Criticizing Criticism: What A Media Critic Doesn’t Seem To Understand About Television
Part 1: TV May Be Art Sometimes. It’s Always Been A Business
I have spent many years writing about the fundamental flaws so many of the people in my business have in regard to TV and to media. Yesterday, I read a long column by Jeff Jarvis, who worked briefly in television and has spent the decades since leaving the field criticizing the media and internet. He wrote a long column about the current flaws in television. I criticized his writing in two comments, one which he basically ignored and one where he faulted me for not remembering his job history. The latter was my mistake. That said, the make up of the column he wrote (which I will not highlight) disturbs me because it has all the hallmarks of someone who wants to complain about television without fundamentally understand — or perhaps even caring — how it actually works. Since both are legitimately possible — this is a big world and not all people, certainly not me, understand how television works — I consider this an open letter to him. On the off chance he ends up reading this column, Jarvis fundamentally needs to understand what he either has forgotten or ever acknowledged about the medium he chooses to write about. Because fundamentally, it demonstrates several flawed arguments. There is a possibility he made read this column and consider me a hack or pretentious. All I will say I love television dearly and I am concerned about its eventual fate as much as he is. But his column seems not to take into account several realities. As I have written about them recently and believe they apply here, I feel qualified to write about them.
Those of you who remember the last column I wrote in this series may remember the fundamental disconnect that so many critics and scholars seem to see about the relationship of art as it applies to commerce. I will now quote that same column:
Every professor of English literature, every New York film critic, basically anyone who has looked at any form of art basically ignores any idea that it was make money for someone, certainly not the artist. Whether they were a poet or a painter, a musician or a filmmaker, no matter how long ago or what country they were in, they were doing solely for the purpose of making art. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, and yes, Orson Welles made Citizen Kane only for the purpose of making art. They did it for free. They didn’t need to eat or pay rent. No they created art solely for posterity and their patrons and absolutely no other reason.
That’s some weapons grade bullshit. All of these scholars and academics will go through the motions of saying, it’s a shame that Renoir and Keats or Chopin died in poverty and unknown at the time, but they live on through their arts. Somehow the horrors of poverty, homelessness and disease only seem insignificant when it comes to artists. I guarantee you that Rembrandt or Schubert or any of the dozens or hundreds of other artists would have gladly sacrificed the idea of being remembered if they could have had heat in their home or food on their table.
And television has never been any different. Hell, they’ve told us that right up front in the names of some of the stations. The ‘C’ in both NBC and ABC stood for ‘Company’. The last two letters in HBO stand for Box Office. That would seem to indicate that networks are about making money first and art, secondary if at all.
We may evoke the Golden Age as being about creativity instead of commerce, but let’s not kid ourselves. Money was a big part of it, certainly for the executives. If The Sopranos hadn’t had massive ratings its first season, I seriously doubt it would have lasted a full season. If The Shield had not broken basic cable ratings records, every cable channel wouldn’t have tried to experiment. Mad Men was basically made to put AMC on the map as a channel in a way it hadn’t been for fifteen years. Television didn’t stop being a business during the Golden Age; everybody got the creative freedom they did because they were trying to create the next Sopranos. The networks didn’t go on attack in the first decade in the 2000s to prove they could compete creatively: West Wing and 24 and Lost got greenlit because the networks were trying to get hits. We may disagree about why HBO cancelled Deadwood; no one argues that it was starting to get too expensive and the returns for the network were diminishing.
And let’s remind everybody that the definition of hit in the ‘Golden Age’ was based on the fragmenting of the TV landscape. Shows like The Good Wife that managed ten millions viewers a year would never have survived one season in the 1980s, let alone seven. There was a redefinition by critics what a ‘hit’ show was. The fact that those same hits began making less and less money for network television was fundamentally ignored by many of those same critics.
Jarvis also argues that so much of television is suffering to day because corporations are creating monopolies among cable channels and streaming services, that fewer markets is leading to the end of creativity among show runs. And that is undeniable. Also undeniable: another kind of monopoly has eroded creativity in television well before the corporations took over. It was called Emmy nominations.
For all the talk about how the Golden Age led to the expansion of creativity across the cable landscape, here are the facts. From the debut season of The Sopranos to this year, HBO has won the Emmy for Best Drama eight times for three shows. AMC has won it six times for two shows. The only other cable network that has managed to win Best Drama is Showtime for Homeland in 2011. FX, the groundbreaker in so much great basic cable programming from Rescue Me to Sons of Anarchy has had two series — Damages and The Americans — nominated a grand total of four times for Best Drama in the past twenty years. It has slightly better luck in the comedies and much more in Limited Series.
As for streaming services, Netflix has won Best Drama exactly once: for The Crown in 2021. Hulu won once for The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017. Amazon took Best Comedy twice — Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Fleabag. For all intents and purposes the Emmys is just as an exclusive club for nominations as it was when there were only three networks.
Of course using the Emmys as the be-all and end-all of determining which series is the best has always been a bad yardstick: this has been a club that would never admit either the WB or the CW even though their series were as good as some of cable and streaming’s best and in some cases had more viewers. But in another way, you have to consider if all the dozens of other networks haven’t spent the last decade getting the hint.
A network’s job is to make money. Creativity and awards are distinctly second place. But if series as great as Battlestar Galactica and Rectify and UnReal can’t even get invited to the party, then what motivation do they have to keep turning them out? A business turning out a product that no one is willing to buy is never going to succeed. Why do critics like Jarvis blame so many networks for being businesses first?
The broadcast networks, to be clear, have gotten the message. What’s the point of putting all your effort into creative gems when the most mediocre cable drama will get all the nominations and awards instead? I made this argument while The Good Wife was doing breathtaking work and all of the Emmy nominations were going to period pieces like Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones. But what’s the point of laboring on a piece like Parenthood which is barely watched by anyone when the collective reaction by the Emmys is to say that House of Cards is better? Is it a tragedy that NBC may soon be giving up its 10 PM time slot for local news? Obviously. But what options have they if no one is going to watch any of the series they put there? (Jarvis, of course, bad mouths NBC for this decision in the first place while holding them responsible for their lack of creativity as well, which is the obliviousness of critics I’ve always observed.) And other cable networks have been getting the message long before the mergers started: A & E, Lifetime, USA…what’s the point of creating a show like The Sinner if no one’s going to watch or acknowledge it? Art can’t be created in a vacuum and expect to make money for its patrons.
And to be clear some of the other rants in Jarvis’ article are that of a tired, bitter old crank. He says he barely holds on to cable subscriptions for a few shows and doesn’t want to subscribe the streaming channels. I’d feel more sympathy for him if, this wasn’t, you know the business model of every single TV service since the beginning of the medium. HBO created The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire; it also created Entourage, Tell Me That You Love Me and Carnivale. Did I like any of the latter? No. But I didn’t cancel my subscription because I was patient. I hated Game of Thrones but I thought it was the cost of getting The Deuce and Boardwalk Empire.
As for not wanting to subscribe to streaming services because he doesn’t want to have to pay for them — I have neither sympathy nor empathy for Jarvis. You don’t want to subscribe to Apple Plus, fine. You don’t get to watch Ted Lasso or Severance. You don’t want to subscribe to Hulu; you don’t get to experience the joys of Only Murders in the Building or Reservation Dogs. And for the millions of viewers now complaining that most of what is on streaming is crap, to paraphrase Theodore Sturgeon: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” This rule did not change when the Golden Age began; the percentage might have dropped to maybe eighty or seventy-five percent; but as fondly as so many critics want to remember the Golden Age and Peak TV, I would remind them that the stinkers didn’t disappear just because of all of the great television. For every The Shield, we got Dirt. For every Homeland, we got House of Lies. For every Breaking Bad, we got Low Winter Sun. And for every Deadwood, we got John From Cincinnati. Some of them might have been more creative than the Homeboys From Outer Space and Unhappily Ever After, but that didn’t make them any better.
There has not been, nor will there ever be, a network or service that ever provides you with only the shows you want to watch. Come to think of it, the algorithms that are currently being used to drive viewers to certain shows are part of the reason were at least partially in this mess. You want to blame the current state of television in all its forms on corporations ruining the way we watch television? That’s fine; no one ever lost money by blaming corporate America for the state of anything. But don’t pretend that this is anything new or that in a sense; corporations are responsible for a lot of the great television you enjoyed decades ago. When Davids Chase, Milch and Simon went to HBO to begin the revolution, they did it because they wanted creative freedom to realize their artistic vision. But don’t pretend that they somehow could have managed to create their legendary series if the network executives and the managers hadn’t been willing to give them the money to do it. None of the writers, directors, and actors and creative staff would have been able to create the iconic shows we have enjoyed for two decades if a corporation or a business — because that’s what networks are and all of those people do not work for free — had been willing to invest in their dreams.
TV Critics want to view Peak TV as art? That’s their prerogative. But if you want to pretend capitalism had nothing to do with it, if you want to pretend that these showrunners created this scripts purely because they love writing, that the executive greenlit them only because they liked the idea, that the crew and actors were assembled only for the love of the dream, and that everybody put together this TV show for no reason other than to create a work of art — then you are horribly, ridiculous naïve. Or a liberal arts professor or a critic in general (see the previous piece.)
The thing is Jarvis not only seems to believe just that, he thinks that very perspective may be the only thing to save television as an art form. To explain what he’s talking about and just how wrong is will require a follow up in which I will have don a different hat as well as that of the critic.