The Idiot Box

I have to admit, I love television. Sure, there's lots of crap on television, but that would seem to be the nature of any medium so broadly and deeply embraced by a culture. There are something like 1 1/2 billion TVs in the world, yet one can still find plenty of people who claim to not watch television; I know people who don't even have one. I guess they spend a lot of time reading, which I also love to do.

I watch television more or less daily. I embrace it. Kim watches, but gets sick of it after a couple hours. Sure, it's a time suck. I'm just someone who is able to keep watching and watching. Not just TV shows, of course, but a lot of movies. To me, it's kinda all the same thing.

Anyway, here's a short list of what I think are the best shows I've ever seen:

Twin Peaks
Max Headroom
The Office (BBC)
The Wire
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The Singing Detective
Sesame Street
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Twin Peaks, actually, is one of my favorite - what would you call the category into which both TV and movies fall? Moving image narrative? And why isn't Max Headroom available on DVD? I'm trying to track it down. I imagine a lot of people, if they remember Max at all, think of the Coke pitchman, not the TV show. But the show was great, a cyberpunk TV show right around the time cyberpunk was actually a thing, instead of years later. Truly innovative and ahead of its time.

I truly love the American Office, too, it's like great TV comfort food, but it's nothing compared to the British version, which is sheer genius, moment-to-moment, from start to finish. Of course, it's maybe easier to do that when you have a total of 12 regular episodes and a long special episode. Still, the compromises and simplifications made for American viewers (thumb-sucking, unsophisticated Yanks that we are) keep our version from being truly great. Why is British TV often so much funnier (or more serious) and sharper than our own?

I don't think TV makes people dumb; a lot of TV, though, is made for the lowest common denominator and is obviously little more than an advertising delivery vehicle. You could say that people make TV dumb. With some shows, it's a bit difficult to articulate what makes them popular or effective, other than that people watch them, and it's easy to become cynical. But then you get a show like The Wire, which really shows what the medium can do - you know, the Dickensian aspect, the duration, the focus, the superb writing and character development, the long arcs - and one finds that we're really in a golden age of this medium: The Sopranos, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica (at least the first two seasons), Mad Men, 30 Rock and many more. American TV is so much stronger and more interesting as an art form than American film these days...

Makes me want to make television for a living which, actually, I do already. But, you know, different stuff.