TV sucks
I don’t usually watch TV shows, because I hate the vast majority of them, but ever since I’ve been shown the glory of “Arrested Development” by a friend of mine, I feel like I have to give them a shot whenever someone insists that a series is worth my time. What always happens, however, is that (1) I say I pretty much never like TV series, (2) my friend insists that this one’s different, (3) I give it a shot, and (4) I’m disappointed. People have managed to convince me to watch “Lost”, “Game of Thrones”, “House”, “24”, “Prison Break”, “The Office” (U.S.), “Heroes”, “Breaking Bad” and many more, but all those TV shows share this one universal, unavoidable, deal-breaking flaw: they’re TV shows.
Don’t get me wrong; all those shows have a lot of merit. They’re head and shoulders above the rest of the drivel that you usually get on TV, but they’re still pretty bad. If you think that the corporate sell-out Hollywood design-by-committee industry is killing cinema, you have to understand that the situation is way, way worse on the TV front. If you want to make it on TV, you have to pander to every demographic at once and, if your show gets popular, stretch your material to make it last 10 years. Once in a blue moon, I’ll see a movie that was made with a shadow of artistic integrity. That doesn’t happen on TV.
On TV, you have to pace your show so that commercials don’t break the flow too noticeably, and to make sure you have a nice hook at the end of every episode, a nicer hook before winter break, and the nicest hook at the end of a season (and the nicestest hook right before the show is cancelled). On TV, when you run out of ideas, tough shit, you have to put out more episodes. Did you have 22 episodes worth of material? Sorry, we can only sign you for 18, just pack it tight!
Most of the shows that I listed in my first paragraph, I liked how they started. “House” is beautifully shot, extremely well-acted (by the leads…), it lends itself well to weekly episodes and sometimes it’s kind of smart. If you took the material from the 8 seasons it had and made 2, maybe 3 with them, you’d have a good show. But they had to pad it, they had to censor it, they had to stretch it so much that characters started having loops instead of arcs, and the end result sucks.
“Heroes” had a good idea; make every season about a new set of characters. That way, you can end an arc every season and start anew the next year. They had a pretty good first season, one that actually ended, and then they dropped their idea, had the second season start where the first one left off (with amnesia-related backtracking, the best plot device!) and it started to blow.
“Breaking Bad”, I had high hopes for, but they really went overboard, really hammering the audience over the head with “See? See how our protagonist is turning into a bad guy? See that? Never seen that anywhere else, huh? Look at how evil he is now! Ooooh! What? We got signed for another season? Alright, let’s make him do something arguably nice, so next season he can be even MORE evil!”
“Prison Break” also had a good first season, during which the main characters break out of prison, which was to be expected. Then they stretched it over another 2 (or was it 3?) seasons, and it started being about weird, retarded conspiracies and, consequently, to suck.
I don’t want to go on and on (more than I already did…) about specific shows, because I have to admit that, given the restrictions, all the ones that I mentionned are actually pretty good, leagues ahead of “Everybody Loves Raymond”, “Castle” or “CSI”, they’re just… well, TV shows. And the poet in me wants to compare a good TV show to a beautiful cottage cheese statue; it’s really impressive that someone made something out of it, but nobody’s going to make me taste it, and there’s no way it’s getting in my living room. And it’ll probably go bad before too long.
I also tried to work in a “milking it” joke, but I couldn’t.