Contrary to popular belief, I think the past ten years have been “The Golden Age” of television, not the 1950s or 60s. The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 24, Entourage, among others, are better entertainment than what was produced back in the day.
I have not changed my opinion on that and I found some supporting opinions while listening to this week's Ricochet podcast (which, if you don't listen to you should, especially now that James Lileks is part of the crew.) The discussion was about the paucity of decent movies coming out of Hollywood this summer and Jonah Goldberg, a frequent guest and another reason to listen to the podcast, mentioned that while movies are a dead-end these days (I'm paraphrasing) TV keeps getting better and better. Rob Long followed with the observation that TV is the place you go to now to see interesting stories while you go to the movies to see the earth explode. That's a dramatic simplification but it's pretty much on the nose. The current dreck coming from the movie industry is for the most part aimed at children, or adults who still think like children. They are video games writ large intended for a generation that grew up on video games. To find a well-told story, these days, you turn to television. In the age of big screen hi-def TVs, that's not so bad a thing. While I miss the old movie-going experience, the anticipation and excitement we get when the lights go down, there is little reason to go if the movie stinks. Better to curl up on the couch at home in front of your big screen tv and watch a well-told story.
Jonah mentions on the podcast that Breaking Bad is the best show on TV, and he may be right. I'd heard little about the show, which recently began its third season, but what I had heard was all good so I threw the first season into my Netflix queue. My wife and I have watched the first six episodes of season one and it is excellent. At the end of episode six, the timid, mild-mannered high school teacher Walter White, stricken with inoperable lung cancer, his head newly-shaven, walks out of a confrontation with a local drug kingpin, having won. He lets out a scream of exhortation, of total release, and I think here we see the crux of what the show is about. It's not simply about a man who is trying his best to make some money for his family before he dies; it's about a man standing up and taking control of his life, a life he's never had control of before. He's always been stepped-on, ordered around, saying little, never complaining. Even the news of his cancer he takes with a certain resignation: things like this are supposed to happen to him. He's always been done to. After the confrontation and the release - and we see it building in him from episode to episode - he is now the one in charge, the one who'll be doing the ordering around. And he likes it. The change we see in Walter White seems to me the essence of good story-telling. It's not simply the action on the screen. It's the internal motivations and desires of the characters that cause the action on the screen. That's a big part of what the movies have forgot. Technological development has replaced character development.
So, once again, with Breaking Bad, television has come through where the movies fail. I think we'll continue to see the steady migration of well-told stories over to tv and also a change of some sort in Hollywood among actors. Whereas once movie actors would never consider television - it was too small-time, and it was an indicator that your time on the big-screen was over - more and more we will see the best actors turning towards television. They'll follow the best writers, who have already made the migration.
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