My McSweeney's Submission

About a month back McSweeney's Internet Tendency announced a contest for new columnist. I submitted an entry, but was not a winner (I can't believe it either). Since my column will never be published in McSweeney's, I figured I might as well post what I've written here for the world to see.

Description

As a child who was pretty much raised on the sweet, intoxicating glow of television, I am a little ashamed to admit I have hardly watched any television over the past five years. I’ve been too busy. Now I’m tired of being left out of the water cooler talk. But where to start? Television series are daunting, time-consuming endeavors. Catching up is almost impossible. So, I’m not going to bother watching every episode of a series. I’m just going to watch one randomly selected episode from a television series I have never seen one minute of, and judge the entire run of said series based on that one episode. I call it Random Sampling Criticism.

Example Essay

Deadwood,

Season 3, Episode 2 “I Am Not The Fine Man You Take Me For”

Going into this episode of Deadwood, the only things I knew about the series were that it is a Western (which I like) and that it is known for its excessive swearing (which I love). Judging from this decidedly limited criterion, I was expecting something in the Revisionist Western mold, the kind of Western which eschews the romantic cowboy imagery in favor of a more realistic depiction of the era. After all, you never really heard John Wayne swear. The opening credit sequence further cemented this impression as it juxtaposed images of a lone stallion, a standard image of Western romanticism, against dirty, rugged depictions of men doing hard men work, a standard image of pick-up truck commercials. I settled back into my chair ready for some good-old rough and tumble Western fun with all the fightin’ and cussin’ (and hopefully female nudity) HBO allows.

I didn’t stay settled for long. I was jostled out of my comfort the moment characters began to speak. Now, it was not the swearing that I found shocking. Swearing I was fully prepared for. Quite frankly, I was prepared for much worse. It wasn’t the coarseness of the language that surprised me. It was complexity of the language that threw me for a loop. These characters don’t just talk, they pontificate. They soliloquize. They throw out ornate poetry for small talk. The language on display here is almost baroque. I came expecting a Western by way of the gutter. What I got was a Western by way of Shakespeare (by way of the gutter). I wasn’t going to be able to sit back and enjoy the ride, I was forced to sit forward and engage the language. Damn you, Deadwood, for making me work.

Big doings are underway in the mining camp of Deadwood. The camp is in a stir as anelection approaches. The episode basically revolves around a series of power plays, be it the characters preparing their big speeches for political office or the more insidious grabs for property. The bar owner, whose name I gathered to be Al, is on edge as he prepares for an attack from the evil (I assume) landowner looking to take over his bar. Meanwhile, a woman lying dying in a hospital leaves all her property to her daughter instead of her husband. Another man buys a house to better position himself for his run for mayor. There is a real sense in the show that the political powers provided by office are not nearly as important as the powers of money, property, and cruel might. We’re in classic Western territory here as the “wild” West is slowly meeting the creeping civilization of political institutions. No matter who wins the various elections it is obvious that the real leaders of Deadwood are the people with all the money, muscle, and property.

There is a lot of stuff going on in this episode. Quite frankly, I’m not going to get into all of it. Clearly the creators of Deadwood are intent upon drawing a portrait of the entire camp. There are a number of threads moving all over the place. To describe them all would just lead to a series of “this guy did this and then this guy did that” statements. There were characters I was drawn to only because they seemed mysterious to my neophyte eyes. We meet Powers Boothe convalescing upstairs in a whorehouse, which seems a much more desirous location than a hospital. From all I could gather he was stabbed by a local pastor, which seems perfectly reasonable. Who hasn’t wanted to stab Powers Boothe at some point?

What really impressed me here were the little details, which rang true. From the doctor performing gynecological procedures with the aid of light refracted from a series of mirrors to the candidates’ speeches being met mostly with indifference, the details seemed carefully studied and thought out. While I have my doubts about the ornateness of the language – although I have a feeling it is more accurate than I first assume – everything feels legit. If I were to travel through time to the actual Deadwood, it might look an awful lot like this.

Of course, even a revisionist Western has to deliver some of the typical genre fair. We get a showdown in the saloon. Although, once the action arrives it is handled in a short brutal burst. There is no prolonged shootout at the OK Corral. The violence is not action, but only an unsavory means to an end. It also says something about the show that the ultimate showdown in the episode is more a battle of wills than pistols as the evil landowner threatens Al and eventually knocks him out.

While I find Deadwood ultimately engrossing (I may even watch the rest of the episodes one day), I do have one major quibble. Where are the horses? This is a Western. People ride horses in Westerns. That’s not even up for debate. It’s a fact. But in this Deadwood everyone walks. Everywhere. I didn’t see one person mount a valiant steed for the whole hour. They even have a horse prominently displayed in the opening credits. When the show actually starts…well, there’s not a horse to be seen. I feel like I’ve been lied to. I was under the impression there would be more horses.

Brief Descriptions of Three Additional Installments

Lost: I’ve probably heard more about Lost than any other show I’ve never seen. Smoke monster. Polar bear. Others. It all kind of sounds like a bad Dadaist exercise out of context. Maybe it would make some sense ever so slightly less out of context.

Battlestar Galactica: I seem remember the finale making quite a stir online a month or two back. I’ll tell everyone I want to get a taste of what made people so passionate about this, but in reality, I just want to see space battles, and Edward James Olmos. He’s in that, right?

Dallas: Why should I limit myself to TV I haven’t seen of recent vintage, when there are probably hundreds of shows from the past I have never seen one episode of? For almost my entire life I have been aware that someone shot J.R., but I have no idea who.

Dear Internet, Stay Off My TV

The Internet is great. We all love it. You probably wouldn’t be here reading this if you didn’t have some soft spot for the Internet. It’s a wonderful invention. Thanks to the Internet anyone with access can find and share information with anyone and everyone else. It’s really quite wonderful and frightening. Wonderful because we have almost instant access to unlimited information, insight, thought, and opinion. Frightening because most of this information is complete, utter crap, and a disturbing amount of it comes in the form of socially maladjusted teenagers with webcams.

The Internet may be the most democratic invention since Gutenberg gave us the printing press. Anyone can find any piece of information with a few simple keystrokes. Anyone can post whatever piece of ephemera his heart desires. A housewife in Kansas can post an adorable video of kittens and puppies fighting over a baby’s ice cream cone (scientifically proven to be the most adorable combination possible) and have over a million hits in a week. Anyone with a semblance of literacy can start a blog and let anyone who wanders by know what he thinks. Even I can do it. I’m doing it right now. You don’t even technically need to be literate. Do you have a webcam? Just shout your thoughts into it. It’s just as good as a blog. I guess. All this opinion and thought is out there. All of it starts from a fairly level playing field. If people like it, they watch. If people don’t, you just end up shouting nonsense into the void (like this blog). But it’s all out there, just waiting for an interested pair of eyeballs.

Of course, there is a drawback. Most of the Internet sucks. I would wager at least ninety percent of the Internet content is completely incomprehensible. Five percent is comprehensible, but terrible. Four percent (they percentage I like to think this blog occupies) is merely amateurish, but has some value. And finally there is that one percent of the Internet that is the home to professional quality well thought out, well produced content. Sifting through the Internet can be a chore. If I want to know the best way to relieve the itch of a bug bite, I don’t want to wade through thirty Yahoo answers suggesting I rub mayonnaise on it before I get to something useful (Calamine lotion, of course.). If I want more information on a movie opening this weekend, I don’t want to read the snark of a million fanboys who all seem to be auditioning to be the next Bruce Vilanch. Sometimes I just want to be able to be able to turn to media trusting that I’m going to find good professional quality writing and production.

This is where traditional media comes into play for me. I know I can open a newspaper and find professional writers writing professionally and professionally edited by professional editors (at least for the immediate future until print media becomes a quaint memory like horse drawn sleighs and cocaine in Coke). Quality control is a novel concept that eludes most of the Internet. Anything can get out on the Internet, but for, say, a television show to make it on the air it at least has to make it past the suits. Say what you will about blandness of most network TV, but even the dullest episode of Two and a Half Men is better written, produced, and acted than ninety-nine percent of the originally content on YouTube. While I love that the Internet is a place for untested talent to push the boundaries and learn on the fly, I like knowing I can turn to some traditional media outlet and see something produced to a higher standard.

This is why I find it so distressing that more and more television is sinking to the level of the Internet. It seems that in a panic television executives are trying too hard to integrate the Internet into their programming. This is most evident in news and sports programming. Think about how often CNN seems to be bringing us up to date on what people are saying on Twitter. But I don’t care what people are saying on Twitter. Really. I could care less. And if I did want to know what people are saying on Twitter, I would go to Twitter. You see when I want Internet based information and opinion I’ll go to the Internet. When I go to television news I’m expecting something better than the Internet. I want professional news reporters and experts going in-depth on a story. I don’t need to know what some kid in his dorm thinks.

One of the worse offenders is ESPN. (I may be unfair here. I just happen to be exposed to ESPN more than almost any other channel since it is usually on at work all day.) It seems as though ESPN is intent on eventually merging their website completely with their station. If you watch ESPN all day – an experiment I can’t say I’d recommend – you will see different talking heads debate the same five major topics all day with the hosts popping in to check up with the Twitter feed or to show a webcam video of some idiot Cowboys’ fan calling out Eagles’ fans in the most unentertaining fashion imaginable. Now to top it off, ESPN officially has a show that is almost completely dedicated to interacting with the Internet hordes. It’s called Sportsnation, and it might be the dumbest show on the network. The shows format is two charisma-less, chemistry devoid co-hosts debate topics and the Sportsnation (i.e. the Internet) weighs in. That’s it. Seriously, I would rather watch World’s Strongest Man re-runs (actually, I really, really miss when all ESPN2 showed was quasi sports like World’s Strongest Man and Cup Stacking all afternoon). The problem is that ESPN seems to be doubting it’s own ability to broadcast sports. And in their rush to embrace the Internet they’re letting the lowered standards of the Internet onto the Television. Look I love the Internet. I really do, but I would really appreciate it if the Internet would get off my TV.

Shalom