“You never know when you’re living in a golden age,” remarked one of the subjects in the great documentary about the small influential cable channel in Los Angeles, “The Z Channel.” And I think that applies to television these days. After a decade or so now of thinking of television as being mostly a wasteland, save for the glory and high quality of HBO, I turn around and find there is great television everywhere. Here’s a sample:
Friday Night Lights, the network TV show about the small high school football team, has incredible heart and is just amazingly good. It feels like it should be on HBO. But it’s network TV. I’m watching the first season now on DVD.
Mad Men, the amc drama about ad executives in 1960, is amazingly done, a stylistic and analytical tour de force.
Chuck, the sci-fi farce about the CIA and such, is slapstick to be sure, but good slapstick. I’ve watched every episode.
And so on. And I haven’t even gone into all the good HBO stuff, which doesn’t count because I knew about that already.
The amazing thing to me about good TV is that it exists in very post-modern fashion. There seems to be no dominant universe. No one talks about TV anymore around the water cooler, as far as I can tell, because they are all watching different shows. If they are watching at all. Instead you hear about good TV here and there, from friends, relations or an odd news story. You have to inquire to watch good TV. My brother in law told me about this show called The Unit, produced by David Mamet. It wasn’t exactly to my liking, but it was certainly of high quaity. I had never heard of it before.
The other amazing TV is that all this great TV isn’t just on TV. It’s on DVD, and ITunes, Iphones, and your laptop. I watched Chuck on either my Iphone or my Mac laptop. Same with Mad Men. As for Friday Night Lights, I watched it all on DVD, a year after it came out. Get this. I don’t even have cable television. Television for me has become about Netflix and downloads from Itunes at $1.99 a pop. It’s a good way to live. Don’t you think?