploitation.
Of course, you could easily say I’m completely wrong and proven wrong on an empirical level considering how many shows that have really had a lot of balance between the average responsibilities of a TV show and something more for its audience to get involved in have tanked early. Times might be changing, but we are still under the tyranny of unwarranted success. The most financially successful movies, TV shows and music still has a great tendency to be assembly line crap (in terms of imagination, creativity and depth), and gosh, even I have a few piles of crap that I love, but this is just a joke that will always be over my head– I just don’t understand how millions of people continually support and encourage a network like CBS. They seriously have 5 1/2 versions of 2 shows.
Oh yeah– Two and a Half Men SUCKS– but at least most sitcoms these days have ditched the 20th century.