It’s overload. I am inundated. I don’t know how much I can take before saturation bullies me either into submission or withdrawal.
Television.
It’s everywhere. It’s too much content.
Let me back up. I am beta testing Hulu. Me and, probably, millions of others. We’re not special. I know that. But, truth be told, I wanted to see how the convergence, rather, this version of convergence might work. And, you know what? It isn’t bad. I mean, I would actually watch the commercial breaks, because there’s just one and it isn’t long. But I am sure that no one is being adequately compensated for that but huzzah to the networks for making it impossible for me to fast forward through the ads. That’s what DVRs should have been doing all along. Make it so you can’t fast forward….or something…….
Anyway, the trouble is….well, I’m gonna back up again.
A couple years ago I confided to a friend that, gosh darnit, 60gig of music is just way too much to have at my disposal. I could never settle on one song. I would fast forward incessantly, waiting for that perfect harmonic convergence of desirability and singability. It would never happen and by the time I would arrive at my destination I would have heard….nothing. Not one song in it’s entirety. It’s too much choice. To much power.
I don’t think we want that much control over what entertains us. Too many quick options means we don’t get caught up in anything. At least I don’t. I find it hard to stick through a 5 page article in Time. If they don’t wrap it up in 1000 words or so, I’m lost. Forget Harper’s or The New Yorker. No patience. I found myself convinced that I could decipher what scenes in the interminably long and boring second season of Heroes were superfluous and fast forwarded accordingly. You know what? I was right. A 42 minute Heroes episode was over in less than 20 for me. Blammo.
I watch movies and tv shows on my ipod at the gym. A movie gets broken up into two or more workouts. It’s piecemeal.
And I have too many options, as I said. Lemme give you an example:
I have three televisions in my house. One in the living room that has a dual mode DVR and records mostly shows that Beth and I like to watch together. One in the kitchen that is just stuff I like to watch when I am cooking or writing or surfing. The bedroom television is almost too small to be watched and we don’t really do that anyway. But the Tivo is connected to a wireless network adapter that can send the recorded programs to my macbook and can then be dispersed to my ipod for viewing at said gym. We are also subscribers to Netflix, to whom I am grateful for now I have seen all of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and consider myself to have more than a passing understanding and knowledge of the works of one Judd Apatow. Three years after I sat next to him in a restaurant after I appeared with his wife in a show.
And now there’s Hulu.
It’s just too much. At first I thought it was just that the quality cant keep up with the tech and availability but that’s not true. As I write this I am 2/3 the way through the Hill Street Blues Pilot. I watched WKRP (which sucked for lack of licensed music). I saw the Arrested Development pilot. And the unaired Lost in Space pilot.
But I never saw any of them in one sitting. It’s all piecemeal. So none of them have an impact. They are all just noise. Clutter. Which makes me sad since I think that television far outweighs, pound for pound, film as a visual storytelling medium. The reasons are too numerous to mention. But I think I am right. There is qualitatively more resounding work in television that even 20 years hence still has resonance. The same can’t be said of film. Pound for pound.
And don’t get me started on videogames. If there are only 7 basic stories told over and over since the greeks wrote them down, in the videogame world there are basically three and they don’t even change except for graphics. They are a neat little pastime but they are as disposable as a used condom. Great to play with at the time, but when they are done you never want to see them again and no one really cares about your conquest.
Not so a great television show. That has impact. Chuckles the Clown? Swanee River? The Hospital in the mind of an autistic child? Edith’s attempted rape? The Lost Pilot? “To serve man, it’s a cookbook!”. Dr. Who, Star Trek, Monty Python? Resonance.
But, it’s too much. Too much choice. I can’t sit still. I’m supposed to be writing a book. How can I write a book when I can’t sit still long enough to read Time or even Everyday with Racheal Ray (don’t judge, there are good recipes in there).
I love to be told stories. Love it. It’s something we as humans love and take to from the earliest of ages. And television is the great storyteller because the characters are the same but the scenarios change. We can hold onto the people and listen or watch them go through adventures. It’s Peter Cottontail but to the nth degree.
It’s like Italo Calvino said in “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”. (A book I have never finished but have talked about for 20 years) You go into a bookstore and the unread books on the shelf call out to you (I’m paraphrasing). There’s not enough time to read them all. And you have to remind yourself what you came in for. And just buy that book.
Television is becoming like that. But when the day comes that it’s all Hulu or something like that and the list of shows, the FUCKING LIST of shows, to watch is laid out in front of you, I dare you not to collapse under the weight of too much choice.
I don’t think I’ll be able to you. I might just have to go back to reading.
post script. for the sake of full disclosure, I must admit that, even though I used to read books like a crazy kid, in the dark, unde the covers when I was supposed to be asleep, those books were novelizations of episodes of Star Trek. That’s right. When I was 8 I would READ my favorite television show and then watch it every night at 6 on WPIX. Spectre of the Gun being the only episode I read before I ever saw it. Okay, disclosure over.
For me, it was Space:1999 novelizations. And Doctor Who. I never watched the actual show until my late 30s, I read the novelizations as a kid.
Anyhow, I agree with what you say, but I am so uninvolved with broadcast TV that part of me has looked at it that way for a long, long time – I gave up cable 4 years ago, have never had HBO or Showtime . . . so I view it as a big morass of stuff that there is not time enough to access. As I’ve gotten older, my time has become more precious, I don’t waste it. Casual television viewing became synonymous with wasting time in my brain. I’m very meticulous about the shows I choose to watch (as I am with movies). This means you miss out on most things, but I think that’s good. The strong stuff does actually stick and mean something, in my experience – it’s the useless clutter that falls away.
In other words, any given work – even a New Yorker article – has to earn your attention. It has to give you a reason not to zoom through parts. It’s not our problem, it’s the problem of the creators. I think you’re watching Heroes exactly as it should be watched, if it is watched at all.