Column in Antenna: Historical Comedies Now

I just published a new column in the Antenna blog at Madison. It's light on socially significant TV and high on TV pleasure. Here's the first paragraph.

America Needs Historical Comedies Now

One day this January, ABC picked up four new TV pilots: a crime procedural set in the nineteenth century with Edgar Allan Poe as detective-protagonist; a “sexy soap” set at iconic airline Pan Am in the 1960s; and two multicamera comedies. The post reporting the pick-ups on Deadline Hollywood said that one of the comedies, Work It, had a “Bosom Buddies vibe to it.” The description of the other, Lost and Found, said it was about a party girl whose life is “turned upside down when the conservative 18 year old son she gave up for adoption shows up on her doorstep,” suggesting another early-80s sitcom icon, Alex Keaton. In both cases, the comedies intertextually reference the TV past, but they don’t go so far as actually setting themselves in it. While I am all for multicamera comedies, the juxtaposition of the period dramas and contemporary comedies is worth thinking about.

Read more here...

A.O. Scott on Film vs. TV

Are Films Bad or is TV Just Better?

A.O. Scott from October:

"Look back over the past decade. How many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological density of “The Sopranos” or “The Wire”? Engaged recent American history with the verve and insight of “Mad Men”? Turned indeterminacy and ambiguity into high entertainment with the conviction of “Lost”? Addressed modern families with the sharp humor and sly warmth of “Modern Family”"

Newcomb/McPherson Conversation

Recently I've been thinking about Newcomb's cultural forum model of television, which I think remains a compelling, useful way to think about how television can work. The terms of how it works maybe re-theorized--and that's one of the things that my work has done tangentially. Here's a great conversation between Horace Newcomb and Tara McPherson that deals with some of Newcomb's reservations about the model, though it really ranges much wider.

Example, on the Iraq War:

"I do think one reason there may not be a more organized antiwar effort is because we are not forced to watch one of three networks every night and that we can avoid so much by watching something else. There is no authoritative core, no cultural center as there was in the 1960s. I don't want to romanticize that, it was a very repressive core in so many ways, but now you can choose to avoid ever seeing much about the war or you can express your opinions in a very fragmented media sphere."