Smarter TV

It’s sadly true — a lot of TV from my past, tinged in golden hue by memory, is just not that good. The plots are cliche (and were then, too), the laugh lines forced, and the focus on “done in one” means any character development and metaplot is next to nil.

Now, some of it remains fun to watch, either from nostalgic reasons (old Star Trek eps) or because it’s just solidly written mini-dramas (Perry Mason comes to mind, as does Mission: Impossible) or other creative efforts. But those are the exceptions — much of TV from the 70s and 80s is nearly unwatchable today, even if it was a personal favorite. As Steven Johnson writes:

For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ”masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ”24” episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ”24,” you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ”24,” you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships.

This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all.

Johnson talks about advances in threaded plots (starting with Hill Street Blues, which was criticized at the time for being too complex, but now advanced greatly beyond even that) and the introduction of intentional confusion (not explaining everything that’s going on).

(And, to be perfectly honest, even as my own beloved B5 in the mid-90s was a ground-breaking quantum leap in complexity and demands on the viewer beyond the Star Trek franchise or Buck Rogers or the original Battlestar Galactica, it still comes off as relatively straightforward compared to, say, today’s Battlestar Galactica.)

Johnson also notes that our denegrating of shows today based on what we remember of shows past is misleading. We tend to focus on the ones we really liked and thought were good, ignoring the “90% of everything is crap” factor (a similar parallel can be made in discussing classical music — it’s not that everyone back then was a Mozart or a Beethoven, but the folks who weren’t — the Salieris and the even lesser lights — simply aren’t remembered today or their music played). The result? Even though we still have junk (Joe Millionaire or Survivor), it’s better junk, more demanding of its audience, than the junk we had back then (Battle of the Network Stars).

The result is not only shows that are better, but that are better for you, more engaging and mentally challenging, less of a “glass teat” or “boob tube.”

The quickest way to appreciate the Sleeper Curve’s cognitive training is to sit down and watch a few hours of hit programming from the late 70’s on Nick at Nite or the SOAPnet channel or on DVD. The modern viewer who watches a show like ”Dallas” today will be bored by the content — not just because the show is less salacious than today’s soap operas (which it is by a small margin) but also because the show contains far less information in each scene, despite the fact that its soap-opera structure made it one of the most complicated narratives on television in its prime. With ”Dallas,” the modern viewer doesn’t have to think to make sense of what’s going on, and not having to think is boring. Many recent hit shows — ”24,” ”Survivor,” ”The Sopranos,” ”Alias,” ”Lost,” ”The Simpsons,” ”E.R.” — take the opposite approach, layering each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you’re exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.

Of course, the entertainment industry isn’t increasing the cognitive complexity of its products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there’s money to be made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there’s a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like ”Lost” or ”Alias” is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars. Finally, interactive games have trained a new generation of media consumers to probe complex environments and to think on their feet, and that gamer audience has now come to expect the same challenges from their television shows. In the end, the Sleeper Curve tells us something about the human mind. It may be drawn toward the sensational where content is concerned — sex does sell, after all. But the mind also likes to be challenged; there’s real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system.

In many ways, this is the Golden Age of TV.

(via Les and George)