The one about television
I.
The Ringer wrote an interesting but mostly flawed piece arguing that television seasons are in general, too lean:
And so, instead of 22 episodes of The Good Wife, we get The Good Fight — which is, well, good, but for only 10–13 episodes at a time. Instead of 26 episodes of Sam Malone, we get 13 of Michael from The Good Place. Instead of around 26 episodes of every previous Star Trek series, we get 15 of the upcoming Discovery.
This is, in general, a bad take: television thrives when it’s tightly paced, and the deathknell of many series is artificial plot dilution, taking poorly-routed detours even when the finish line is in sight. The Good Place had a terrific first season because it was so tightly plotted: it established its setting, lived in it for a little bit, advanced the plot, and then burnt the whole thing down for season two.
I think if there’s any obvious next stage for television, it’s throwing off the yoke of the 6/13/22 episode season. Imagine if the Netflix Marvel shows didn’t feel the need to pad their view lengths by an extra few hours! Imagine if Game of Thrones made us spend, like, five hours in Dorne!
II.
My favorite piece of television writing is What Nothing Means, an ode to rewatching Seinfeld. The entire thing is worth reading, but the coda of the piece is what keeps me coming back to it every few months:
When Camus wrote of nostalgia, he did not refer to the usual longing for a roseate past. He described instead the want of faith in an orderly, purposeful existence that often dissolves in adult life, leaving us to fill the void haphazardly for ourselves. To longtime Seinfeld watchers, the reruns offer an unlikely consolation. Though the memories that attach are perhaps amorphous, in melding, they can foster an impression of seamless continuity. The pain of disillusion washes away, as we are assured—however spuriously—that we are moving forward and that our progression has been fluid, that the track remains unfractured, and that all is well.
Recently, a friend observed that watching this show, often enough, we do not laugh anymore. I supposed that was right, and we wondered why, agreeing that its humor had not diminished with age. “It’s like being with an old friend,” I ventured. “With whom you can be comfortable in silence.”
“No,” he said, making a face. It wasn’t like that at all.
“Well, what then?” I said. “It’s like something.”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like? It’s something like being home.”
III.
One of my self-imposed rules is to not re-watch television. This is equal parts pragmatic (there are too many new shows that I want to watch that it seems suboptimal to spend time rewatching old ones) and aspirational (chopping off a little piece of regressive behavior might beget larger, better changes in my life).
I break this rule constantly, but it’s usually just when my partner and I are watching something before we go to sleep: Bob’s Burgers, Happy Endings, the kind of show that falls over you like a blanket. I already know the cadence of the humor; I can remember or deduce the plot beats in the first few minutes; it is less a piece of content and more a cup of tea.
The only other time I break this rule is to rewatch The West Wing.
I rewatch one episode of The West Wing every Tuesday, right before the corresponding episode of The West Wing Weekly is released. This is I think my fourth time through the series: the first being bits and pieces when it was originally aired, then once more with a certain religious fervor my junior year in college, then casually after graduating, and then now.
Each time I watch it I’ve been a different person, and so each time I watch it I learn different things about the show and myself. Now, as I’m watching it, I find myself focusing on two things: the dichotomy the show presents between virtue and power, and the demands of narrative constraint.
The most common criticism levied at the show is that it’s a liberal fantasia, an aspirational view of the White House rather than an illustrative one.
I accepted this criticism for a while: Aaron Sorkin is certainly a bleeding heart (which is not to say he’s without his criticisms), and all of his characters are largely flawless intellectual Democrats who try very earnestly to do the right thing. They speak eloquently and passionately and can reference Gilbert & Sullivan.
But on this rewatch, that criticism seems largely inert. The characters on the West Wing don’t really accomplish anything. The motifs of the show come from struggles against larger machinery, in the form of congressional subcommittees or institutional friction; the victories the characters earn are hard-fought and universally come at the price of conciliation and sacrifice.
And most importantly, the narrative of a sixty minute television show necessitates that victories are never final, the champagne only effervescent until the end credits roll; the characters are, as prescribed by the form, always in turmoil, always in crisis.
Josh Lyman is never happy: there are no episodes of the show where they bask in their success. A show about conflict and struggle can never be absent of conflict and struggle (or, it can, but it becomes a different show — and a worse one.)
IV.
There are some things you can only pick up on after a rewatch.
Don’t give me eighty episodes of a great show. Give me twenty episodes that I can watch four times.
Technically speaking
- This one isn’t really technical, but I wrote about my favorite podcasts. (None of them are tech podcasts.)
- I wrote a rejoinder to a dumb post about app bloat making the rounds.
- I wrote about how there are still dragons everywhere, and I can find myself feeling like a novice.
Three things I really liked this week
- May-Li Khoe’s archaeological dig through an Apple manual from 1985
- Kyle McDonald’s visualizations of pop music over time
- Simon Fieldhouse’s illustrations of iconic New York architecture
Happy Sunday
I hope you watch an episode of television that sticks with you forever.