Fear and Self-Loathing in Couchland: Eight Myths About Television‪.‬

I want to make it clear from the outset that I speak as someone who believes television is a medium worth taking seriously. Put that way, the point may sound a little condescending; but the reason I use that phrase is because it is part of my contention that both the makers and watchers of television don't take it seriously enough. When we do talk about the power of television, or the place of television within our cultural experience, we almost always do so in ways that leave all the important questions unasked. This in turn leads to a lack of precisely the critical discourse we need if we are to realize television's potential as a medium. Without such a discourse, television is all too likely to remain in its current dismal state: suffused with mediocrity, jangling with advertising, numbing in its pointless variety. I am not one of those people who despise television, who sometimes appear to think that moral worth is generated by removing all televisions from the home.(1) This group of voluntary media-fasters, which includes some of my best friends, does possess a certain intellectual purity. And I think I understand something of the desire to excise television from their lives -- even if I don't always share their sense of what such an excision proves or achieves. For instance, though the proposition is probably unfalsifiable, I don't believe television has made me more stupid or less productive. Of course, like most people who watch television, I am aware of its many shortcomings; naturally I have been tempted, at times, to throw my own set out the window, as in the famous opening sequence of the old SCTV comedy series. (The irony of illustrating the point with that particular cultural reference is obvious.) Television is annoying and pointless often enough to make it seem rational, now and then, to get rid of it altogether.