TV's golden age

The idiot box has gained some serious IQ points in the last decade. So let us behold: Television as fulfilling as anything at your local multiplex.

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: Crash, The Sopranos, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, Arts & Entertainment Features

(From left): Kiefer Sutherland, Sonja Sohn, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Ealy and Evangeline Lilly.

Aug. 21, 2006 | Remember the good old days, when TV was the favorite whipping post of the cultural intelligentsia? When we bemoaned how "television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity" (Malcolm Muggeridge)? When we tsk-tsked that the boob tube "tells a story in a way that requires no imagination; the picture on the screen and the sound provide all we need to know -- there is nothing to fill in" (Witold Rybczynski)? How it was really just an idiot box with "the bland leading the bland" (Murray Schumach)?

TV even turned Pauline Kael, with her populist appreciation of the guiltiest of trash pleasures, into a bit of a snob. "Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose -- selling -- that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise," Kael wrote in "Movies on Television" in 1968. "We almost never think of calling a television show 'beautiful,' or even of complaining about the absence of beauty, because we take it for granted that television operates without beauty."

We'll never know what Kael would say about the "Narm" episode of "Six Feet Under" or the tense aftermath of nuclear annihilation on "Battlestar Galactica," but we do know this: Television has become a more reliably fulfilling and commercially uncompromised medium than film. This is largely due to the rise, in the last decade, of the serial drama, with its season-long arcs, slow-simmering character development, and diverse permutations, all of which have allowed TV writers more creative range than ever before. Instead of concise, often formulaic, self-contained episodes, we're treated to rich, complexly plotted stories about tortured Mafia families, soulful Muslim CIA agents and intergalactic spirituality crises that we end up caring deeply about.

Beginning with shows like "Hill Street Blues," "NYPD Blue" and "ER," which experimented with developing characters over the course of a season or several seasons, and peaking with "The Sopranos," which dedicated its creative muscle as much to character study as it did to the plot, TV writers have slowly been redefining the modern drama and pulling in viewers like never before. Finally, "24" introduced the suspense-driven series, in which each episode -- and sometimes each act -- ended with a cliffhanger. Today's most popular dramas, and many of the upcoming pilots, blend these elaborate, nail-biting stories with artful character studies and meticulous editing, a combination that has done nothing short of revolutionize the television-watching experience.

And while, of course, filmmaking has been influenced by the monetary interests of studios since day one, and television has always aspired to be more than just a means of selling laundry detergent, the latter medium suddenly feels much less compromised than the former. While Kael may have been accurate in her assessment that "when our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box," the mitigating agent of TiVo, along with commercial-free premium cable channels, have rendered the interruptions of advertising less egregious than they've ever been.

Meanwhile, most movies are preceded by five or 10 minutes of commercials before the previews even begin, and are positively littered with product placements. As Charles Taylor argued, the marketing machine behind big releases has undermined the quality of moviemaking considerably, with studios focusing on "increasing the size of the product, the size of the hype, and, of course, the size of the process -- all the while reducing the time anyone has to savor or respond to what they're putting out."

But since commercialism will always pollute both media to a certain extent, let's consider some of the most dramatically taut, unforgettable scenes from "Brokeback Mountain," "The Constant Gardener" and "Million Dollar Baby," and then recall some of the very best scenes from "Six Feet Under," "The Wire" and "Deadwood." Did that final, plaintively poetic scene in "Brokeback" cause you to ponder the constraints of mortality more than those final, flash-forward scenes of "Six Feet Under"? Did Hillary Swank's boxer death in "Million Dollar Baby" really mean more than the Shakespearean murder of Frank Sobotka in season 2 of "The Wire"? Were you really more engaged by the foggy political games of "The Constant Gardener" than those in "Deadwood"? Really?

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