But What If We're Wrong? Read online

  This is the world that is not there.

  Don’t Tell Me What Happens. I’m Recording It.

  Television is an art form where the relationship to technology supersedes everything else about it. It’s one realm of media where the medium is the message, without qualification. TV is not like other forms of consumer entertainment: It’s slippier and more dynamic, even when it’s dumb. We know people will always read, so we can project the future history of reading by considering the evolution of books. (Reading is a static experience.) We know music will always exist, so we can project a future history of rock ’n’ roll by placing it in context with other genres of music. The internal, physiological sensation of hearing a song today is roughly the same as it was in 1901. (The ingestion of sound is a static experience.) The machinery of cinema persistently progresses, but how we watch movies in public—and the communal role cinema occupies, particularly in regard to dating—has remained weirdly unchanged since the fifties. (Sitting in a dark theater with strangers is a static experience.) But this is not the case with television. Both collectively and individually, the experience of watching TV in 2016 already feels totally disconnected from the experience of watching TV in 1996. I doubt the current structure of television will exist in two hundred fifty years, or even in twenty-five. People will still want cheap escapism, and something will certainly satisfy that desire (in the same way television does now). But whatever that something is won’t be anything like the television of today. It might be immersive and virtual (like a Star Trekian holodeck) or it might be mobile and open-sourced (like a universal YouTube, lodged inside our retinas). But it absolutely won’t be small groups of people, sitting together in the living room, staring at a two-dimensional thirty-one-inch rectangle for thirty consecutive minutes, consuming linear content packaged by a cable company.

  Something will replace television, in the same way television replaced radio: through the process of addition. TV took the audio of radio and added visual images. The next tier of innovation will affix a third component, and that new component will make the previous iteration obsolete. I have no idea what that third element will be. But whatever it is will result in a chronological “freezing” of TV culture. Television will be remembered as a stand-alone medium that isn’t part of any larger continuum53—the most dominant force of the latter twentieth century, but a force tethered to the period of its primacy. And this will make retroactive interpretations of its artistic value particularly complicated.

  Here’s what I mean: When something fits into a lucid, logical continuum, it’s generally remembered for how it (a) reinterprets the entity that influenced its creation, and (b) provides influence for whatever comes next. Take something like skiffle music—a musical genre defined by what it added to early-twentieth-century jazz (rhythmic primitivism) and by those individuals later inspired by it (rock artists of the British Invasion, most notably the Beatles). We think about skiffle outside of itself, as one piece of a multidimensional puzzle. That won’t happen with television. It seems more probable that the entrenched memory of television will be like those massive stone statues on Easter Island: monoliths of creative disconnection. Its cultural imprint might be akin to the Apollo space program, a zeitgeist-driving superstructure that (suddenly) mattered more than everything around it, until it (suddenly) didn’t matter at all. There won’t be any debate over the importance of TV, because that has already been assured (if anything, historians might exaggerate its significance). What’s hazier are the particulars. Which specific TV programs will still matter centuries after the medium itself has been replaced? What TV content will resonate with future generations, even after the technological source of that content has become nonexistent?

  These are queries that require a thought experiment.

  [2]Let’s pretend archaeologists made a bizarre discovery: The ancient Egyptians had television. Now, don’t concern yourself with how this would have worked.54 Just pretend it (somehow) happened, and that the Egyptian relationship to television was remarkably similar to our own. Moreover, this insane archaeological discovery is also insanely complete—we suddenly have access to all the TV shows the Egyptians watched between the years 3500 and 3300 BC. Every frame of this library would be (on some level) interesting. However, some frames would be way more interesting than others. From a sociological vantage point, the most compelling footage would be the national news, closely followed by the local news, closely followed by the commercials. But the least compelling material would be whatever the Egyptians classified as their version of “prestige” television.

  The ancient Egyptian Breaking Bad, the ancient Egyptian House of Cards, the ancient Egyptian rendering of The Americans (which I suppose would be called The Egyptians and involve promiscuous spies from Qatna)—these would be of marginal significance. Why? Because the aesthetic strengths that make sophisticated TV programs superior to their peers do not translate over time. Looking backward, no one would care how good the acting was or how nuanced the plots were. Nobody would really care about the music or the lighting or the mood. These are artful, subjective qualities that matter in the present. What we’d actually want from ancient Egyptian television is a way to look directly into the past, in the same manner we look at Egyptian hieroglyphics without fixating on the color palette or the precision of scale. We’d want to see what their world looked like and how people lived. We would want to understand the experience of subsisting in a certain place during a certain time, from a source that wasn’t consciously trying to illustrate those specific traits (since conscious attempts at normalcy inevitably come with bias). What we’d want, ultimately, is “ancillary verisimilitude.” We’d want a TV show that provided the most realistic portrait of the society that created it, without the self-aware baggage embedded in any overt attempt at doing so. In this hypothetical scenario, the most accurate depiction of ancient Egypt would come from a fictional product that achieved this goal accidentally, without even trying. Because that’s the way it always is, with everything. True naturalism can only be a product of the unconscious.

  So apply this philosophy to ourselves, and to our own version of televised culture: If we consider all possible criteria, what were the most accidentally realistic TV shows of all time? Which American TV programs—if watched by a curious person in a distant future—would latently represent how day-to-day American society actually was?

  This is the kind of question even people who think about television for a living don’t think about very often. When I asked The Revolution Was Televised author Alan Sepinwall, he noted the “kitchen-sink realism” of sitcoms from the seventies (the grimy aesthetics of Taxi and the stagnation of Barney Miller, a cop show where the cops never left the office). New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum suggested a handful of shows where the dialogue captured emotional inarticulation without the crutch of clichés (most notably the mid-nineties teen drama My So-Called Life). Still, it’s hard to view any of the programs cited by either as vehicles for understanding reality. This is not their fault, though: We’re not supposed to think about TV in this way. Television critics who obsess over the authenticity of picayune narrative details are like poetry professors consumed with penmanship. To attack True Detective or Lost or Twin Peaks as “unrealistic” is a willful misinterpretation of the intent. We don’t need television to accurately depict literal life, because life can literally be found by stepping outside. Television’s only real-time responsibility is to entertain. But that changes as years start to elapse. We don’t reinvestigate low culture with the expectation that it will entertain us a second time—the hope is that it will be instructive and revelatory, which sometimes works against the intentions of the creator. Take, for example, a series like Mad Men: Here was a show set in the New York advertising world of the 1960s, with a dogged emphasis on precise cultural references and era-specific details. The unspoken goal of Mad Men was to depict how the sixties “really” were. And to the present-day Mad Men viewer, that’
s precisely how the show came across. The goal was achieved. But Mad Men defines the difference between ancillary verisimilitude and premeditated reconstruction. Mad Men cannot show us what life was like in the sixties. Mad Men can only show how life in the sixties came to be interpreted in the twenty-first century. Sociologically, Mad Men says more about the mind-set of 2007 than it does about the mind-set of 1967, in the same way Gunsmoke says more about the world of 1970 than the world of 1870. Compared to The Andy Griffith Show or Gilligan’s Island, a mediated construct like Mad Men looks infinitely more authentic—but it can’t be philosophically authentic, no matter how hard it tries. Its well-considered portrait of the sixties can’t be more real than the accidental sixties rooted in any 1964 episode of My Three Sons. Because those 1964 accidents are what 1964 actually was.

  [3]My point is not that we’re communally misguided about which TV series are good, or that prestige programming should be ignored because the people who make it are too aware of what they’re doing. As a consumer, I’d argue the opposite. But right now, I’m focused on a different type of appreciation. I’m trying to think about TV as a dead medium—not as living art, but as art history (a process further convoluted by the ingrained reflex to never think about TV as “art,” even when it clearly is). This brand of analysis drives a certain type of person bonkers, because it ignores the conception of taste. Within this discussion, the quality of a program doesn’t matter; the assumption is that the future person considering these artifacts won’t be remotely concerned with entertainment value. My interest is utility. It’s a formalist assessment, focusing on all the things a (normal) person is not supposed to (normally) be cognizant of while watching any given TV show. Particularly . . .

  The way the characters talk.

  The machinations of the world the characters inhabit.

  The manner in which the show is filmed and presented.

  The degree to which “realness” is central to the show’s ethos.

  That first quality is the most palpable and the least quantifiable. If anyone on a TV show employed the stilted, posh, mid-Atlantic accent of stage actors, it would instantly seem preposterous; outside a few notable exceptions, the goal of televised conversation is fashionable naturalism. But vocal delivery is only a fraction of this equation. There’s also the issue of word choice: It took decades for screenwriters to realize that no adults have ever walked into a tavern and said, “I’ll have a beer,” without noting what specific brand of beer they wanted55 (an interaction between Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern in the 1986 theatrical film Blue Velvet is the first time I recall seeing the overt recognition of this). What’s even harder to compute is the relationship between a period’s depiction of conversation and the way people of that period were talking in real life. Did the average American father in 1957 truly talk to his kids the way Ward Cleaver talked to Wally and the Beaver? It doesn’t seem possible—but it was, in all likelihood, the way 1957 suburban fathers imagined they were speaking.

  The way characters talk is connected to the second quality, but subtly. I classify “the machinations of the world” as the unspoken, internal rules that govern how characters exist. When these rules are illogical, the fictional world seems false; when the rules are rational, even a sci-fi fantasy realm can seem plausible. Throughout the 1970s, the most common narrative trope on a sitcom like Three’s Company or Laverne and Shirley was “the misunderstanding”—a character infers incorrect information about a different character, and that confusion drives the plot. What always felt unreal about those scenarios was the way no one ever addressed these misunderstandings aloud, even when that was the obvious solution. The flawed machinations of the seventies sitcom universe required all misunderstandings to last exactly twenty-two minutes. But when a show’s internal rules are good, the viewer is convinced that they’re seeing something close to life. When the rom-com series Catastrophe debuted on Amazon, a close friend tried to explain why the program seemed unusually true to him. “This is the first show I can ever remember,” he said, “where the characters laugh at each other’s jokes in a non-obnoxious way.” This seemingly simple idea was, in fact, pretty novel—prior to Catastrophe, individuals on sitcoms constantly made hilarious remarks that no one seemed to notice were hilarious. For decades, this was an unspoken, internal rule: No one laughs at anything. So seeing characters laugh naturally at things that were plainly funny was a new level of realness.

  The way a TV show is photographed and staged (this is point number three) are industrial attributes that take advantage of viewers’ preexisting familiarity with the medium: When a fictional drama is filmed like a news documentary, audiences unconsciously absorb the action as extra-authentic (a scene shot from a single mobile perspective, like most of Friday Night Lights, always feels closer to reality than scenes captured with three stationary cameras, like most of How I Met Your Mother). It’s a technical choice that aligns with the fourth criterion, the extent to which the public recognition of authenticity informs the show’s success (a realization that didn’t happen in earnest until the 1980s, with shows like Hill Street Blues). Now, it’s possible that—in two hundred fifty years—those last two points may be less meaningful to whoever is excavating these artifacts. Viewers with no relationship to TV won’t be fooled by the perspective of the camera, and people living in a different time period won’t intuitively sense the relationship between the world they’re seeing and the world that was. But these points will still matter a little, because all four qualities are interrelated. They amplify each other. And whatever television program exemplifies these four qualities most successfully will ultimately have the most usefulness to whatever future people end up watching them. For these (yet-to-be-conceived) cultural historians, TV will be a portal into the past. It will be a way to psychically contact the late twentieth century with an intimacy and depth that can only come from visual fiction, without any need for imagination or speculation. It won’t be a personal, interpretive experience, like reading a book; it will be like the book is alive. Nothing will need to be mentally conjured. The semi-ancient world will just be there, moving and speaking in front of them, unchanged by the sands of time.

  All of which leads to one central question: What TV show will this be?

  Removed from context, it’s a question that can also be asked like this: What is the realest fake thing we’ve ever made on purpose?

  I’m (slightly, but not really) embarrassed to admit that this is an inquiry I’ve been thinking about for my entire life, years before I ever had a financial incentive to do so. It is inexplicably hardwired into my brain. For as long as I can remember, whenever I watch any scripted TV show, part of my consciousness interrogates its relationship to reality. “Could this happen? Does this look the way it would actually look? Does this work the way it would actually work?” It does not matter if the details are factually impossible—if I’m watching Game of Thrones, I can readily accept that dragons exist. Yet I still wonder if the dragons on my TV are behaving in the way I believe real dragons would behave in reality. I still question the veracity of those dragons, and I instinctively analyze the real-world plausibility of a scenario that’s patently impossible. This is just the way I am, and I never had to try.

  So I am ready for this question.

  (And I’d better be, since I appear to be the only person asking it.)

  The first candidate to consider—and the easiest candidate to discount—is reality television. As a genre, the social and generational importance of these shows is vastly underrated; they are postmodern picture windows. But they’re pretty worthless at demonstrating the one quality they all purport to deliver. Even if we take The Hills and Storage Wars and Keeping Up with the Kardashians at face value—that is to say, even if we’re willing to accept (or pretend) that these are normal people, behaving naturally in unnatural circumstances—the visual presentation makes no attempt at masking the falseness of the staging or the contrived banality o
f the conflicts. Nothing on TV looks faker than failed attempts at realism. A show like The Bachelor is instantly recognized (by pretty much everyone, including its intended audience) as a prefab version of how such events might theoretically play out in a distant actuality. No television show has ever had a more paradoxical title than MTV’s The Real World, which proved to be the paradoxical foundation of its success.

  Programming that nakedly operates as a subcultural roman à clef actually gets a little closer. The early twenty-first century spawned a glut of these series: Empire (a fictionalized portrait of the “urban” music industry) and Entourage (a fictionalized portrait of the celebrity industry) were the most successful attempts, but others include Nashville (centered on the country music scene), Ballers (the post-NFL brain economy), UnREAL (the reality of reality TV), and Silicon Valley (a satire of the Bay Area tech bubble). None of these programs claim to depict actual events, but all compel viewers to connect characters with the real people who inspired them. The star of Empire is some inexact synthesis of Jay Z, Suge Knight, and Berry Gordy. The protagonist in Entourage was supposed to be a version of Entourage producer Mark Wahlberg, had Wahlberg experienced Leonardo DiCaprio’s career. There’s a venture capitalist on Silicon Valley based (at least partially) on a melding of billionaire Mark Cuban and online entrepreneur Sean Parker. Part of the pleasure these programs provide is an opportunity to make these Xerox associations—and once the connections calcify in viewers’ heads, they can effortlessly inject living public figures into fake story lines.56 That intellectual transfer makes this programming far more watchable than the writing justifies. But this essential process, somewhat ironically, erodes the level of realism. It exaggerates every narrative detail and forces the characters to unload bushels of awkward exposition, simply because casual viewers won’t make those subtextual connections without heavy-handed guidance. Beyond a few key exceptions, simulacrum shows are soap operas, marketed as fantasies, geared toward mass audiences who don’t want to think very hard about what they’re watching. Characters need to invent ways to say, “This is who I’m supposed to be,” without saying so directly. Nothing in a simulacrum is accidental, so you end up with the opposite of naturalism: It’s bogus inside baseball, designed for outsiders who didn’t know anything to begin with. You can’t be real by trying to be real.