Monday, January 17, 2011

We Are In A Golden Age Of Awful Television

We are in a golden age of awful television "The thing is, people spend so much time talking about how this new television paradigm has created amazing shows like Mad Men, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Breaking Bad that they ignore the other side of this brave new world - namely, that we are in a golden age of awful television unlike anything we've ever seen, particularly in the realm of science fiction."

"So if that's the track record for a good example of this kind of show, how bad could things get with weaker examples of the form? Just look at shows like FlashForward, The Event, and to some extent V, which are all clearly indebted to Lost in their tone and approach. In their way, these shows are also the spiritual successors of Seinfeld, because they're all essentially shows about nothing. These are all shows without real characters, without real action, without...well, without pretty much anything. It's almost heroic how committed these shows are to never doing anything that might be considered interesting."

It goes on to critique each of those shows pretty accurately and then to talk about serialized story telling a la Lost. "We are indeed in a golden age of television, but there's another side to that story. The rise of more complicated, sophisticated types of storytelling have given TV shows an opportunity to screw up royally in ways we've never before imagined. "

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