The man behind Filboyink blog wrote to us regarding Eric Scheske's review of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. He raises some good points that challenge the assertion that TV entertainment is getting smarter (better, more sophisticated, whatever):
First off, the real golden age of actually being entertained and learning from a TV drama came during the late fifties-early sixties. It was mostly embodied in two shows that proved too deep and controversial for the advertisers: The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
The former proved to be just too darn Orwellian for the Madison Avenue types, with all its predictions of just how many ways humanity could be counted on to shoot itself in the foot if we blindly followed our leaders. The ironic twists were particularly dazzling in the scripts Serling himself penned, but the great part was that one didn't have to be capable of appreciating the more subtle elements to get the big picture. The subtext consistently illuminated the folly of reveling in our supposed modernity, and how we become ever more blind to the danger inherent in denying our essential humanness.
Hitch, with his black sense of the macabre, exposed the American penchant for trying to get something for nothing, usually by way of some sort of crime or fraud. And virtually always the guilty was caught in the end, often not by the cops, but by the flaw in the basic impossibility of consistently getting a free lunch. Again, the subtle ironies that pervaded the episodes were icing on the cake.
What Johnson uses as a base point of reference for his slice of silliness was the mindless crap that was put in place of the few shows like Rod and Als, and it was put there along side a similar dumbing down trend in the public schools. Taken together, and throw in some political or religious ideology and the joys of consumerism, and you get a crowd that would one day manage to be able to piece together serial soaps, which in effect is all Bochco's shows and stuff like The Sopranos really are. What they substitute for the big picture is the ways and means of social Darwinism. While there may be a few exceptions, the general rule is that the most brutal rises to the top of the modern American system.
