2/13/05

Insomnia forced a retreat to the television Saturday night. Reading is usually more engrossing (snotty, ain’t I), so my hope was, as always, that bad tv would convince my mind and body that sleeping was better.

Checked the TV schedule. 1 am is not a particularly propitious time to camp out in front of the idiot box. It’s amazing how TNT/TBS has a rotation of mediocre movies. This time, Blade was the highlight of their weekend. Thanks but no, caught this when I lived with someone who had free-per-view.

The West Wing was on. Another smart, smart episode and a few funny gimmicks. It was a presidential debate, and President Bartlett came out swinging in a way that we’d never see in real life. He took issue with both the content and tone of typical presidential debates. How falsely polite they are, how empty most of the slogans and sound bytes are, how the key to success is to boil any program into a 10-word statement. Seems like some of the better commentary on politics can be found on The Wing—if only because more of America watches the show than reads political pundits at length.

Getting a complicated, substantive message to the people is something tremendously valuable and doesn’t happen nearly often enough. Arthur Miller was one of the few who was able to do it. John Sayles, while no Miller, tries to tell important stories and comment on the nature of life in America, but he’s only playing on and for the art house scene. Doing something that isn’t simple on broadcast television seems to be hard work.

There is something painfully unsatisfying about bad television. Even after you’ve seen it, you have a thirst that can’t be slaked. Angry, it’s only too easy to surf the channels, hoping to find something, anything, that tells a marginally interesting story and will serve a complete narrative meal.