Category: TV

I.
The other night I was out at dinner, and someone was talking about meditating. Decades ago that would indicate I live in San Francisco. Now it just means I spend lots of time with white people.

The Meditator was talking about how meditation works. The process. The benefits. The before-and-after narrative of self-discovery and -healing. One person at the table said it sounded nice, but it didn’t ever work for her. I said something similar: meditation’s insistence on not-thinking didn’t help me find what I was looking for, whereas Ignatian spirituality?which insists instead on dialogue and creative imagination?did.

“But Dave,” the Meditator said. “It’s not about not thinking.” It was about changing your relationship to your thoughts, I was told. There were similar things told to the other person. It was, for the Meditator, not as though we were speaking honestly about our lives, but that we were willful ignorants, blathering about nonsense.

All I kept thinking was this: I don’t watch that TV show, okay?

II.
Sometimes in a conversation someone will say something, or something around us will happen, and I’ll get an exciting feeling in my head. Then I’ll say, “Do you watch 30 Rock?” Or American Dad or Friends or any number of shows I’ve seen dozens of times, one of which once made a funny/wry/accurate comment that I want to reference.

Often, the person I’m with will say, “Not really.”

Every time, I feel bad. “Oh,” I say. “Never mind.” I feel bad because my exciting feeling finds no outlet.

Who’s at fault? Everyone knows: It’s never the person who doesn’t watch my TV show.

III.
I’m writing this up because I continue to be surprised and confused by the Meditator’s inability to listen to us non-meditators and trust that we’d tried it, decided against it, and found our own way. I watch plenty of other TV shows. They’re also entertaining and important to me.

I’m on Twitter a lot, and more and more these days (probably as people continue to get impassioned about presidential candidates), I feel like Twitter is a feed of people insisting you watch their TV show.

Or no, it’s more than an insistence. It’s that your life is lesser than theirs, that you yourself are lesser than they, because you don’t watch their TV show. It might be a specific kind of logical fallacy: Because this worked for me it must also work for you. It requires from the believer a certain lack of imagination. Or a certain belief in other people.

A lot of people on Twitter want me to watch the “Hillary 2016” show, and when I say that I don’t watch that TV show, this results in the onset of an argument about how I’m watching the wrong show. I’m not watching the wrong show. I know myself better than you do, and I know that “Bernie 2016” is the TV show it’s important for me to watch. I don’t recommend it to everyone, and I can’t fault you for watching your own show.

Actually, what’s happening is that people want me to watch the “This election is important and that importance is happening here online” show. But that’s a show I have no interest in watching.

Before irony and winking became the chief way advertisers tricked you into wanting to buy their products, they relied—ages and ages ago—on rhetoric and persuasion. Like in this Subway ad:

Then came cable TV and MTV and commercials had to compete entertainment-wise with programs and so ads got performative and hammy. Like in this Subway ad:

I think the hammy quotient—and what I mean by this is the exaggerated or overly theatrical quality of the acting—is legible to us post-millennial viewers. There’s something immediately artificial about them. Like, no sandwich artist has or will ever present a sub to us this way:

And this guy is such a risible failure of a punker:

In this way, TV commercials have always been things we laugh at, which was lovely because (as I’m going to keep developing and thinking about in some blog posts to come) what you can laugh at has less power over you.

Lately, though (and yes this isn’t a new phenomenon just newer), TV commercials have become things we’re meant to laugh with. They’re aiming to be funny the way vids people forward from Funny Or Die are. Like this Subway ad from 2014 (which runs twice in the clip, no need to stay for the whole 30 seconds):

The elementary way of talking about what’s happening here is that it’s self-aware hammyness. Meta-ham. I think something more complex is going on. This ad isn’t so much about the hammyness of commercial actors, it deliberately opts for hammyness as a way to keep us entertained—us who have grown immune to hammy actors in commercials.

Here’s the thing, though, these bacon lovers are just as risible and inauthentic as the punker with a burger in his hand nosing that chain-link fence. The way they archly express their love for bacon so widely misses the mark of how performative post-YouTube/rise of foodie culture folks archly express their love for bacon.

I can’t pinpoint yet where the difference lies, and Subway is one example I’m picking on. This is, for certain products aimed at a demographic I’m slowly growing out of (or—horrors!—is this sensibility growing up alongside me?), the norm for selling ads now: a winking irony that claims to vault above advertising’s base cloyingness, but in its failure to spring from anything real ends up reading just as inauthentically as every ad in TV history.

All right, work to do. And don’t worry, I, too, hope I don’t turn into Jon Rosenblatt, 27, a Harvard University English graduate student specializing in modern and postmodern critical theory

I mean where do I start with this one?

I don’t need to point out what’s so odious about this one, but can you imagine how insufferable the kind of guy would be who calculates his every move from the time he enters a new bar?

What’s interesting here is that Modelo, a relatively shitty, low-rent beer, has invested some money in an advertising company that employs very smart people to help make it the new Tecate, which seems to’ve become the west-coast PBR owing to being inexpensive and never advertising. So Modelo might not be so smart, but these people they’ve hired? Very smart people. All commercials operate off our fears and anxieties, and nothing scares a twentysomething hipster more than not being cool. Or, more exactly, not being seen by others as cool.

I was always a nerd. I don’t remember how or when I learned that being an adult meant no longer needing to care what other people thought about me, but this is what I had faith in growing up. I understand worrying about whether you smell, or are pretty. But worrying about whether strangers in a bar you’ve never been inside think you have good taste? It’s maybe the definition of the hipster.

It’s this:

I hate commercials. Now that cell phones and the NSA’s domestic spying practices have driven “being dupefully surveilled” up to the top of the list of my greatest fears and anxieties, “being effectively marketed to” is at most a distant second. Still, I hate being effectively marketed to. I like DVRs’ commercial-hopping abilities. But I don’t hop over Esurance’s “Beatrice” ad, because every element is so exquisite.

Let me direct your attention to:

• All parts of Beatrice’s outfit, particularly the scarf and its knot’s location w/r/t the hang of her bosom.
• How Beatrice points to her “wall” and then revises that pointing for more emphasis and clarity.
• The look the critical friend gives the supportive friend after her, “Ooh! I like that one!”
• The cut on “fifteen percent” that shifts our attentions from the supportive friend to the critical one.
• The faint gasp heard from Supportive in the wake of Beatrice’s unfriending.
• The well earned vocal fry on 66% of these women.
• Beatrice’s continued gesturing during Jim Halpert’s voiceover that broadcasts her pitying attitude toward this supposedly more savvy friend.
• The piano in the corner at the end, which of course Beatrice can play and perhaps teaches lessons for.

It’s got in 30 seconds the same richness of detail dudes in magazines fawn over Wes Anderson features for. Every time it comes on I sit up in my seat, leaning forward the way I imagine Sontag did in the second row of a movie theater.

(Or was that Pauline Kael?)

Let’s begin a series of posts about TV commercials. Have you seen this Old Spice one?

I’m impressed by how smart it is. Here we have a bunch of moms with long skirts hanging out in a tree. One is weeping a rain of tears. She sings a minor-key A/A/B/A dirge lamenting her son’s new sexual prowess. It’s the exact kind of tune witches would chant in the woods around a cauldron. Listen again:

Old Spice isn’t nice
and it comes with a price.
My boy, Garret, chose to wear it
now he can’t help but entice.
All these ladies, all these women
are up on him like lice.
As a mother I condemn new
body spray from Old Spice.

More than the easily won, consequence-free attraction from hot models slightly older than you, what’s alluring to teen boys (I speak from experience) is knowing that you’ve both vanquished your mother while also retaining her undying love. It might be the key fantasy of adolescence.

This commercial’s a lot less fun than the ones where moms, like, slither across the floor and up on the furniture while singing a kind of power anthem about Old Spice’s ability to kick up the sexness vis-a-vis one’s son, but I argue that it’s way more psychically effective. I wish I’d written it.

Fanboy time. Advance apologies.

Did you watch? Look, if you aren’t watching Louie on FX every Thursday night then you’re a person who doesn’t like TV. That’s fine for you. Some of my best friends don’t like TV. The rest of us, however, get this show—which, as I’ve tiringly blogged before, is the most honest sitcom on TV now. It’s like the opposite of 30 Rock—so fanciful and filled with hyperbole—and but just as good.

Like in this week’s episode, where Louis, needing to score Gaga tickets for his daughter, finds himself backstage with Gaga’s friend Dane Cook before one of the latter’s shows. Standup nerds know this to be an encounter as butt-clenchingly tense as the one Louis had with the teen bully last season. For years now there’s been this accusation that Cook stole three of CK’s jokes in his Retaliation album (details here), and rather than write around this tension (or, say, cast someone else), Louis CK opted to write directly into it.
Continue reading Dane Cook on Louie