The Shield and how it affected me OR: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love TV

I just did a search on Facebook. I typed in "I don't watch TV" and the results I got back included several friends, a number of groups, and a whole slew of random Facebookers dedicated to the anti-TV cause.

I guess I just don't get my generation's opinion on TV. It seems to me that the popular opinion among people my age is that TV is unwaveringly bad for you. Or at least a lot of people will go out of their way to let you know that they don't watch much TV. Stuff White People Like had an entry about not owning a TV. All the cool kids like to say that it will rot your brain or make you stupid; these are usually, and ironically, the same kind of people that won't use the word movie, but only film. You know the type.

In the mind of our generation, when did television become slop and film stay art? I could make a pretty good argument that television is a better artistic medium than movies. Television gives its creators a lot more freedom to develop deeper characters, and more of them. It has the ability to tell more stories, and longer ones. It's harder to make a TV show that's consistently compelling for five seasons than it is to make a movie that's compelling for two hours. Way harder. Provoke me if you ever want to hear the long version of that argument.

Last night I watched the finale of The Shield. I got pretty emotional about it. That sounds dumb, but this was a show that was a formative -- perhaps the formative element in my appreciation of and education in the media arts (a term here encompassing film, television, and related forms). It meant a lot to me because from it I learned the point of making art on television. And damn if the end of the story wasn't haunting -- I didn't sleep last night.

My point is this: there's not a movie (or film, if you like) on the planet that could stick with me like the end of The Shield did. That's because I didn't spend seven seasons and a hundred hours growing and changing and learning and experiencing life along with the characters in any movie. We spent two hours together! I barely knew any of them! The challenge of film, I suppose, is conciseness (make me care about someone in two hours or less, admittedly an achievement) while the challenge of television is consistency (make me care constantly about someone for years).

"But Jeff, TV is centered around commercial breaks -- it's just a tool of the man to get you to buy stuff." Well, you're right, TV is built around commercials, which for one thing means that we always get proper structure. So we don't end up with crap like Zodiac that should/could/would have been really good but wasn't because no one pared an hour off the second half. Plus sometimes commercials are cool. Be thankful for it.

I want TV to get its due. It's certainly art, and some argue that the right kind of TV can make us smarter. Steven Johnson argues that we recognize this subconsciously: "The shows that have made the most demands on their audience have also turned out to be among the most lucrative in history."

I used to be embarrassed to tell how much I liked TV. One day I decided not to be. Now I'm honest.