By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, and I’m at my wooden-planked, farmer’s table that is also our dining table. It seats as many as eight people, but usually its just me and Susan down on one end eating salmon, salad and sipping a varietal nectar from California. Sometimes we put Pasta Roni and Pinot on a tray and climb upstairs where there is a television.
Our typical television routine is to watch about 30 minutes of CNN — the “Situation Room” or “Up Front With Erin Burnett.” The news these days can be apocryphal — Ukraine, Gaza — in which case Ms. Burnett comes to us live from Tel Aviv without lipstick or make-up. Her format also calls for a panel of experts whose credentials usually involve a recently written book and having ordered caviar at the Russian Tea Room. Her inquiry also includes lengthy questions that most lawyers would call “leading.”
As a lawyer, I groan when I hear these long-winded questions that suggest the answer; and I dislike those questions that ask, “How does this (bombing, beheading, mass killing) make you feel?” But then there is BBC (that I listen to at 3 a.m.) that usually stays away from “How do you feel?” questions.
After Wolf and Erin, Susan and I move over to Netflix and Prime looking for something like “The Crown” or “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad” to take us away from the tedium and frustration of our lives here in Beaufort County. Unfortunately we wind up watching characters less menacing (or complex) than Tony Soprano or Don Draper. Usually we grudgingly settle for a predictable, quickly made re-tread with Diane Keaton or Julia Roberts or Michael Douglas delivering their once clever dialogue.
In the end these folks just can’t deliver the goods anymore.
Michael Schulman, writing in the New Yorker on November 6, has noticed this same deterioration in television programming and has written a history of the past twenty (20) years sometimes called the “Golden Age of Television.”
“When did ‘prestige TV’ jump the shark, or maybe just get chomped up in its jaws? Flip around for something to watch, and you’ll find star-crammed absurdities …”
“What happened? One answer is what always happens; golden ages never last.” Schulman then refers us to some newly-published non-fiction, “Pandora’s Box,” by Peter Biskind for answers to “What happened?”
Biskind begins with HBO in the 90s and its expansion into edgy, controversial territories like “Oz,” “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “Game of Thrones.” He says it didn’t take long for other networks — Starz and AMC — to want a piece of the action.
Biskind introduces us to writers, by name, who “reinvented the Mob drama” by giving us balding, middle-aged men who could kill as easily as they could urinate on the side of the road. Men who killed other men by burning them alive then shoving their dead bodies in barrels of hydrochloric acid. Now, suddenly, everyone was talking about these scenes at the “water cooler” the next morning even though the iconic water cooler was long gone.
Biskind says that success at HBO led to “internecine warfare, bad calls and overdevelopment,” and eventually another company stepped in and grabbed the torch — the torch carrier being Netflix who green-lit “House of Cards.”
“House of Cards” gave us ambition and banality metastasizing its way into full-fledged, full-throated evil in the bodies of Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.
Of course we knew that Congress was a bad place and here, in a wonderfully watchable format, we got proof that Capital Hill was a back-stabbing, hypocritical hell where any vestige of altruism went to die. We saw this calculated, Hamlet-worthy evil every week and it confirmed what we all knew — that representative government is beyond redemption.
After Netflix all hell broke loose when Amazon, Disney and the algorithm-addicted MBAs joined the fray spreading thin the millions of people who once watched HBO’s exclusive domain. Now there is an ongoing scramble, and according to Biskind, the common goal is reaching the largest possible audience as cheaply as possible. The default setting, according to Schulman, is “crap.”
For us that means swimming through the “crap” every evening hoping for a legacy film (“Ma and Pa Kettle”) in somebody’s vault. Or we seek help from the assisted living channel, aka PBS, and dial-up “Father Brown” or “GrantChester,” knowing the Brits can put us down before the “two-murders-and-sermon” episode is over.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
