Is Even Good TV for Dummies?

I read Liel Leibovitz’s recent article in Tablet, a magazine that even a goy like me can enjoy, provocatively titled “TV is for Dummies.” His basic thesis I am inclined to agree with: the great novels are more satisfying and intelligent than today’s great television. As a great lover of the great novel, and a great lamenter of the fact that people watch Two and a Half Men and whatever the show about physicists hanging out with a hot blonde is called, as well as 34 iterations of CSI and other acronym-based franchises, it is self-evident to me that Dostoevsky beats Chuck Lorre. But as I read on and reflected I realized that I didn’t agree with Leibovitz overall, and the examples he used of TV shows inferior to the novel displayed a lack of actual engagement with these shows.

Leibovitz assures the reader that he is fine with the high estimation of many of the modern prestige television shows, but that he loses patience when the contemporary TV proselyte utters what he calls “the Phrase”: “TV is so good now that it’s just as great as our great novels. Maybe even better!” First of all, I am not sure who has ever uttered that phrase seriously. I know lots of people who love these shows, but I have never heard anyone compare Mad Men to Middlemarch. I myself am a hopeless addict of many of the modern shows Leibovitz namedrops here, but I have never entertained the thought that they are better somehow than the great novels of the past. The new shows are certainly better than most anything that came on TV before The Sopranos put television on a trajectory to actually be more interesting than movies, but they are not great art like War and Peace or David Copperfield.

But television shows are a different medium altogether than the book and it is therefore not possible to compare the two side by side. It is like comparing painting to epic poetry. Leibovitz praises what masters such as Henry James can do with different perspectives and word choice and accuses television of not having the same power, but his critique is merely a fancier way of saying books are written on paper and television uses live action and spoken words. A kinetic experience such as television will of necessity be different than the static book-reading experience.

Moreover, what serialized television allows that comparable mediums like film do not is a chance to slow the pace down and let things happen at a cadence truer to life. So when Leibovitz writes “(i)n television narrative, any television narrative, the commandments are few and simple: Something must always be happening, for otherwise there would be little reason to tune in next week; and whatever’s happening must happen on screen, for this is a visual medium, and a shot of Walter White brooding in his kitchen isn’t quite as gratifying as a shot of Walter White shooting some guy in the head” he is ignoring the way in which the multi-episode structure of a show like Breaking Bad allows us to see Walter White brooding in his kitchen, which we often do see. In fact, we see Walter White brooding far more often than we see him shooting someone in the head, something which makes one question if Leibovitz was merely beginning from ignorance in his jeremiad against prestige TV. 

This slower pace is what makes the sudden and stark violence of the show all the more affecting—it is set against the backdrop of a much slower and far more human experience than the typical action movie with its ten minutes of beginning exposition and hour and a half of violence. In other words, the fact that there are 13-16 episodes in a season of one of these shows and they therefore get 585 – 720 minutes of run time compared to the 100 – 120 minutes of a movie allows them, despite the differences in medium, to more closely resemble the muted structure of a novel.

Another quibble I have with this article is a fallacy I will call reductio ad Dostoevskyum. If Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, is not an intellectual and storytelling heir and equal to Fyodor Dostoevsky than current television is for the people Neil Postman warned us about in Amusing Ourselves to Death. (A similar fallacy would be, in conversations about the dire straits of contemporary Christian music, reductio ad Bachum, in which modern musicians are berated for not being equivalent to the quintessential musical genius.) Listen, I am reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot right now, and it is incredibly brilliant. It is difficult, packed with philosophy and history and theology, incredibly slow-moving at times, and filled with such a list of characters (all of whom have three or four nicknames, Christian names, or last names they are referred to as at different times) that you really do have to make a list to keep everyone separate. But Dostoevsky is freaking Dostoevsky. An unparalleled genius. A man so amazing and with such a rich life and a catalogue of works of such depth that Joseph Frank of Stanford wrote a five volume biography of the man. Of course Vince Gilligan or Matthew Weiner is not Dostoevsky, but whoever was before him and whoever will be again?

I have my own problems with the state of contemporary television, but part of me wishes we could all get along—the TV lovers and the TV haters. Because, really, most of the people who watch Breaking Bad or Mad Men or The Americans are also people inclined to read a book and not really the people you need to encourage to pick up a copy of Dickens. You can tell by all of the people and outlets who cover those shows as compared to all of the critical analyses of, say, CSI: Omaha. And maybe it is a bit silly to imbue television shows with all of the meaning and creepy level of addiction that some people do, but there is nothing wrong at the same time with a little entertainment. You can’t read Henry James all of the time (and who in the hell would want to?).   

Commonplacing: Williams on Dostoevsky, 2

Not having much in the way of original thinking lately, I am allowing others to do it for me. Another gem from the Dostoevsky book I am working through (slowly): 

"What [Dostoevksy] does in Karamazov is not to demonstrate that it is possible to imagine a life so integrated and transparent that the credibility of faith becomes unassailable; it is simply to show that faith moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself, not by adjusting its doctrinal content (the error of theological liberalism, with which Dostoevsky had no patience) but by the relentless stripping away from faith of egotistical or triumphalistic expectations. The credibility of faith is in its freedom to let itself be judged and to grow."

In our conversations about faith recently, Clara and I have joked about how much we had figured out about God and Christianity when we were 19. I had it down. I knew how God worked, knew how this world worked--there was an almost mathematical simplicity to the whole thing. Now, I feel as if I hardly know a thing. The faith is still there, but the proud assurance of my total grasp of it is gone. And I don't think this is a bad thing; I don't lament the loss. Over the years, I have found that I am far worse and Christ far greater than I ever could have imagined then. I have also found this glorious world to be far more complicated and the people who walk about on it far more confusing, interesting, beautiful, and fallen than I could have known then. And that, I think, is growth.

Commonplacing: Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky

Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury, basically the Anglican pope, and he is a man that I admire very much, a man attempting in his own delicate way to restrain the Anglican church from a headlong fall into irreligious liberalism. He is also a world-class scholar, reflecting the old adage of the Puritans that the ministers of a congregation be the "best and brightest" in the parish, an adage that has fallen into hard times recently. Dr. Williams wrote a book about Dostoevsky, perhaps my favorite writer of all time, a few years ago for a series sponsored by Baylor University Press, called The Making of the Christian Imagination. The other titles in the series also have me salivating and my wife slightly lamenting my near obsessive love of books. I started reading the Dostoevsky book last night and this is what I encountered on the first page:

"The world we inhabit as readers of his novels is one in which the question of what human beings owe to each other--the question standing behind all these critical contemporary issues--is left painfully and shockingly open, and there seems to be no obvious place to stand from where we can construct a clear moral landscape. Yet at the same time, the novels insistently and unashamedly press home the question of what else might be possible if we--characters and readers--saw the world in another light, the light provided by faith. The novels ask us, in effect, whether we can imagine a human community of language and feeling in which, even if we were incapable of fully realizing it, we knew what was due to each other; whether we could imagine living in the consciousness of a solidity or depth in each other which no amount of failure, suffering, or desolation could eradicate. But in order to put such a challenge, the novels have to invite us to imagine precisely those extremes of failure, suffering, and desolation."

This encapsulates the movement of Dostoevsky's novels, at least the four that I have read, so well. We tend to parcel Dostoevsky out, read him in chunks. The Grand Inquisitor scene from The Brothers Karamazov is routinely excerpted as if it was meant to stand on its own. As if it was not a small part of a larger trajectory. But Dostoevsky never showed us a simple truth, because truth is not simple. It is hidden, yet real, in the interactions and dialogue that shape the world he conjures. And at its heart, is the Christian faith.