TV that ate my brain
As someone whose job is ostensibly to think deeply and at great length about literature, I end up spending a lot of time thinking instead about why I find television so appealing and worthwhile. Among other things, there’s the bald fact that I love it and always have, but I’d like to point to two recently published pieces that illustrate the issue a little bit better than that.
The first is an op-ed by Porochista Khakpour that came out a few days ago in The New York Times. Written while working on her second novel at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, NY, Khakpour describes obsessively watching the show Thirtysomething rather than working on her book. She writes first about watching it as a child and holding it up as a symbol of American adulthood, something she actively strove for in her own life as a child of immigrants. Now, watching it again as a thirty-one year old, Khakpour feels a “stew” of mixed emotions: “it is true, it is real, it is me, it is not me, it is horrible, and I love it.” Despite the show’s obvious distance from the world she sees around her, Khakpour sees Thirtysomething’s “devotion to the naturalism of everyday details and all the microcosms of absolute, roller-coaster intimacy” as “the real reality TV, every bit as boring and dazzling as the real ‘real life.’”
The other piece I found particularly engrossing was a blog post by Josh Friedman, the showrunner of the now-defunct show The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Friedman’s piece was written as a part of io9.com’s weeklong “TV that ate my brain” coverage (for which they made an awesome banner), and he writes about the role television has had in his experiences with therapy. Not only has television created unreasonable expectations for the therapeutic process, (“I want each session to be a closed-ended episode of CSI, and in truth it’s closer to a badly written soap opera that’s been stripped of the sex and the betrayals and the evil twins and replaced with a meandering, repetitive monologue”), the television Friedman writes plays an important role for his therapist. “When she watches Sarah Conner she doesn’t seen robots and Skynet and John Connor, she sees cancer dreams and death fetishes and the psychological damage done by the absent and perfect father.”
Khakpour and Friedman are essentially enacting the same process while watching and creating television. For Khakpour, something made for mass audiences and viewed by millions of people becomes a personal object, relevant to her life in specific ways and available for study and interpretation. For Friedman, the process is much more fully integrated in his life – like Khakpour, he uses television as a tool to interpret himself, but those personal revelations are re-embedded into television and produced for mass consumption. Television shows are simultaneously accessible for an audience of millions and for an incredibly personal audience of one. Of course literature can do that same thing, and has been doing it for centuries. But the idea that television can play the same role in shaping our identities and perspective of the world is something we haven’t thought about as much.
For me, I wish I could say the show most closely equivalent in my own life to Khakpour’s Thirtysomething was Sex in the City, but I really didn’t watch it until college, when my perception of adulthood was much clearer. Alas, the show that signified adulthood and forbidden topics of discussion was that other show about young Manhattanites searching for love and success. Yes, when I was twelve, I thought life as an adult meant a life like the one on Friends. I vividly remember my babysitter debating with herself about whether it would be okay to watch it in front of me, and then hurriedly changing the channel when Ross and Rachel had sex on the floor of an exhibit in the Museum of Natural History. I remember her looking at me guiltily, as if she’d exposed me to something I was not yet ready to see. It never became something I went out of my way to watch, or anxiously looked forward to (unlike Babylon 5, to which I was passionately devoted), but whenever I happened across a rerun, I would store away ideas and vocabulary for future consumption. Rent control. Lesbian life partner. Spray-on tanning. Coffee shops. Blind dates. Being “on a break.”
Watching Friends now, it is hopelessly absurd and unreal. For one thing, apparently everyone in Manhattan is white (until Joey dates Charlie near the end, but that’s about it). The stupid jokes that come at carefully spaced intervals, the characters that quickly become caricatures, the absence of any problem that lasts more than 22 minutes – the entire sitcom format is antithetical to realism. But I remember watching it and thinking “one day I’ll live in an apartment!” So I sit now in my apartment and am glad to find people writing about television as a personal medium. It always has been for me.