I’ve been known to complain about television. I made my own “Break Your TV” shirt, inspired after seeing a tee that said “Exhalt your new God” with stylized hands praying to an idiot box. To clarify my own throughts, and to have somewhere to point when people ask what I’ve got against the greatest American passtime, I’m going to explain myself.
Complaint 1: Commercials irritate me, both at a visceral and an intellectual level. Viscerally, I simply don’t like constant, pandering interruptions in my entertainment. I have better things to do with my time. Intellectually, I view advertising as a “tragedy of the commons” problem. Like lawyers, advertising is an overhead cost of our society. It performs a necessary role – informing the public that products are available – but every dollar spent after achieving that goal is meaningless. Given their interests, we cannot trust advertisers to provide a fair and balanced appraisal of their product. Overall, the capitalist system of competition is very efficient, but this is one of its ugly points.
Complaint 2: I think it’s unhealthy and wasteful to schedule your life around trivial entertainment. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been addicted to a show, but I know many people who go out of their way to be in front of a television at certain times.
Thanks to TiVo, there’s a way to solve these first two problems. I wonder what long-term effect it will have on broadcasters whose primary revenue comes from advertising, but for now it makes watching television a less onerous task. It doesn’t wholly placate me, though.
Complaint 3: The producers of televised material have a conflict of interests with the viewers. When we go to the movies, we want to be entertained. The creators of movies share our goal – they want to entertain us so we’ll recommend the movie to our friends, see other movies by the same creators, and maybe even buy merchandise related to the movie. Likewise, when we watch TV, we want to be entertained. But, the goal of television producers is subtly and critically different – they want us to keep watching. As long as we sit through the commercial breaks and come back next week, they’ve done their job. They can, and sometimes do keep us coming back by providing good entertainment. But, they also use frustrating cliffhangers and stretch story archs far beyond their limits. We get watered down creative work because a season requires a certain number of episodes, whether there’s a story worth telling or not. We get second- and third-string writers, who may not care one whit about the characters, because the creators and main writers are overworked, or have simply decided to move on. Shows don’t end when their story has been told – they end when the ratings fall, resulting in truncated masterpieces and zombies of shows that don’t know when to die.
So, I’m not much of a television fan. If you hear me talking about how I love a particular show, I almost certainly watch it on DVD.
