Posted on 05/09/2006 8:55:37 AM PDT by Natty Bumppo@frontier.net
Rats in the Ruins
My Two Cents on Cable TV
By David J. Aland 5 May 2006
Do you remember when HBO first aired on the local cable television network? What an idea – to get recent boxoffice films by television, relatively soon after their release. This was genuine out-of-the-boxoffice thinking, and it caught on fast. But somewhere along the line, it looks like either Hollywood couldn’t produce enough movies, or the cable channels couldn’t afford to buy enough Hollywood distribution rights. HBO gave way to CINEMAX, and STARZ, and other movie channels, and splintered into more than a few of its own schizoid siblings.
Splintered. Schizoid. These are actually not all that inaccurate when it comes to characterizing what has become of Charles Francis Dolan’s brainchild, HBO. From it’s modest beginnings as a Manhattan cable channel, HBO has become a major force in moviemaking as well as movie distribution, and has grown into more of a network than most of the networks can afford to be. There are a dozen different HBO channels now, some in other languages, some for kids, some for grownups, some for new stuff, some for old.
But some of it is just plain weird.
The days of the relatively simple miniseries, like “Band of Brothers” or “From Earth to the Moon” are long gone. HBOs recent lineup is a case study in dysfunctional relationships, bizarre settings, and darkly gothic characters. There is “OZ”, an intimate examination of the high-security prison social scene, as well as “The Wire” and “The Sopranos”, close-up looks at the kind of monsters who end up (or should end up) in places like OZ. The very popularity of these shows says scary things about our culture.
There are shows like “Arli$$”, “The Entourage”, and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” that celebrate venality and self-centered behavior, and shows like “Six Feet Under” and “Big Love” which attempt to normalize entirely abnormal social and family situations. But, for as absurd as all of these may be, the dark underbelly of HBO is even darker than that.
Two programs, “Deadwood” and “Carnivale” are about as garish a depiction of worm-ridden psyches as you can get this side of Edgar Allen Poe on a bender. Gratuitously violent, and depicting all the characters as mean-spirited and grim, these programs plumb the sewers of human behavior in an unremittingly harsh light.
Sex, sodomy, bestiality, incest, torture, murder, graphic mutilation, beheadings, betrayal, suicide, drugs, rape, depravity – these shows have all the elements of the fall of Constantinople without (except, perhaps, for the miniseries “Rome”) the architecture. It’s as though the only topics left to dramatize in Western culture are the manic fringes and the psychological undercrofts. No wonder other cultures think we’ve become morally bankrupt. It is a free-for-all of the macabre and revolting.
What drives this fascination with the kind of stuff you would normally look queasily away from taking over our televisions? Is it the license of a largely unregulated cable industry, which evades the “decency” boundaries of network television? Is it because we have so much choice these days that there is space for just about every niche interest to get it’s fifteen minutes of airtime? Or is it something more troubling – have we lost the ability or will to recognize and avoid garbage?
We can watch the evening news from just about every country on earth that actually has evening news, yet we remain blissfully unaware of what is going on around us. There are channels for boring academics and channels for boring politicians, but have we learned anything? There are sports, semi-sports, and non-sports, like paint-ball tournaments, but do we stay nailed to our La-Z-Boy and never go outside to play? Do we watch things in which we have no interest, just because it’s on? Do we watch things that we shouldn’t or the same reason?
It’s one thing to have diversity and choice, but at what point does being “open-minded” about what’s on TV start to trump our better judgment? Being judgmental is not necessarily a bad thing, when it allows us to make healthy choices like taking out the garbage. But sit up late some night and channel-surf your local distributors offerings and ask yourself this question: Is all of this stuff this really entertainment, or am I just watching the rats feed off the garbage?
If your answer is the former, then you’d better clean your whiskers.
David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College.
Oz and The Sopranos this season both had me wondering about cable's extreme interest in gay sex in "straight" shows. They're like Details magazine readers secret fantasies. Yuck.
And the plot jumps around without notice, too. It is as if the writers are running out of crack cocaine.
There, I fixed your post. :-)
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