Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

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    A few popular sitcoms have done well with the traditional living room banter of yesteryear: Everybody Loves Raymond comes to mind. But most comedies that have managed to achieve both critical and commercial success— Scrubs, The Office, South Park, Will & Grace, Curb Your Enthusiasm —have almost without exception taken their structural cues from The Simpsons instead of Three’s Company : creating humor with a half-life longer than fifteen seconds, drawing on intricate plotlines and obscure references. But the sitcom genre as a whole has wilted in the past few years, as television execs turned their focus to the new—and oft-abused—ratings champ: reality programming.
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    S KEPTICS MIGHT ARGUE that I have stacked the deck here by focusing on relatively highbrow titles like The Simpsons or The West Wing, when in fact the most significant change in the last five years of narrative entertainment has nothing to do with complex dramas or self-referential sitcoms. Does the contemporary pop cultural landscape look quite as promising if the representative TV show is Joe Millionaire instead of The West Wing ?
    I think it does, but to answer that question properly, you have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early seventies—invoking shows like Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family —they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade. If you’re going to look at pop culture trends, you have to compare apples to apples, or in this case, lemons to lemons. If Joe Millionaire is a dreadful show that has nonetheless snookered a mass audience into watching it, then you have to compare it to shows of comparable quality and audience reach from thirty years ago for the trends to be meaningful. The relevant comparison is not between Joe Millionaire and M*A*S*H ; it’s between Joe Millionaire and The Price Is Right, or between Survivor and The Love Boat.
    What you see when you make these head-to-head comparisons is that a rising tide of complexity has been lifting programming both at the bottom of the quality spectrum and at the top. The Sopranos is several times more demanding of its audiences than Hill Street was, and Joe Millionaire has made comparable advances over Battle of the Network Stars. This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve theory: even the crap has improved.
    How might those improvements be measured? To take stock of this emerging genre, once again we have to paint our portrait of the rhinoceros carefully, to capture why people really get hooked on these shows. Because I think the appeal is often misunderstood. The conventional wisdom is that audiences flock to reality programming because they enjoy the prurient sight of other people being humiliated on national TV. This indeed may be true for gross-out shows like Fear Factor, where contestants lock themselves into vaults with spiders or consume rancid food for their fifteen minutes of fame. But for the most successful reality shows— Survivor or The Apprentice —the appeal is more sophisticated. That sophistication has been difficult to see, because reality programming, too, has suffered from our tendency to see emerging genres as “pseudo” versions of earlier genres, as McLuhan diagnosed. When reality programming first burst on the scene, it was traditionally compared with the antecedent form of the documentary film. Naturally, when you compare Survivor with Shoah, Survivor comes up short. But reality shows do not represent reality the way documentaries represent reality. Survivor ’s relationship to reality is much closer to the relationship between professional sports and reality: highly contrived, rule-governed environments where (mostly) unscripted events play out.
    Thinking of reality shows in the context of games gives us useful insight into the merits of the genre, as opposed to the false