WHEN I WAS a kid, it was
Fred Rogers who did it. Hyperactive as hell, liable to upend any apple cart in the general vicinity, Rogers was the thing that would keep me still. My parents found it funny -- that their holy terror of a first born calmly and attentively clocked in to a plain speaking man in a duffy cardigan.
Now, if you're of a certain type you could spin that story into all manner of foo about the narcotic aspects of
TeeVee. How it kills the imagination. Never mind the fact that there was one other thing that could still me - playing with small plastic
Hotwheels cars on the windowsill.
In fact, if I'm honest, my first, earliest flashes of memory are flickering pieces of a small boy running the cars back and forth over that sill.
TV does loom large in my consciousness, though. I can also remember watching the baseball playoffs with my grandfather in the yellow living room of my first house in
New City, New York, after we'd made the move out of the city. My grandfather was a
Mets fan.
Then there's a clear memory that isn't of tv, but sparked by it. I'm sitting on the toilet, watching my father shave in the morning, and I'm quizzing him about why the
President is in trouble. He doesn't know quite how to take it -- but all I know is that the President is getting talked a lot about on TV. There are
Senators --
a word I'd just learned -- holding
hearings -- another new word. And it looks like the President might be
resigning. Or maybe he
has resigned -- I'm not sure of the timing. What I remember is my father making a pretty good punt. He explains that "
the President isn't necessarily a bad man. But he lied to protect his friends. It's good to protect your friends, but not if you have to lie about it."This moral discussion with a five year old was brought to you by
the magic of television.It really has been that way my whole life. I went home for lunch one day and watched the Space Shuttle
Challenger explode. When I was terrified by the prospect of moving to Canada, I seized on the way I'd watched the
Olympics from
Montreal the year before: It hadn't looked so bad, then. They evidently did have
summer there -- that was a relief, when you're eight, and contemplating a move from
Florida.
I remember the parents letting me stay up to watch
Roots. It reformed and rebooted how I felt about race and people. It drove me onto my
Abe Lincoln kick, devouring everything I could read about slavery and the Civil War.
And I was so piqued by not being able to understand the
SNL joke,
"Generalissimo Franco is still dead," on a rerun I saw in Maine in 1981 that it led me to research, in turn:
Franco, Fascism, The Spanish Civil War, and through
Guernica,
Pablo Picasso.Not bad for an idiot box.
When I graduated University and went out in the workforce, I found myself working with older producers who I got along with very well. Some of them were confused by how old I was -- I seemed more in tune with what they were going through than a kid of 20. I didn't tell them that it was because of
thirtysomething, and
Murphy Brown.Then I got the reverse-tip. I started teaching back at
Ryerson, and I was terrified that my students would see me as a fraud, as someone who knew not much more than they did. Then I saw a program called
My So Called Life and was reminded that the things that they had struggled with -- more recently than I -- put them in a different place. It rebooted how I could relate to them.
In 1958, ten years before I was born,
Edward R. Murrow gave a speech to the
Radio and Television News Directors Conference in Chicago. The scene is recreated lovingly in
Good Night and Good Luck. What Murrow said that day essentially sums up my personal experience with the medium of television:
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.
For me, the weapon of television has indeed been very useful. It's shown me the lives of people I could not have imagined. It's helped me find compassion for others whose lives are so different than mine. It's dramatized experiences that have taught me about our shared humanity. It has
never been merely wires, and lights in a box.
Which is why I have
no patience for those who want to simplify the whole medium into something ugly -- who preach things like TV turnoff day and declaim proudly that they
"never watch television." Perversely, in Canada we sometimes give TV shows to these people - or we try with this programming strategy or that to reach them. The non-tv watchers. The people who don't love television.
I know that I did not drift into working in Television.
I actively sought it out. My post-secondary education was based around it. I worked as a producer for almost a decade. And what finally caused me to overcome fear and to make the leap to writing was the knowledge that I wasn't part of making the kind of TV that had so
inspired me when I was a child. I wasn't showing sides of people that hadn't been considered. I wasn't entertaining people while also throwing a spotlight on the sadness, the joy, and the puzzling contradictions of the human condition.
I've spent the lion's share of another decade working my way up and through, trying to get to a point where I can get some stories like that on the air. (And let me tell you folks, it's been a journey -- and only now am I seeing traction) I like to say that what I want to do is to write things that just entertain people -- that people have tough enough lives, and at the end of the day when they come home they should be able to watch something that engages them, that makes them feel connected or joyful, that helps them to catharticaly exercise whatever they're going through.
But that's
not the
full story. I decry the interlopers who think they're making
"important tv," who don't care as much about the
story as the
message. It's not because I don't think TV can have that effect. It's cause I think they miss the point.
All TV carries that message. Our role is to imbue our stories and characters with the stuff of truth. If we are
truthful while we make people laugh, and think, and feel, then surely the message will take care of itself.
This is how I feel about TV. So I understand the deep feelings fans have for characters they connect with; I share those feelings. I know all about being tense and excited to see what happens next. I'm with you on that one, too.
What's more, I would say that the overwhelming majority of people who write the Television you watch feel
exactly the same way you do. We all have our stories and our seminal TV moments. We all are struggling to get truth out there and up there on the screen, not because
"we have something to say," but because
we all have something to say, and maybe seeing people who are like us, or people who are not like us at all but who go through the same things we do -- maybe, just maybe that can increase our understanding of the world. Maybe it can cut through
indifference,
ignorance and
intolerance.
The TV medium used to be full of people on the other side of the aisle --
producers -- who approached the telling of story from a different way. Yeah, they were concerned with the money side of it. But the idea of
story was not unknown to them. But twenty years of solid media concentration in the United States has taken those people out of the running. That's what's behind that letter last week, where 80 Producers asked
Variety to stop referring to the AMPTP as "producers."
To me, to
us -- you are the audience. You engage with the teleplays we bring you, and the agree to which you do or don't charts our rise and fall -- both professionally and artistically.
But to the people who make the decisions in Hollywood today -- to the people who
really have the power to end this
WGA strike, you are merely lines on a balance sheet. The companies they run are leveraged across many different industries. The TV/Media side is only one small piece. Today, it's more important that that piece be cost effective and maximize shareholder value than it is to bring you those characters and stories that mean something to you.
Not only is Television merely wires and lights in a box;
they're not even focused on the box. The box is merely one among many. The people who don't care about Television are running Television. And for you, for me, for this strike, for the experience I've had with TV
my entire life -- that's a disaster.
Now you have people like
Peter Chernin, COO of
News Corp, the corporate parent of
FOX, saying things like this:
"We save more money in term deals and, you know, story costs and probably the lack of making pilots than we lose in potential advertising," Chernin said, adding the walkout that started last week is "probably a positive" for the company.
Probably a positive.Is no new
Simpsons, or
24, or
Bones, or
House, a
positve for you? Ask yourself that question. And then realize that your answer is very different than Peter Chernin's answer. And that's why though the start of negotiations next week is a positive sign, it's not going to be
enough. The people with the power to end this strike simply do not care about the same things you care about.
Fans have struggled with different ways to show their support to writers, or with symbolic gestures they can make to demonstrate their displeasure with the premature end of the shows that mean something to them. But in the world ruled by that quote above, these ideas are probably doomed to fail.
But there is something you can do.
And it's
big.
And we'll be talking about it here in a bit.
As we say in television,
Stay Tuned.
A member of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain shows his support for striking Hollywood screenwriters.
Vinay Menon
