So some guy at Salon wrote a piece saying that we aren’t in a Golden Age of TV. And if you do a little Twitter search for that link you find that the people were not pleased.
Seriously, what has happened to our species where we are in a position to worry about this stuff? Like what kind of hellish sour spot have we found ourselves where we’re comfortable enough that this is the source of our worry but insane enough that it actually hurts? Who cares if there’s a golden age of TV? It is a question totally devoid of meaning. There is nothing there. The term “Golden Age of Television” has as much content as “Doritos makes every party snacktacular!” It’s a vague idea, discussed without specificity or precision, about a formless period that has no defined beginning or end, which includes some shows and not others thanks entirely the whims of whoever is writing the latest shithouse think piece, is based 100% on purely subjective distinctions, and was ginned up by bloggers looking for a good peg to grab a few precious pageviews. Getting animated about whether there’s a golden age of television is like putting money on the sausage race at Miller Park. It’s investment in a spectacle that exists for no real reason.
What must it be like in our brains now that we have enough time and mental energy to care about this? I mean, really. Do you guys find that there’s just a lot of space up there for new anxieties? Like, do you walk down the street during the day and say to yourself, my mind isn’t sufficiently filled with thinking about my job and my relationship and my impending demise and that dickhole Brian from accounting and my bad knee and the perpetually broken thing on my car and how that joke I told yesterday to the cool dad at the park totally didn’t go over and when is that rebate from Verizon gonna come, it’s kind of lonely up there in my mind really, I need some phony complaints about some equally phony laurel that people kind of started handing around to each other because, when you really think about it, if there’s one group that doesn’t get celebrated enough in our society, it’s people in Hollywood? (Do adults talk about “ages”? When they aren’t, like, writing a book about Suleiman, or whatever? Do you find yourself thinking, “you know when it comes to washing machines this is really the Just Alright Age”?) I can give you some of my worries, if you find yourself so oppressed by boring mental serenity and lack of self-destructive anxieties that you’d appreciate a few extra reasons to really give your mind a piece of itself. And boy, do I have little to really worry about in this life.
Some people don’t like the show you love where the gnome gets raped in the Murky Forest by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the sons of the deposed Baron of Whateverthefuck. That’s life. Somebody disputed the idea of the golden age of TV, a concept with all the methodological rigor of a Time magazine spread about how women nest and men hunt. Find the courage to carry on. If your brain’s agenda for the day is so empty you find it necessary to fill it with anguish about this nonsense, consider investigating the back catalog of Mallard Fillmore or really getting into Worldstar. Holy moly.
Seriously, you guys. I can’t even deal right now.
Update:
Emailer Sean: “But you’re getting yourself as riled up about people getting riled up about that article! You’re just the same!”
I think perhaps it’s not the article’s argument that this is not a golden age of TV that is riling people up so much as the argument that watching and writing about television is not meaningful political action. Perhaps people whose activism takes the form of writing about television are threatened by this idea..
I will fight to the death in any debate about the snacktacularness of Doritos past and present.
I may not agree about the snacktacularness of Doritos, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to fight to the death to defend it.
Why? Because bloggers need shit to blog about, is my guess. Most aspects of human culture have little that most mammalian life would regard as essential about them. Why not TV Golden Ages? Snits come in many forms.
“This is the Golden Age of television because [insert title of show you really like]!”
“This is not the Golden Age of television because [insert title of show you really hate]!”
Repeat ad infinitum.
Exaaaaaaaactly!
Zaitchik’s piece is actually very good & worhtwhile, though. And aesthetic evaluation was not at all his point; he says this explicitly and repeatedly.
Indeed. I really need to make a tag for my posts called Mostly Foolin’.
If you ask me the Golden Age of Television was before it was invented.
Yours,
Ned Ludd
I see there’s a pingback to this from LGM. Got to hand it to them, they sure know how to build a winning political coalition. They’ll just keep ridiculing Ralph Nader and Freddie DeBoer until the arc of the moral universe finally bends in the correct direction.
Indeed!
Don’t forget the unemployed law school graduates!