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Years ago, sitcoms,
police dramas, and just about every other TV genre, including
the news, depicted relatively flat, one-dimensional characters,
and viewers were satisfied with the little information about
them that was provided. We really didn't know, or would have
cared, for that matter, anything much about the original Joe
Friday's private life on or off of the screen. Ralph Kramdem
(Jackie Gleason) and Norton (Art Carney) were constantly exposing
us to their very current, very colorful personal on set opinions.
Lucy and Desi operated in the flamboyant present, both larger
than life, but the public really knew little about any of
these stars' lives.
We knew little, if anything,
about FDR's, Ike's, or JFK's personal "transgressions"
at the time they occurred, and as for the news media personalities,
sixty years ago during World War II we received our war news
(in black and white and suitably "sanitized") at
the movies, one of the "Selected Short Subjects"
from an elderly male voice talking over the strains of peppy
martial music. Even movies, newspapers, and magazines were
quite careful to keep any startling, intimate "tidbits"
away from the public. We were fed only the pre-approved bland
hype.
Now, we have all been
informed up to the eyebrows, so to speak, we know that Jerry
Orbach's character on Law
and Order is a recovering alcoholic, that
Anthony La Paglia's character (Without
a Trace) is having severe marital problems
and he had an affair (refreshingly unseen) with a co-worker,
that David Caruso's "Horatio" (Miami
CSI) had a "bad cop" brother, and
that the original CSI
includes a a recovering gambling addict the illegitimate daughter
of a Vegas kingpin.
Reality shows are screeching,
name calling, free-for-alls, and as for Springer and Maury:
"fuggedaboutit!" The discreet What's
My Line and Queen
for a Day programs were well-mannered, considerate
dinosaurs compared to the trailer trash, fifteen minutes of
fame genre hosted (better yet, refereed) by those two. Today,
both Clinton and Bush's private lives are subjected to intensive
examination. (Clinton didn't know what the word discretion
meant, and Bush's private life appears squeaky clean, if not
so his politics.) We get our current war news from suntanned
and sartorially splendid TV hunks, and even when embedded
in the battlefield, they manage (the women, too) to look gung-ho
and fashionably "Ralph Laurenish." Katie Couric
no longer just delivers the news, but asks some extremely
personal questions of her interviewees. And her personal life
is constantly subjected to undue scrutiny by supermarket rags.
Of course, "art
reflects life" has never been more true than it is now.
Novels, by their very nature, have always had many layers
of meaning and deep character analysis, plays have three acts
in which to impart information to the audience. Magazines
and newspapers have pages and pages to discuss anything and
everything, and movies have become longer than ever, the better
to spew out mountains of information on why their characters
are the way they are now, and exactly what in their backgrounds
caused them to become that way. Paintings and photographs
and music can be visited again and again by the individual
connoisseur and invested with her/his ideas of what they really
mean, and what they mean to them, particularly. 9/11 of course,
has had a lot to do with the fairly new and extensive backstories
that have lately been appearing. The world certainly changed
forever after that horrific event. We seem to want and need
to have more depth, breadth, and meaning in our personal lives.
There is also the high profile coverage of corporate greed,
clergy pedophilia, and airforce academy "date rape."
Oh yes, and let's not forget Afghanistan and Iraq.
As highly individualistic
Americans, we now feet that it is our God-given right to observe,
comment on, and make worldwide pronouncements on everyone's
morals and lifestyles. And, in order to do so, we all have
been put on a "need-to-know" "for-your-eyes-only"
basis, so can you blame television and other media for broadening
and deepening their backstories? We have also become a nation
of shrinks and self-help addicts, but also quick to jump into
the confessional ourselves. Medical knowledge had widened
considerably, too, and people like Betty Ford, Rush Limbaugh,
Mike Wallace, and other high-profile people are telling us
all about their problems and how they found help for themselves.
Therapy, AA, and antidepressants, are mainstream now.
Nowhere in the arts
is the "nitty-gritty" more abundant than on TV.
Television is for the short attention span audiences of today.
The big money right now is in voyeurism and confessionalism;
Dr. Phil is hugely popular, although he does stress that there
is no quick fix, and Oprah has wisely toned down her content.
We all have to work on ourselves, no longer is it possible
to believes in isolationism. "No man is an island"
has never been truer that today — especially with the
Internet. So TV shows, because they are fairly short, give
us continual tantalizing bytes of backstory so that we can
slowly digest the characters' problems over a week's time,
put those characters on our own couch and figure out from
whence they came; and in doing so, perhaps we can all learn
something more about ourselves and maybe try to improve our
lives a little more — all the while knowing, of course,
that those poor bastards in the blue box are so much more
screwed up that we are — thank God and the writers!
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