A note on post-Reality TV

"Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles"
                                              -Dostoevysky.

First of all I should disclose that I don't watch much television. In fact I have a better memory of what was on 20 years ago (when I was five) than what is slated to air this week. But I do read a little bit.

Pre-Reality TV, as we know, was generally engineered as more or less a living dream of the ideal. Then came Survivor. Reality TV was a sheltered, insulated peek at the suffering and hardships of others (however engineered and contrived that all was), at a worse--and in one subgenre's case more extreme reality than one's own. Oh the joy in seeing others on some dangerous locale or some strife-ridden community residence or other! Oh, what riveting articulation the contestants/participants/actors have in the private (scripted?) interviews!

Post-Reality TV is smarter and more sophisticated than any of that--finally we are faced with unlikable characters who live in less-than-ideal situations rife with conflict. HBO, having recognized the death of the made-for-TV film brought irony, satire, and near-cinematic production values to serial television, and there (HBO) the major networks turned for the consciously fake uber-real.

The show in question for this discussion has received its due in awards, critical acclaim, and mid-to-highbrow press buzz. It is called Arrested Development--[Disclaimer]: I am in no way using this outlet as another lefty/progressive/artsy venue to win the show more viewers; it's important to note the fact that the show has been warmly welcomed, in fact obsessed over, by mainstream and alternative media--and stars, among others, David Cross, Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, and Jeffery Tambor.

Very quick summary of the show's premise and stylistic hobbies: A rich family is no longer rich once the patriarch is abducted by the SEC (which happens in the pilot), and one of four siblings goes against his better judgment to get his spoiled family back on its feet. This is not one of those put-a-rich-ineffectual-bitch-in-a-coal-
mine-and-see-what-happens type of thing. Most of the characters continue to live their privileged lives as though nothing has changed, and in the Orange County, California bubble that is the show's setting are evidently able to overcome their new economic and legal problems with no more stressed than that of bad customer service. Most of this is documented in a mock-verite style. There are, graciously, no mockumentary-style private interviews.

Bateman, as most of the fans know, starred on the enjoyable-for-this-viewer-in-1988- The Hogan Family (or Valerie's Family, or Valerie--before the producers fired actress Valerie Harper, whoever she was, and took in the Wheat Thins woman in her place). The Hogan Family was not critically praised, and it was actually pretty bad. As a child I taped a few episodes and they did not stand the test of multiple viewings, not even for a 9-year-old. David Cross as we know is a veteran televisual outlaw, who began his career as a writer for the Ben Stiller show before co-creating an unorthodox sketch comedy show for the above-mentioned premium network. Portia de Rossi is an attractive and charismatic former model, and a lesbian involved with Ellen DeGeneres. Jeffrey Tambor is a deadpan veteran of postmodern television, remembered by this viewer for playing the only interesting character on Larry Sanders.

The ratings have been paltry since the beginning, and no amount of awards or critical gushing appears able to change that. But the cult of fans the show does have are an obsessive bunch indeed. When Fox announced near the end of last year that it planned to cancel the show, and was reducing its episode order, the blog-centered uproar of protest and campaigns to keep the show on air was a veritable crusade. Suddenly, friends--of whose identity as a television viewer I was unaware--are joining the march. It began with post after re-post, which led to chain mail, which led to petitions, which led to...t-shirts? Buttons? I haven't seen any yet, but does a media-age crusade against the media itself need t-shirts?

The grown sophistication of televisual media over the past fifteen years is well known. Advertising is insanely smarter than it was in the '80s. Every useful bit of subculture, every important or potentially important socio-political moment has been co-opted in service of hip, irony-laden commercials that have found even the best of us compelled to discuss their cultural ingenuity amongst one another. Ron Howard has done pretty much the same thing with Arrested Development, and it's worked. I had no idea the guy was so smart.

Consider that much known. The debate from this point, among those of us who don't rely on television for primary (if any) edification and/or entertainment, concerns whether or not the above phenomenon matters, and if so, whether or not it's bad. I should have disclosed earlier that I have in fact seen many episodes of the show, and do in fact enjoy it. The main reason I got started writing this is that I realized I as I was watching it (on DVD, in unhealthy succession) that the time for me to turn it off to go "READ A BOOK," as the posters said so charmingly in the libraries of my childhood, had passed. Say it doesn't matter--it's just television. And that no matter what airs out there the masses will sit passively by. But say it does matter; would those of us media-savvy types who believe we have good taste prefer to see the dumbest, most un-'real' programming, only to confirm our suspicions? Or do we let ourselves take delight--as so many do--in the one or two shows that come along each decade which test the limits of the form, and impress the best of us with their sophisticated wit? Suddenly this is all too much for me. I need a break. I'm in just the kind of mood the producers of these shows depend on.

-Dave