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[Nov. 7th, 2006|05:54 pm] |
There have only been two shows that qualify as great works of art in all of North American television that I am aware of. I don't mean that hyperbolically. Television is a fucking wasteland, and there are really only two shows that are great works of art that I'm aware of.
The two great works of art on television are the original series of Star Trek and (maybe) Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are certainly many other fine, amusing, interesting shows on television, but there are few works of art amongst them, and of those works of art, only two are great.
I'm using a definition of "great work of art" that comes out of Kant and Gadamer here. In this tradition, we can understand a great work of art as one that requires an act of understanding that is shaped by our tastes, that in turn changes our tastes and therefore our capability to understand any other work of art, and even the original work of art that made this change (we grow more sophisticated in our tastes over time). This hermeneutic circle is the process of aesthetic development, and in doing this, we partake of a kind of development analogous to moral development, which allows us to access the space of reasons where freedom and beauty can be spoken of as parts of the world.
Under this view, to qualify as a great work of art, a work of art must have several features.
First, it must have an element of strangeness to it. This strangeness places it outside our current tastes, and prevents its total assimilation to those tastes. There is always something about the great work of art that we cannot fit easily into a critical structure.
Second, the great work of art must engage with a tradition. There must be an element of the familiar by which we begin to understand the work. This familiarity comes from the work being situated within body of works (not necessarily themselves great works of art) that provide us with the basis for interpreting and understanding it. A work of art that was completely unfamiliar would simply be unintelligible - we could not make sense of it.
Third, the great work of art must sophisticate our tastes. Once we have understood it, it must change the way we understand other works, and even itself. We must be unable to ignore it in order to properly understand the tradition it comes from, and we must be unable to ignore its influence when we examine and attempt to understand other works of art.
It is my contention that only Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer accomplish this within the field of television. I can't think of another show shown in North America that fulfills those three characteristics. There are many movies that have done so (Unforgiven, by Clint Eastwood, is an example of one, as is the Godfather), but I'm discounting movies from this.
The original series of Star Trek qualifies because it is incredibly influential on both the production and criticism of science fiction shows. Every science fiction show since Star Trek can be read as a reaction, in one way or another, to some feature of Star Trek. They aren't all derivative of it, but they either take some feature or features from it, or else self-consciously undermine its claims about the future, about humanity, and about the power of reason to revolutionise the human condition. I'm not going to go exhaustively through the field of science fiction shows since it, but let me point to a few where Star Trek's influence is particularly obvious: Andromeda, Babylon 5, Farscape, Stargate SG-1.
The strangeness of Star Trek is the revolutionary relationship to the characteristics of humanity that Star Trek establishes. It is the most unabashedly intelligently moral show I have ever seen. No one on Star Trek ever "follows their heart" and the critical watcher is given to understand that this simply wouldn't be intelligible to the people on this show (the fact that later Star Trek series do begin pushing this "moral" is one reason amongst many that they aren't great works of art like the original series). Instead, every good person on Star Trek gives reasons for what they do, and considers it their moral duty to be able to justify themselves in this way. When they can't, they suffer anguish over it (for example, the episode where Scotty is accused of killing a woman, and his only defense is that he was drunk and therefore can't remember whether he did or not, or what provoked him to do so).
You can see this especially clearly, I think, in the interaction between McCoy and Spock. Supposedly, Spock is the "rational" one and McCoy the "emotional" one but really, both characters are rational, and they merely operate within different intellectual systems. Spock is a utilitarian, and therefore refuses to accept the ability of sentiment to provide moral guidance. McCoy does believe that sentiment can provide us with moral intuitions. Both characters constantly attempt to convince Kirk that their viewpoint is right by giving him reasons to take particular courses of action. Neither one is actually "irrational" in any meaningful sense. Rather, they disagree about the criteria of moral justification while agreeing that rational moral justification itself is a necessary act.
This is actually quite different than most shows on television. It's not merely a matter of the quality of writing or anything like that. Rather, one often finds on televisions shows today a distinction between sentiment and reason. Sentiment is presented on these shows as being completely irrational - without a legitimate source that justifies its occurrence. One falls in love, despite not knowing anything about the object of that love. One suspects the bad guy is bad, without any rational justification (when the initial judgement is made). Rather than provide reasons that characters feel certain sentiments, or showing them grappling with justifying or rationalising a particular feeling, characters merely assert their feelings, then demand recognition of them from others. No attempt is made to explain them, or allow us to understand why they feel a particular way - because there usually isn't one, other than the writers wanting to make the characters do something related to those feelings.
As a result, this remains the strangeness of Star Trek - the idea that one's tastes, one's beliefs, one's feelings and everything about one is contingent, and could really be changed if one merely rationally investigated one's self with the proper willingness to respond to the conclusions one finds. The familiarity is, of course, its use of allegory and the science fiction genre, and the sorts of moral problems that it chooses to deal with.
For Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the familiarity comes from its use of the teenage romance and horror genres, its use of archetypal characters from those genres (both the monsters and the "Scooby Gang") and its use of self-conscious humour. The strangeness of Buffy is its constant, unrelenting subversion of the traditions it takes part of. There isn't an episode of Buffy I can think of where some trope of these genres isn't being criticised or used ironically. Very few other shows subvert their genres in as profound a way as Buffy does, either because they are not as well-written or because they gradually come to pick easier and easier targets to satirise (for example, the Daily Show, which claims to subvert and satirise the news media, but which doesn't actually do so in any meaningful way). This unrelenting subversion of the cliches of the teen romance and horror genres makes everything in Buffy unlike the rest of the genre, even its imitators (Supernatural, Smallville) and provides it with an individuality that those other products lack.
The sophistication of Buffy comes from that subversion of the genre as well. After watching it we cannot go back to appreciating teen romances or horror shows in the same way (once again, think of how poorly Supernatural and Smallville compare). We understand them differently, now as just genre pieces without much importance, and without as deft and clever a use as Buffy had.
Anyhow, I'd be willing to take candidates for other great works of art on television, but I honestly can't think of any myself. There are many amusing, interesting, and well-written shows on television, but none of them seem to have this character. Sopranos or any other HBO show like Carnivale, Deadwood, etc. aren't (well, Deadwood might be, but I'm growing increasingly more dubious of that as I watch it), and neither are Britcoms like the Office or Extras. Certainly no sitcom (with the possible exception of Lucky Louie) is. |
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