Inside the box
You cannot love television and understand its preeminent role in contemporary life without contrary feelings of resentment, disappointment and even outright hatred.
That is what readers will take away from “Television: A Biography,” written by a man who is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most passionate and thoughtful cinephiles, David Thomson.
What is a “biography” of television? One thing it is not is a year-by-year catalog of shows, content platform growth and Emmy Awards. Instead, Thomson considers the medium of television almost as a life form. Although Thomson devotes significant space to British television, his “biography” is a quintessentially American story of coming from nothing and becoming hugely successful, with lots of bumps and disappointments along the way.
Thomson loosely, and somewhat artificially, divides his book into McLuhan-esque halves, “The Medium” and “The Message.”
He isn’t doctrinaire about his construct, and we’re the better for it as he chats away, making thought-provoking and always entertaining observations about television’s explosive growth in ways that could easily fit into either half of the book.
Actually, in a charmingly un-blocked metaphorical pile, he states his purpose in his introduction: “The household pet of once upon a time became a strange, placid being — the elephant in the room, if you like — not a monster that attacked us and beat its Kong chest in triumph but an impassive force that quietly commandeered so much of what we thought was our attention, our consciousness, or our intelligence.”
Thomson singles out particular shows, and even specific episodes, on both sides of the Atlantic as jumping-off points to discuss how television evolved in an incestuous relationship with so-called real life. Some might call the relationship symbiotic, but overall, it has damaged our perspective on reality. Writing about a particular episode of the original TV show “The Fugitive” in which Angie Dickinson guests with star David Janssen, Thomson nudges us toward realizing that content is content, regardless of whether it is labeled as a comedy, a drama, the news or advertising: “It is the nature of television acting not to act but to be the flawless window through which our desire joins that of (Angie Dickinson’s character). That’s how ads work.”
By 1954, there were sets in 26 million American households, and many members of those households saw the moment in the Army-McCarthy hearings when Joseph Welch called out Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy with the words, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?,” seen as the end of McCarthyism. Television got “real” with its broadcast of the hearings, but it was only a temporary excursion away from the embodiment of unlikely ideals, both in scripted content and in commercials.
“Pretty women on television then were made to be in love . ... The same fallacy prevails still in every ad that needs a cute girl. So every product has this grotesque aura of pretty lovability as torment to a world in which people drive battered cars with homely mates.”
What has been true of commercials has also been true of programming. Donna Reed, who’d won an Oscar for playing a hooker in “From Here to Eternity,” became the idealized American wife and mother in her own TV show, dressing pretty frocks, heels and stockings to welcome her husband and kids home. If she donned an apron, it was almost a fashion accessory, certainly not a stained, wrinkled article real people might reach for when slaving over hot stoves.
Reality slapped the country in the face over the long weekend beginning on Nov. 22, 1963, and resulting in the live broadcast of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. A few years later, television was bringing Vietnam into American living rooms and Lyndon B. Johnson would cite Walter Cronkite as the reason he knew he’d lost the support of much of the nation for the Vietnam War effort.
These were only the most memorable of significant moments in the evolution of the medium that combined to alter our point of view on the world.
Stand back, as Thomson so brilliantly does, and consider the what he calls “the onlooker culture” that took root as television became dominant in the culture: “You can regard the culture as a new, radicalizing means of bringing the things seen (the world) into our homes for our appreciation and experience — like a gift. But that formula is not enough. It loses awareness of the conditioning elements in the process of screening, and thereby seeming to control, the experience of chaos — in that sense, the gift can be a misleading trick.”
From 1963 to the present day, we see real death side by side with artificial death on our screens, and in the case of the latter category, the “dead” come back again next week in a different costume. Remember the Challenger disaster? That was a defining moment for cable news. The first time we saw the rocket blow up with smoke and debris forming a big Y in the sky, it was horrific. Then cable showed it over and over again, all that day and the next, and we became inured to it. Same thing on 9/11, although of course the numbing effect of constant repetition was mixed with profound sadness in both cases.
Think of how often you’ve see Laquan McDonald walking purposefully away from the cops across the bridge in Chicago in 2015 before he collapses on the ground. One final bullet hit him and we see a tiny puff of smoke rise from his side. Almost as a reverse process of looking at one of Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs, our minds begin to disassemble video loops we see over and over again. That is what Thomson is talking about with the “apparent control” that occurs in our subconscious through the process of screening.
The people who make commercials know how to tap into that by offering meaningless but memorable summary statements about products. “The Real Thing,” “Think Different,” “Does She or Doesn’t She?,” “Because I’m Worth It.” We remember the slogans because they are simple, but they also trigger subconscious reactions. The Coke slogan says authenticity, in contrast to all the chemicals, additives and artificial coloring in soda, the L’Oreal statement flatters our egos, and the Clairol catch phrase is meant to suggest sex.
Now consider how scripted content works on us, which Thomson does in his biography: “We have been sapped by our uncertainty. It comes from a lifetime of having to look at actors and abide by the dream that they are telling the truth, that they are authentic or sincere. Yet we know that actors make it up every time, and we have realized how like actors we are in our own everyday masquerade.
So, again, if actors in dramas and comedies, and beautiful people in commercials, are part of screen content along with news, or its pale contemporary facsimile, how does our brain process the difference? We can say we know the difference, yet, as Thomson points out, Fox News is the most trusted cable news network in the country and yet it is proudly the most biased. Don’t consider that in context of your own politics, but in the context of what “trust” and “truth” mean on TV.
Television may or may not be experiencing a “Golden Age.” The term is tossed about like a beanbag in kindergarten, and is worth about as much. Yes, there are superb shows, but mostly, there is just a whole lot of television on various platforms, and Thomson finds much of it wanting.
“Too much television, to this day, has little sense of the unique medium and different ways of filming waiting to be tried,” he writes. Absolutely. Not to mention daring creativity in concept and writing. In recent years, we’ve experienced the rise of the long form on TV, but Thomson rightly gripes that watching a long-form show like “American Crime” is challenging because of frequent commercial interruptions and a fatal outbreak of promotional junk at the bottom of your screen, especially on broadcast TV.
Thomson has written an enthralling and very necessary book about the complex medium of television. He gets a couple facts wrong, or perhaps his publisher’s proofreading department has: Sharon Tate was murdered in August 1969, not February, and the co-creator of “NYPD Blue” is Steven Bochco, not Jeffrey.
But the far more important takeaway here is that Thomson has trained his singular vision on the dominant medium of our lives, our constant — if not always welcome — companion, tightening its hold on our culture and our minds with a proliferation of portable screens. It has trained us well.
David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV