JVL: The Future of Television

Television in changing.

The medium of TV has been quite durable. Technologically, it’s had only two major innovations: the move from black and white to color displays and from over-the-air signal broadcast to cable. That’s it. Everything else—from flat screens to internet-enabled TVs—have been mere iterative changes.

But the TV show itself has undergone a number of evolutions. We’ve had live television, sponsored television, studio audiences, specials, series, mini-series, first-runs, re-runs, scripted shows, game shows, variety shows, reality shows, and more.

Today we have a new evolution. The two major streaming services, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, began their corporate lives as alternatives to the video store. But after they put Blockbuster out of business, they began to morph into something very much like the old broadcast networks. Today, they are basically supersized versions of HBO: Premium channels which offer their own propriety programming intermingled with some feature films to which they’ve acquired streaming rights.

But with one important difference: When Netflix and Amazon release one of their shows, they make the entire season’s worth of episodes available at once, rather than parceling them out once a week, like traditional networks. This may sound like a small change. It’s not.

Joss Whedon is one of my favorite story-tellers. He got his start in the writers’ room at Roseanne and became (kind of) famous for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then really famous for writing and directing The Avengers. He’s written a lot of stuff—from Shakespeare adaptations to comic books—and despite the fact that he has the political sophistication of a 15-year-old, he’s great at what he does.

The Hollywood Reporter did a long interview with Whedon a couple weeks ago for the 20th anniversary of Buffy and his thoughts on the streaming TV medium are very interesting. Because periodicity turns out to be kind of important:

I would want people to come back every week and have the experience of watching something at the same time. We released Doctor Horrible in three acts. We did that, in part, because I grew up watching miniseries like Lonesome Dove. I loved event television. And as it was falling by the wayside, I thought, "Let's do it on the internet!" Over the course of that week, the conversation about the show changed and changed. That was exciting to watch. Obviously Netflix is turning out a ton of extraordinary stuff. And if they came to me and said, “Here's all the money! Do the thing you love!” I'd say, “You could release it however you want. Bye.” But my preference is more old-school. Anything we can grab on to that makes something specific, a specific episode, it's useful for the audience. And it's useful for the writers, too. "This is what we're talking about this week!" For you to have six, 10, 13 hours and not have a moment for people to breath and take away what we've done ... to just go, "Oh, this is just part seven of 10," it makes it amorphous emotionally. And I worry about that in our culture — the all-access all the time. . . .

The more we make things granular and less complete, the more it becomes lifestyle instead of experience. It becomes ambient. It loses its power, and we lose something with it. We lose our understanding of narrative. Which is what we come to television for. We come to see the resolve. I'm fond of referencing it, but it's “Angela Lansbury finds the murderer.” It's becoming a little harder to hold on to that. Binge-watching, god knows I've done it, it's exhausting—but it can be delightful. It's not the devil. But I worry about it. It's part of a greater whole.

What Whedon is getting at, I think, is that if television evolves to the point where releasing all the episodes of a show simultaneously is the norm, we’ll never have a cultural conversation about a TV show again. Those little shared experiences—that Seinfeld gag about Keith Hernandez, the little cult of Buffy, the Walking Dead grumble thread—will shrivel and die. There won’t be a TV audience any more; only individual TV watchers.

Now, as Whedon says, this isn’t the worst thing in the world. It wouldn’t even make the top thousand worst things in the world. But it is of a piece with the general decline of our social capital and cultural spaces. It is absolutely another data point for Robert Putnam’s bowling alone.

And it is also possibly another example of how the internet ruins everything.

In the old days, the weekly release of TV episodes created relatively strong cultural ties, but caused some mild individual inconvenience. Because if you didn’t catch an episode during the first-run broadcast, you had to wait until re-runs or syndication and then play roulette waiting for the show to come up.

Then the internet happened. This should have gotten us to an optimal outcome where we got the strong cultural ties of weekly episodic release coupled with an instant back-catalogue library which could be accessed on-demand. You missed the episode of Justified last night? No worries. You can stream it tomorrow and still be able to talk about the show with your co-workers.

But instead of settling at this Pareto optimum, the internet shot past it and went straight to “information wants to be free” and started dumping all episodes of a given series at the same time, achieving some small gain in individual convenience at the large expense of an entire shared cultural space.

This was not a data-driven decision. It was an ideological choice. We did not have years of testing where Netflix and Amazon experimented with different release strategies. Maybe putting out one episode a week of Narcos would have captured more eyeballs than putting up all the episodes at once. Maybe releasing three, or five, episodes a week, over the course of a month, would generate more interest.

The point here is that the internet cultivates its own set of values and that they are distinct from the values of people, or society, or even the free market. And the two primary values of the internet are and always have been: (1) Faster. (2) More.

Neither of which are especially good organizing principles for human flourishing.

At first blush, the entire dodgeball skirmish might seem a mere footnote to the larger story, the Wussification of America. Ours is becoming a childproofed nation, where playgrounds have been shut down because of sharpedged jungle gyms, where legislatures pass anti-bullying measures, where students are no longer sent home with suspension notices, but are sent instead to peer mediation and conflict resolution classes. It’s a place where—as a friend who coaches his son’s t-ball team reports from Arlington, Virginia—“All players bat every inning, nobody who’s thrown out has to leave the bases, no score is kept, nobody loses, and everybody gets a trophy.” But Neil Williams and his ilk aren’t simply a late innings curiosity, a paragraph or two in a News-of-the-Weird round-up. They are the future. For no longer is it sufficient for our mollycoddled children, raised like hothouse orchids, to attend school for mere academic instruction. They must also learn how to salve their self-esteem, to stay with the group in cooperative learning, to set the bar low, then throw themselves a party for clearing it. Nowhere will they learn this more effectively than in the New P.E.

—Matt Labash “What's Wrong with Dodgeball?” from our June 25, 2001 issue.

Scott Alexander: On James Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

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Jane Mayer: On Robert Mercer and Trumpism.

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Sam Knight: What will happen in London when the queen dies.

Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. Every station, down to hospital radio, has prepared music lists made up of “Mood 2” (sad) or “Mood 1” (saddest) songs to reach for in times of sudden mourning. “If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on,” wrote Chris Price, a BBC radio producer, for the Huffington Post in 2011. “Something terrible has just happened.”

—Sam Knight on what will happen with the queen of England dies, February 17, 2017

I’ve been reading—or, as Bill Kristol likes to say, “reading in”—Jane Jacobs’ classic treatise on urban development, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Maybe Jacobs is old hat to professional city planners and architects, but to a hobbyist like me she came across as incredibly profound.

To pick just one example of her insight (among a great many): Neighborhoods cannot be redeveloped all at once because they need a diversity of building stock. New buildings carry higher rents. Only certain kinds of businesses can afford them: They tend to be established chains with high margins and low volatility. That’s why, whenever you pass through a recently redeveloped urban neighborhood you see a lot of frontage dominated by banks and national-chain pharmacies.

Old, crappy buildings have cheaper rents. Which allows all sorts of different businesses to set up shop: Ethnic restaurants, used book stores, cafes, comic book shops! The kind of borderline businesses which are undercapitalized and risky and may not last—but which make living in the neighborhood pleasant.

Naturally, you don’t want to live in a crumbling urban neighborhood where everything is falling apart. But neither do you want to live in an all-new neighborhood where everything has recently been bulldozed and replaced by a series of symmetrical, concrete boxes. What you want, ideally, is a neighborhood which is in the process of slow, perpetual, piecemeal renewal.

Which brings us to Scott Alexander’s recent essay on James Scott’s much-acclaimed Seeing Like a State. Here’s a sample:

Scott starts with the story of “scientific forestry” in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world.

And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones.

Natural organically-evolved cities tend to be densely-packed mixtures of dark alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts. Yet for some reason, whenever these new rational cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic suburbs. And again, for some reason the urban planners got promoted, became famous, and spread their destructive techniques around the world.

Even if you’re not going to read Scott’s entire 500-page book (no judgment, I probably won’t read the whole thing either) Alexander’s essay on it strikes me as pretty useful. And not just because the stuff on Le Corbusier alone is insane:

The Soviets asked him to come up with a plan to redesign Moscow. He came up with one: kick out everyone, bulldoze the entire city, and redesign it from scratch upon rational principles. For example, instead of using other people’s irrational systems of measurement, they would use a new measurement system invented by Le Corbusier himself, called Modulor, which combined the average height of a Frenchman with the Golden Ratio.

The Soviets decided to pass: the plan was too extreme and destructive of existing institutions even for Stalin. Undeterred, Le Corbusier changed the word “Moscow” on the diagram to “Paris”, then presented it to the French government (who also passed). Some aspects of his design eventually ended up as Chandigarh, India.

But the big take-away for me about Scott is the portrait of the importance of traditions. For example, Scott describes pre-colonial farming practices in Tanzania, where farmers would grow “dozens of crops together in seeming chaos.” Colonists forced them to grow just a single crop at a time. Which was the state of agricultural science in Europe, but turned out to be a very, very bad idea in Tanzania, because:

The multistoried effect of polyculture has some distinct advantages for yields and soil conservation. “Upper-story” crops shade “lowerstory” crops, which are selected for their ability to thrive in the cooler soil temperature and increased humidity at ground level. Rainfall reaches the ground not directly but as a fine spray that is absorbed with less damage to soil structure and less erosion. The taller crops often serve as a useful windbreak for the lower crops. Finally, in mixed or relay cropping, a crop is in the field at all times, holding the soil together and reducing the leaching effects that sun, wind, and rain exert, particularly on fragile land. Even if polyculture is not to be preferred on the grounds of immediate yield, there is much to recommend it in terms of sustainability and thus long-term production.

The Tanzanians couldn’t explain this in technical terms and the colonists couldn’t understand it until they did a post-mortem of the disaster they caused. But the point here isn’t about cultural miscommunication. It’s that highly evolved systems are incredibly complicated and interrelated in ways which insiders can only intuit and outsiders cannot even see, let alone understand. And that describing these systems using formal rules is a fool’s errand. You monkey with them at your peril and can only minimize the unintended negative consequences by proceeding slowly, and in an iterative manner.

And if this is true for farming practices in Tanzania, just imagine how true it is for large components of entire civilizations. Like, oh . . . I don’t know . . . let’s just pick a topic at total random. How about marriage?

You take an institution which is the product of literally thousands of years of evolution. With an unfathomable set of implicit and explicit traditions. That is the basic building block of human organization. And in the span of a single generation a few elites disentangle it from reproduction, make its contract highly soluble, redefine it to include same-sex unions, and then start pushing polyamory.

How is this not like Le Corbusier bulldozing Moscow and re-engineering it according to an invented system of measurement?

And the answer, of course, is that it’s exactly like that. And we are now dealing the consequences at every level.

Well that got out of hand fast. There’s a new Substandard podcast coming tomorrow! We talk about the new Beauty and the Beast and gay Lefou and Disney movies in general. I rank the Disney animated movies—because that’s my move—and I’ll give you a small spoiler: The worst Disney film ever is The Little Mermaid. Download the show tomorrow and you’ll hear why.

And if you haven’t already, then subscribe on iTunes or Google Play. It’s great.

Best,

JVL