Allison Shoemaker - How TV Can Make You Smarter

Text copyright 2020 by Allison Shoemaker.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Shoemaker, Allison, author.
Title: How TV can make you smarter / Allison Shoemaker.
Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020005664 | ISBN 9781452171784 (hardcover); ISBN 9781797203492 (epub, mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Television programs--United States. | Television programs--Social aspects--United States.
Classification: LCC PN1992.3.U5 S5455 2020 | DDC 791.45/ 70973--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005664

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Youve done it. You picked up this book. You have, at least tentatively, accepted the premise emblazoned across its cover. You have allowed for the possibility that one of the great myths of the age is false: that what is ubiquitous, or, worse still, popular, must be inherently bad for you. Congratulations! The energy you might have wasted on feeling guilty about what you like, judging yourself for how you spend your time, or denying yourself what would bring your mind or heart pleasure, you can instead spend on other things. Go for a walk. Listen to music. Make yourself a nice sandwich. Or go ahead and do what, according to Nielsen, 95 percent of US households do from time to time: Watch some television.

The idea that TV rots your brain is almost as old as the medium itself. When Newton N. Minow, a chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by President Kennedy, addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, he did exactly what a lot of people do nowadays: He said that sure, there were good programsimportant onesbut that TV was, on the whole, a wasteland. (Its commonly called the Wasteland Speech.) But in his remarks, Minow praised the great live dramas of the 1950s, as well as contemporaneous shows like Rod Serlings The Twilight Zone, which remains one of TVs finest accomplishments. When television is good, he said, nothingnot the theater, not the magazines or newspapersnothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.

Minow recognized the potential for greatness and for corruption alike in television, praising trailblazers like Serling even as he decried laziness, irresponsibility, and dishonesty. But if ABCs Work It, a particularly lousy sitcom, were a novel, we would never use it as an excuse to declare all fiction worthless. Nor were Minows concerns limited to quality. He was focused on community responsibility and the advancement of education and culture and feared the accessibility of televisionabout the harm that could come from every family having a wasteland at their fingertips, a universe of detergent commercials and paint-by-numbers comedies. But if the bad stuff is a click away, then so is all the brilliance, and never has that been more true than now: If you have a TV, or a computer, or a phone for crying out loud, you have access to some of the greatest art of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. So do countless others. That means that youre equipped to discuss, debate, and dissect what comes before you with an ease that Minow could hardly have imagined. Wheels turn. Synapses fire. Opinions change. The mind engages, stays engaged, and once that happens, what do you know: TV can, and will, make you smarter.

You can choose to see a wasteland for one, or a wonderland for many. The latter puts your brain to far better useand its more fun, too.

In days gone by, television was a pretty straightforward proposition. If someone was watching TV, it meant they had their family set tuned to one of the major networks. On the screen would be a show: I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, Moonlighting. That show would be interspersed with advertisements, sold by the networks. Eventually, if you had a VCR, you could set things up to tape your favorite shows while you were out.

Times have changed. Yes, there are still commercials, but not always, and if you missed The Sopranos or Breaking Bad the first time around, you can now head straight over to On Demand, a DVD set, or one of many streaming services to catch up. Netflix gradually transformed from the place that sent you DVDs of The West Wing through the mail to the home of House of Cards, its first original series. Now, with the rise of the Streaming Wars, Netflixs playing field grows increasingly crowded. HBO and other premium cable services remain dominant, but basic cable networks like FX and AMC have also had wild successes. Sometimes the watercooler show of the moment is still broadcast on a major network (like NBCs This Is Us) or one of those cable titans (HBOs Game of Thrones, FXs Atlanta); sometimes it comes from a more unexpected corner, like BBC America (Killing Eve), Pop (Schitts Creek), or the invaluable PBS (Downton Abbey). Its an ever-changing world.

Yet the most fundamental part of the DNA of TV remains unchanged. Put most simply, a television show is any program created for and released by a network, be it broadcast, cable, streaming, or another such source. There are exceptions, but by and large, television is a place you head to for serialized storytelling: a larger story made up of smaller stories, viewed in sequence. That category excludes some major players: event programs, such as concerts, awards shows, and other such programs, as well as made-for-television movies, talk and variety shows, and the mighty anthology show (like The Twilight Zone). But the narrative series reigns supreme.

Living in a post-Sopranos world means being able to champion great television shows to others without much risk of that person rolling their eyes and writing off the medium as a whole. Yet there remains an undercurrent of defensiveness to the way that some talk and write about television. One of the most common refrains, ostensibly intended as praise, is the claim that such-and-such prestigious television show is really more of a six-hour movieor a ten-hour movie, or, in the case of the creators of Game of Thrones, a seventy-three-hour movie. This doesnt mean the show in question is structured like a movie. Its a remark intended to do one of two things (and sometimes both). First, its a signal that the show in question is meant to be better than TVa film, a novel, something artistically and intellectually superior to its tawdry, just-TV brethren. Its also meant to suggest that the series can only accurately be judged as a whole, with individual segments somehow above criticism because the ending has yet to be seen.