The Sopranos and the Decline of Television Criticism

As I have remarked in the past the country was clearly going off the rails mentally back in the ‘90s--but it knew it was going off the rails, and at least gave some sign of caring that it was going off the rails, in part because it occasionally criticized itself for doing so. And the main thing that distinguishes the cultural commentary of the time from where we are now is the demise of that self-awareness and that capacity for self-criticism (even if by that point they had been reduced to a mere flicker of what they once were).

One small example of that would seem to be how television criticism has changed. I remember, for instance, how unhinged the TV critics got in their "rapturous praises" of The Sopranos--and also remember a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch that presented a commercial for the show’s upcoming season, saturated with quotes plucked from (mock) reviews claiming that The Sopranos "will one day replace oxygen as the thing we breathe in order to stay alive" (!).

Since then it seems that this kind of over-the-top praise has become a common mode for TV criticism, particularly for the more prestigious cable/streaming productions (They're mad for Mad Men, euphoric about Euphoria! Breaking Bad! House of Cards! Ad nauseam.)--and no one thinks twice about it. Instead "everyone" insists that this is the Golden Age of TV--because the critics tell them it is, and they have lost their own critical perspective on those critics.

What happened to make it so? I suspect one factor was that so much TV became such a "middlebrow," "Midcult" affair--using the "modern idiom in the service of the banal," as Dwight Macdonald put it, doing arthousey things that made the typical "educated" person think it was art even when it wasn’t. An aspect of this is how television became so much more complicated even when it wasn’t being particularly intelligent--with Arrow a good example of this, I think. What I saw of the show was pretty standard stuff as far as comic book action-adventure goes. (Thus did season four, for the millionth time, have a villain whose big plan for "regenerating" the world was instigating a massive nuclear exchange.) But the nonlinearity of the episodes, the fact that not just the "present day" material of the episodes was connected with season-length arcs but so were the constant flashbacks, with the former significantly evoking the latter, made the show demanding viewing, even when one could unkindly characterize it as stale and stupid.

If you will forgive what may seem a pretentious allusion--putting in the brain-work to follow the tale told by an idiot, to other idiots, for the delight of idiots, can make people who may not neccesarily be idiots miss the fact that the tale signifies nothing. Thus do English students go on battering their heads against the middle finger to the principle of coherent, rational meaning that is T.S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland" a century after the publication of that unfortunate poem, in spite of the complete frankness of Eliot about just what it was that he did in writing it, while convalescing after a "nervous breakdown" ("just sayin’," as they say).

The students, of course, would not be doing this were they not unfortunate in having instructors who, monomaniacally fixated on claiming to find meanings in works other academics told them were "important" (they usually don’t make that judgment themselves); and completely accepting of the sheer, nihilistic depth of Modernism’s irrationality and anti-rationality in all its absurdity and contradiction without really understanding it; prove they don't understand it by presuming to dig such meanings out of such works in quasi-rational fashion, with points given for abstruseness and implausibility in what can seem more parlor game than scholarly enterprise. (John Crowe Ransom, whose The New Criticism, frustrating as it is, was for me indispensable to getting this stuff, wrote that for the Modernists, for whom it seemed "the bottom [had been knocked] out of history and language and [they] become early Greeks again" thought a work's "ontological density . . . proves itself by logical obscurity"--its incoherence from the logical, rational standpoint proof that it is the truth about the world in which we live. So yeah, if this stuff seems crazy to you it’s not you, it’s them, definitely them.)

The critics at the more upmarket and mainstream outlets, being middlebrows, are those who accepted the instructors’ beliefs unquestioningly, or have come to imitate those who did. Naturally they fall for the trick every time, while, a scale ranging from "good to excellent" not being satisfactory anymore, they grade it all from "excellent to outstanding," while taking the fulsomeness of their praises totally for granted.