The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
Thanks for the quotes, Lee! I saw that article but didn't read it. i have seen part of an episode of the show. The show is acclaimed, so I've wanted to watch it, but my sons warned me that I probably wouldn't get it because there are too many rap-culture in-references. I did have a hard time following the segment I watched, but then I was just jumping into the middle of a series that has been on more than one season, without knowing anything about the characters or storyline.
I did read a few quotes from the story somewhere. Despite his talent, I think Donald Glover may be going a little over the top when he speculates that people will be writing essays about his show 20 years from now. Well ... maybe. But are people even still writing essays about The Sopranos or The Wire, which were roughly 20 years ago? Or even Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which were more recent? Not to say his show isn't or can't be as good as those classics. It's just that you'd think a show's essay shelf life would be limited to a few months after the season finale, if that.
Jeff Wrangler:
That might not even be limited to TV shows. Is anybody writing scholarly essays on BBM anymore? Seriously, I'd like to know if anybody is. I remember hearing about academics writing things in the immediate wake of the film, but is anybody doing it now?
I imagine BBM might get mentioned if someone writes an essay about Call Me By Your Name right now, but I think that would be different from being the focus of the essay/aritcle.
serious crayons:
The only exception I can think of would be students writing essays as college papers. My son wrote a paper about the philosophical themes reflected in two Cohen Brothers' movies (No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man) as a requirement for his BA in Media Arts and Culture.
A lot of people still think of essays as school papers that start with "In this essay, I will blah blah blah" and end with "So in conclusion, blah blah blah" and in between cite a bunch of academic papers and research.
But I, and most people who are familiar with literary essays (like those in The New Yorker, for example) think of them as more creative and informal pieces that people read for information, entertainment and novel ideas. And it's hard to think of a publication that would run an essay about an old TV series or movie. It would have to be really, really good and say something strikingly new. And maybe not even then.
The only exception I can think of is someone writing something about a really old but widely familiar show. Someone not long ago wrote a piece on Slate "proving" that Mike and Carol Brady had killed their dead spouses. It was silly, of course. But someone on Facebook posted it who apparently knew the essay's writer. I wrote a comment with a link to that related New Yorker short story about the couple on the plane. The writer of the Slate essay popped in to point out that story contained no proof, whereas his essay was supported with "evidence."
He did have a point. One of his pieces of evidence, for example, was that in this big happy family made of bereaved widows and grief-stricken young children, nobody ever even mentions the deceased spouses/parents. Which would be really weird, come to think of it.
And I read another essay recently about how Ross and Rachel, the lovebirds of Friends who finally get together in the last episode, were actually a terrible couple and that Ross treated Rachel like shit. She made some valid points, also with evidence. I can't imagine anybody being interested except those who watched Friends (though admittedly, that's a lot of people, including me).
Whereas I never watched much of The Brady Bunch, but certainly have seen and heard enough about it to feel pretty familiar with the setup.
Oh now I can think of one more essay about TBB that I first read a long time ago, possibly even in the New Yorker. It was called "Here's the Story" in reference to the opening words of TBB's theme song, and he connected his regular TV watching in childhood and to the similarities and differences in his real life. That one was pretty good, too.
Jeff Wrangler:
Interesting points. I was thinking narrowly of scholarly journals (on paper--if they continue to exist--or online). But then I didn't read the Glover article because when I glanced through it, it seemed that it would not interest me whatsoever. While I had heard of his series (possibly it was even in good old-fashioned TV Guide :o ) the show itself didn't interest me whatsoever.
Maybe he did have in mind articles such as the one proving that Mike and Carol Brady had murdered their previous spouses.
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on April 19, 2018, 08:57:47 am ---Nestled in the middle of the article on Glover is a recap of television's recent history that I found enlightening. "That creative breakthrough [the Sopranos] allowed shows to aim for smaller but more fervent audiences, to traffic not in quirky heroes but in flawed Everymen prone to depression and savagery."
--- End quote ---
Here's more about The Sopranos, which you specifically asked about. “The Sopranos,” which arrived on HBO in 1999, established a new benchmark, verisimilitude; in the fifth episode, we saw the Mob boss Tony Soprano strangling an informant. . . . “True Detective. . .reinvents the procedural form using a unique, layered story structure which braids multiple time periods and employs occasionally unreliable narration. “Fargo” ’s “Season One Is a Triangle,” Structure is the new Tony Danza. [In the old days of television, when four networks dominated the industry, the survival standard was clear. A show thrived by attracting a huge audience, and it attracted a huge audience by being diverting yet comforting. You just needed that actor everyone liked, Tony Danza or Ted Danson]"
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