swampman posted:

The problem with these shows is they are television for the sake of television. Their number one aesthetic principle is that they must be good television. This primarily means they are easy to ignore. If you get distracted by a text message or conversation, you can get right back into the show when you return to it, whether it was paused or had been running. The audio alone can be enough to "watch" the show, so it lends itself to multitasking and background noise. This is "valuable" in the context of, like, Barthes' view of wrestling from the essay in Mythologies, as drama where every character, action, pose, moment, line of dialogue, is a full spectacle, a complete narrative within the moment, but as their only drive is to compete for the amount of time the public spends consuming television entertainment, this moment is empty and pointless. That's why so many of these shows have twisting plots that avoid a typical sense of story, because they have no aesthetic purpose beside their own pointless self-continuation. The valuable shows don't take it for granted that art is a process by which people establish cultural meaning, they try to actually say something...

that reminds me what i read about Police Squad! on Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia that anyone can edit:

Cancellation

ABC announced the cancellation of Police Squad! after four of its six episodes had aired in March 1982. The final two episodes were aired that summer. According to the DVD Commentary, then-ABC entertainment president Tony Thomopoulos said "Police Squad! was cancelled because the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it." What Thomopoulos meant was that the viewer had to actually pay close attention to the show in order to get much of the humor, while most other TV shows did not demand as much effort from the viewer. In its annual "Cheers and Jeers" issue, TV Guide magazine called the explanation for the cancellation "the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series."

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, has said, "If Police Squad! had been made twenty years later, it would have been a smash. It was before its time. In 1982 your average viewer was unable to cope with its pace, its quick-fire jokes. But these days they'd have no problems keeping up, I think we've proved that."

somewhere else they wrote about how people like, would just keep the tv on in the background while they would do something else, prepare dinner, knit, talk, read the newspaper, and alot of television shows played to that, kept things very simple and easy to jump back into (or at the very least know what was generally going on). and with Police Squad! alot of people--some would just listen to the show--didn't even realize it was a comedy, they payed that little attention

Crow posted:

somewhere else they wrote about how people like, would just keep the tv on in the background while they would do something else, prepare dinner, knit, talk, read the newspaper, and alot of television shows played to that, kept things very simple and easy to jump back into (or at the very least know what was generally going on). and with Police Squad! alot of people--some would just listen to the show--didn't even realize it was a comedy, they payed that little attention

It's a shame that one of the Zucker brothers went crazy and the other directed Rat Race.

discipline posted:

I've watched about 12 hours of television so far this week it's better than drinking myself to death ~I suppose~

this is cool book

also his name is literally gerry mander how did that happen

mongosteen posted:

cuts exist as narrative devices to remove superfluous crap and make structuring scenes easier

*cuts you outta here*

discipline posted:

Zen_Punk posted:

this is cool book

yes I love it! it's basically what started lil radical me, at the tender age of 16

i think he goes off the rails a little when he starts going on about ~spirituality~ and whatnot but the message that no technology is just neutral or harmless re:society and the individual is a good one.

I need to check that book out again but there are so many books, so little motivation to stop vidyagamin or whatever and go read them

(book is 4 arguments for the elimination of television)

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

goatstein, i have a beard

yeah her name's Amy lmao

tpaine posted:

im a curvy boyish pear tee hee

have you read proenza

discipline posted:

it's interesting when this happens in fashion, they can't differentiate by race and they have all these words to differentiate between body types, but for people in the fashion industry, who would be writing this article, the human phenotype is a more abstract concept. so they use non-racial words to designate race. you get the same thing with the color "nude," a relic from when high fashion was exclusively white... anyway these articles only exist to get us to glance at an advertisement, being outrageously stupid and offensive is a great attention-getter after all....