Assignment 5 - Tahsen Hossain - Television

Why do you watch TV? Why do you not? What shows do you love or hate?

05:30 PM--- Ok. I have a lot of homework to do. 3 quizzes tomorrow. I'll just watch one episode to relax a bit and then I'll go get my work done.

Literally 10:15 PM---  #?*! @#$%^&

The experience of watching television for me is like cooking: while it can be done listlessly and without much overall effort the more effort you put into it, the more rewarding it is. Not only do I spend hours in front of a screen watching the shows unfold, I then spend hours thinking about the shows that I watch, going over every memorable scene in my head thinking about why it was the way it was. Honestly, I waste so much of my time doing this, writing reviews that I never publish and gathering my thoughts on each show for no particular reason. I believe that TV shows, being the result of many peoples' collaborative artistic talent, deserve to be appreciated as a great form of media if nothing else.

I do, however, personally think most of the content put out on TV is pretty bad. I'm tired of seeing three billion cop shows that seem to play out exactly the same with absolutely no character building. CSI, Law and Order, Hawaii Five-O. If I tune in to one episode of one today and watch an episode of another tomorrow I would not know that it was a different show. I'm exhausted by the overly dramatic romantic sitcoms and all the artificial and meaningless tension they create in a misguided attempt to seem complex. Sometimes, I sit down, perfectly fine, with my dad and watch an hour of Jane the Virgin afterschool and leave confused having lost several hundred brain cells. Finally, I am downright frustrated by the lack of well-realised fantasy or science fiction plots that don't end up turning into slightly tweaked versions of my aforementioned complaints. Lucifer, the Flash (as well as all of the CW superhero shows), and Once Upon a Time all manage to make great premises and plots boring. How do you make a show about the literal devil visiting the US for a vacation into another generic LA detective drama? How do you mess up your creative process that badly? (I'm not spiteful or anything.)

Despite my annoyances, there are a lot of shows that go well above my expectations. I absolutely loved Game of Thrones (until its 8th season which was really disappointing), Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, My Hero Academia, Breaking Bad. But more recently, I have dived headfirst into The Boys, Carnival Row, and American Gods which have hijacked my thoughts of late. All of these shows offer such engaging and fluid stories that I hardly have time to gather my thoughts before they introduce the next big plot point. 

Does TV provide a good form of entertainment? Is it just a convenient delivery system for advertisers to send their messages to the masses? Is it an inane use of time? Can it be all three?

Television can definitely be fun, provocative, and pointless all at the same time. Television is a great narrative medium that has all the capabilities of films without the limitations of time or trendiness. However, their prolonged nature allows them to also be a great medium for advertisers to build brand awareness and provoke a reaction from the audience. And if the content that the audience is devoting so much time to is not of an acceptable quality or is otherwise insubstantial then, yes, it will have all been a waste. All three of these depend entirely on the content being watched by the audience and it is very possible that a smart audience member might be able to maximise their entertainment whilst minimising the other factors. Television like any other medium of entertainment, from fireworks to skittles, to shots of tequila, must be used responsibly.

What does it say about our society that the Emmy's have so much glitz and attention and the Nobel Prizes are quietly announced in the news? Is that bad? Good? Appropriate?

Society as a whole seems to idolise entertainment because its much more available for public consumption than the honours of intellect. Everybody is involved in the entertainment cycle and thus it feeds itself. While many might argue that a society valuing entertainment over achievement is objectively bad, I would say that while the proportion to which we venerate our entertainers may need to be scaled down, it's not necessarily so surprising or objectively terrible as we often portray it to be. It seems only fair that we idolise those people who motivate us and speak for us when we cannot motivate or speak for ourselves and they, despite being enlarged out of proportion, should continue to have our societal support. That said, I do think the Nobel prize is a big enough deal that it should be more appreciated as they are the greatest achievements of our society in any given year.