Reflections on Network TV as Comfort Food

Not long ago a TV critic who, like most of his ilk, worships at the altar of "prestige TV," recently reported eschewing it for a mere week and watching network TV instead as an experiment (the Nobel committee must be informed at once!) and then discussed his findings. One (for him, anyway) significant theme of those findings is that network TV tends toward "comfort food." Of course, I am not sure how much that can be said of network TV today as against before. He talked quite a bit about reality TV, which I have regarded as nasty stuff from the start, while sitcoms certainly seem to have got much meaner over the years--with the asshole behavior on Friends giving way to the still more thoroughly asshole behavior on How I Met Your Mother or The Office (which contributed much to the current, wildly excessive use of the word "cringe"). And when it isn't reality TV or sitcoms it is more often than not procedurals dealing with serious, life-and-death stuff--crime, medical emergencies, and the rest, in increasingly graphic fashion (CSI a long way from the old Quincy episodes).

Still, precisely because of the seriousness of the subject matter the procedurals seem especially worth mentioning. Even as the images got increasingly graphic they still tended to deal with ugly things order upheld by episode's end--making comfort food (or at least, what some were ready to accept as such) out of ingredients that looked unpromising at first glance. And it seems worth thinking about why this was so characteristic of TV. The most basic thing seems to me to be that, given the limited resources early TV had to work with, and the tightness of the censorship under which the makers of television had to work in the form's early days (you couldn't even show a pregnant woman on TV), comfort food was the medium's most plausible offering--a fact reinforced by the structure of the market. The competition was limited among a few outlets each going for mammoth shares of the market, while "prime time" was king--which is to say people sitting on a comfortable piece of furniture at the end of the day and staring at their screen like cavemen at the fire in their hearth.

Between the limited options, and sheer weariness--TV was what you watched when you didn't have the energy for anything else, like reading a book, or going out for a movie--people easily became habituated not to seeking out the scintillating, but leaving on what was least distasteful, with the name of the game keeping them from changing the channel at the end, one show leading to another to another so that you had them through the night, week after week, year after year. Where the broader audience is concerned it's easier to get by, especially if your material isn't all that great, by not taking yourself too seriously. (Indeed, looking at old reruns of Magnum P.I., The A-Team, MacGyver, I am constantly reminded of just how much those action-adventure shows got by on their sense of humor.) Meanwhile the practical difficulty of accessing the content (if you didn't catch it when it was aired, that was pretty much it), and the importance of summer reruns and a lucrative syndication market, meant there was a heavy stress on "rewatch" value, on things people would be pleased, or at least willing, to see again and again. This, too, encouraged the making of material people could take easily in bite-sized pieces, again and again. (Think of how we watched certain episodes of, for instance, the original Star Trek, or The Simpsons, until even their minutiae became part of the common frame of reference--like a beard that wasn't there before denoting the evil parallel universe version of an individual, or the way just about every line of dialogue in the first eight seasons or so of The Simpsons seems to have its own Reddit page, its own memes.) All of that encouraged a lowest common denominator logic that, again, pushed producers toward offering up comfort food, and audiences toward taking it.

All of that has since changed. The resources available to producers expanded, the censorship to which they were subject by no means disappeared but became more relaxed in respects that were not insignificant, the competition intensified, and people started treating TV-watching as a serious cultural activity, the more in as it became so much more accessible--rather than something looked at the end of the day something they watched on the smart phone on the way to work, or even at work when they should have been working. Meanwhile, their consumption of other media changed. Certainly no matter how much some in the press deny it, people read less, and what they read is, well, not what it once was. (I still can't get over the fact that John le Carrè was one of the biggest bestsellers around back in the '80s. Today even Robert Ludlum is likely too tough, as indicated by how a "young adult" version of Dan Brown is thought to be called for.) At the movies what we get are "Big Dumb Blockbusters" that can make us, as Joe Bauer did, look back longingly to a day and age that had "movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting." Thus TV has become that much more important as their cultural and intellectual "nourishment"--all as people have been positioned to see what they want when they want by conveniences ranging from programmable VCRs to streaming, and the concern for the rewatch value of the show in reruns has fallen by the wayside, again, because there is so much out there from which to choose.

The result is that there is much more opportunity--and incentive--to produce TV which is not comfort food. But that hardly means that there is no audience for the old comfort food stuff, even if there would seem a generation gap here, with the Big Three/Big Four networks counting on those older audiences (one reason, I suppose, why they have been cranking out "new seasons" of The X-Files, Roseanne and Law & Order), while young people eat up the rather less comfortable stuff the other cable channels, streaming and the rest serve up as a matter of course.