the trouble with television essay

The Trouble with Television

• Description

In “The Trouble With Television,” former broadcast journalist Robert MacNeil presents a persuasive case that television has a negative effect on American society. He cites statistical evidence about the average amount of hours spent watching television and the feeding of information in short bursts to support his argument that television viewing undermines Americans ability to think critically or handle complex issues in their lives. (Prentice Hall Literature, 2010)

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Film, Television and the Troubles: A 'Troubles Archive' Essay

An essay commissioned by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and published as a pamphlet with eleven other essays which look at the ways in which various art forms responded to thirty years of 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland. This essay considers a range of film and television drama over the years and argues that for most of the time, film and television drama ignored the politics behind the violence to concentrate on the impact that violence had on individuals and society in general. Any film or television drama which did venture into the politics behind the violence tended to create considerable controversy. With the peace process under way from 1993 onwards, film and especially television drama became more daring and more probing.

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This essay considers the promotion and reception of the Northern Ireland set Oscar-winning short film The Shore (2011) and its employment within the post-Belfast/Good Friday Agreement reconciliation discourse. Film is one of the most revelatory sites to view how this discourse has been formulated and circulated, evident particularly in the recurring focus on filiative (Said, 1983, pp. 174-175) reconciliation, operating at the level of the family rather than society, within cinematic texts. Cinema also suggests the failure of this discourse to engage with the real underlying and unresolved issues in the post Agreement context. Indeed, film has tended to obscure and elide these fundamentals, producing ultimately utopian depictions, often revealing a touristic gaze, for mass consumption. In this respect, The Shore is a remarkable rendering not so much of either Northern Ireland or of the post-Troubles context, but of the dominant representational paradigms within depictions of Ireland itself.

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The media can contribute to the reproduction of violent conflict in societies either through direct bias or more silent acquiescence. When wars end, therefore, the question arises as to the media’s past role and the possibilities of reconstructing the media in such a way that it contributes to conflict transformation. This article looks at one specific situation, Northern Ireland, where during the violent political conflict over three decades there was a professional and sophisticated broadcasting environment. Broadcasters have been frequently charged with bias in relation to reporting the conflict, but their record in reporting the peaceful transition has been less well researched. The broadcast by the BBC of three programmes in March 2006 presents a timely case study in the ability of the media to come to terms with peace. Collectively titled Facing the Truth, these three programmes brought together victims and perpetrators with a view to eliciting repentance and forgiveness. Char...

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This article is concerned with narratives of ethno-religious conflict depicted in a genre I term 'conflict cinema'. The two films under discussion, '71 and Paradise Now, are largely set, respectively, in the cities of Belfast in Northern Ireland and Nablus in Palestine and represent the divisions and violent tension between enemy factions there. The intersection of the landscape of the conflicts and the bodies of the male protagonists who must negotiate them emphasizes the centrality of physically being 'in place' or 'out of place' to 'conflict cinema'. The soldier/colonizer Gary Hook in '71 and the freedom fighters/terrorists Said and Khaled in Paradise Now travel through the enduring battlegrounds of their divided and politically unstable societies. Against the backdrop of ethno-religious conflict, both films focus on the ideal militant body that must be a machine or an automaton. I argue that through the screenwriters' and filmmakers' depiction of these bodies' negotiations of conflict space, or in other words, the interface between the body and the unstable, urban conflict zone, 'conflict cinema' upsets overdetermined notions of the male militant body, thus manifesting the paradox of the dehumanised body that is also innately human.

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Film, Television and the Troubles: A 'Troubles Archive' Essay

Research output : Book/Report › Book › peer-review

• television drama
• the Troubles in Northern Ireland

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

• http://uir.ulster.ac.uk/11861/1/Film%2C_TV_and_the_Troubles_-_sent_version.doc

Other files and links

• http://www.artscouncil-ni.org

Fingerprint

• Film Arts and Humanities 100%
• trouble Arts and Humanities 100%
• Television Drama Arts and Humanities 100%
• TV Social Sciences 100%
• Television Films Social Sciences 100%
• Politics Social Sciences 50%
• Impact Arts and Humanities 25%
• Northern Ireland Arts and Humanities 25%

T1 - Film, Television and the Troubles: A 'Troubles Archive' Essay

AU - McLoone, Martin

PY - 2009/10

Y1 - 2009/10

N2 - An essay commissioned by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and published as a pamphlet with eleven other essays which look at the ways in which various art forms responded to thirty years of 'the Troubles'. This essay considers a range of film and television drama over the years and argues that for most of the time, film and television drama ignored the politics behind the violence to concentrate on the impact that violence had on individuals and society in general. Any film or television drama which did venture into the politics behind the violence tended to create considerable controversy. With the peace process under way from 1993 onwards, film and especially television drama became more daring and more probing.

AB - An essay commissioned by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and published as a pamphlet with eleven other essays which look at the ways in which various art forms responded to thirty years of 'the Troubles'. This essay considers a range of film and television drama over the years and argues that for most of the time, film and television drama ignored the politics behind the violence to concentrate on the impact that violence had on individuals and society in general. Any film or television drama which did venture into the politics behind the violence tended to create considerable controversy. With the peace process under way from 1993 onwards, film and especially television drama became more daring and more probing.

KW - television drama

KW - the Troubles in Northern Ireland

UR - http://www.artscouncil-ni.org

SN - 978 -0 -903203-13-5

BT - Film, Television and the Troubles: A 'Troubles Archive' Essay

PB - Arts Council of Northern Ireland

Critic’s Notebook

The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV

It’s got a great cast. It looks cinematic. It’s, um … fine. And it’s everywhere.

Credit... Alex Merto

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By James Poniewozik

• April 27, 2024

A few years ago, “Atlanta” and “PEN15” were teaching TV new tricks.

In “Atlanta,” Donald Glover sketched a funhouse-mirror image of Black experience in America (and outside it), telling stories set in and around the hip-hop business with an unsettling, comic-surreal language. In “PEN15,” Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle created a minutely observed, universal-yet-specific picture of adolescent awkwardness.

In February, Glover and Erskine returned in the action thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime Video. It’s … fine? A takeoff on the 2005 film , it updates the story of a married duo of spies by imagining the espionage business as gig work. The stars have chemistry and charisma; the series avails itself of an impressive cast of guest stars and delectable Italian shooting locations. It’s breezy and goes down easy. I watched several episodes on a recent long-haul flight and they helped the hours pass.

But I would never have wasted an episode of “Atlanta” or “PEN15” on in-flight entertainment. The work was too good, the nuances too fine, to lose a line of dialogue to engine noise.

I do not mean to single out Glover and Erskine here. They are not alone — far from it. Keri Russell, a ruthless and complicated Russian spy in “The Americans,” is now in “The Diplomat,” a forgettably fun dramedy. Natasha Lyonne, of the provocative “Orange Is the New Black” and the psychotropic “Russian Doll,” now plays a retro-revamped Columbo figure in “Poker Face.” Idris Elba, once the macroeconomics-student gangster Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” more recently starred in “Hijack,” a by-the-numbers airplane thriller.

I’ve watched all of these shows. They’re not bad. They’re simply … mid. Which is what makes them, frustratingly, as emblematic of the current moment in TV as their stars’ previous shows were of the ambitions of the past.

What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.

We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.

LET ME SAY UP FRONT: This is not an essay about how bad TV is today. Just the opposite. There is little truly bad high-profile television made anymore. As I wrote last year , these days it takes a special confluence of celebrity pull and network resources to make a dud like HBO’s “The Idol.” When we encounter a majestic prize turkey like this in the wild, we almost don’t know what to think. Who did this? How did this get past quality control?

What we have today instead is something less awful but in a way more sad: The willingness to retreat, to settle, to trade the ambitious for the dependable.

People who grew up in the three-broadcast-network era — we knew from bad TV. We watched it and sometimes even loved it. (ABC’s 1977 comedy “The San Pedro Beach Bums” was one of TV’s biggest punchlines, and its cancellation was one of the first heartbreaks of my young life.) But the rise of cable transformed both the business and the art of television, as the likes of HBO, FX and AMC took risks and offered creators freedom in order to stand out.

It worked — so well, in fact, that eventually the truism that TV was garbage was replaced by the truism that TV was the new literature, or cinema, or maybe even religion. A New York Times critic heralded “The Sopranos” as possibly the greatest work of pop culture in a quarter century. “Deadwood” was likened to Shakespeare, “The Wire” to Dickens, “Mad Men” to Cheever. People deconstructed “Lost” and argued over “Girls.” TV’s auteurs bestrode the cultural conversation like the easy riders and raging bulls of film in the 1970s.

For a good two decades now, it’s been bien-pensant wisdom that TV could be good — no, not just good. Original. Provocative. Important.

TV was so highly acclaimed for so long that we were like the frog in boiling water, but in reverse. The medium became lukewarm so gradually that you might not even have noticed.

The streaming era at first promised more innovation, supercharged and superfunded, and for a while that’s what we got. Eager to establish a catalog of original programming, Netflix underwrote experiments like “Orange Is the New Black,” “BoJack Horseman” and “Sense8.” Not everything worked, and what did work could be inconsistent, but there was a sense of opportunity and possibility.

But another thing happened as well. The conferral of status (and money) on TV meant that there was a lot more talent available. Doing TV was no longer a demotion, and you could buy an instant sense of importance by hiring stars. Netflix’s early hit “House of Cards” was a harbinger, a pot of boiling ham given the aura of prestige with the casting of a pre-scandal Kevin Spacey.

Also, more streamers — Netflix was joined by Amazon, Hulu and sundry Maxes and Pluses — simply meant more TV. More TV was better in some ways: It meant room for new voices and untold stories, more dice to roll. But it also created a sense of overload. In a seemingly infinite sea of story, how would viewers find shows, and shows get found?

More and more often, they’d get found through the algorithm, whose purpose is to serve up new versions of the last thing you watched. Increasingly, the best way to get noticed was with something people already recognized: A familiar title, formula or franchise.

Disney+’s Marvel Cinematic Universe series are too polished to be awful or tacky — just compare them to the threadbare comic-book dramas of the ’70s and ’80s — but they are too bound by the rules and needs of the larger megaproperty to take creative leaps. (It’s noteworthy that the first of these series, “WandaVision,” remains the one significant exception.) Meanwhile, Netflix’s “Ozark” showed that you could ask, “What if ChatGPT rewrote ‘Breaking Bad’?” and enough people would embrace the result as if it were “Breaking Bad.”

Put these two forces together — a rising level of talent and production competence on the one hand, the pressure to deliver versions of something viewers already like on the other hand — and what do you get? You get a whole lot of Mid.

MID IS NOT the mediocre TV of the past. It’s more upscale. It is the aesthetic equivalent of an Airbnb “modern farmhouse” renovation, or the identical hipster cafe found in medium-sized cities all over the planet. It’s nice! The furniture is tasteful, they’re playing Khruangbin on the speakers, the shade-grown coffee is an improvement on the steaming mug of motor oil you’d have settled for a few decades ago.

If comparing TV to fast-casual dining is an insulting analogy, in my defense I only borrowed it. A New Yorker profile last year quoted a Netflix executive describing the platform’s ideal show as a “gourmet cheeseburger.”

I’m not going to lie, I enjoy a gourmet cheeseburger. Caramelize some onions, lay on a slice of artisanal American cheese and I’m happy. But at heart, the sales pitch for that cheeseburger is no different from that for a Big Mac: You know what you’re going to get.

And it’s not only Netflix plating this up. Look at the star-packed algorithm bait we’ve seen over the past year or so. There’s “Masters of the Air,” a well-credentialed, superfluous expansion to the World War II-verse of “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” (Liked those? Watch this next!) “Apples Never Fall,” a room-temperature adaptation of another Liane Moriarty novel. (Liked “Big Little Lies”? Watch this next!) “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” a fall-from-grace biopic cast to the hilt and padded to the limit. (Liked “Fosse/Verdon”? Watch this next!).

These shows don’t have what it takes to be truly bad. Making honestly bad TV requires a mercenary, Barnumesque disregard for taste, or a hellbent willingness to take the kind of gamble that can turn into disaster.

Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon” ). Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it.

Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas. (You really liked the star in that other thing! You can’t believe they got Meryl Streep !)

Mid is based on a well-known book or movie or murder. Mid looks great on a big screen. (Though for some reason everything looks blue .) Mid was shot on location in multiple countries. Mid probably could have been a couple episodes shorter. Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.

Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.

And let’s be fair, it makes plenty of people happy. Any honest critic has to recognize that people for whom TV-watching is not work do not always want to work at watching TV. (See, for instance, the unlikely resurgence on Netflix of “Suits,” that watchable avatar of 2010s basic-cable Mid.) I get it. TV critics have laundry to fold, too.

There may also be economic reasons to prefer good-enough TV. As more people drop cable TV for streaming, their incentives change. With cable you bought a package of channels, many of which you would never watch, but any of which you might .

Each streaming platform, on the other hand, requires a separate purchase decision , and they add up. You might well choose a service that has plenty of shows you’d be willing to watch rather than one with a single show that you must watch.

So where HBO used to boast that it was “not TV,” modern streamers send the message, “We’ll give you a whole lot of TV.” It can seem like their chief goal is less to produce standout shows than to produce a lot of good-looking thumbnails.

There even is a growing idea that a new Golden Age is emerging, with a new Midas. Apple TV+, the home of “Ted Lasso” and “The Morning Show,” has been deemed, by more than one commentator, “the new HBO.”

Apple TV+ is not HBO. At least not in the sense of what made HBO HBO in the 2000s, when it was revolutionizing TV and challenging viewers. (And HBO wasn’t alone in being “HBO” in this sense: It had company in FX, AMC, Showtime and occasionally Syfy and others.)

But Apple TV+ just might be the HBO of Mid.

Broadly generalizing, Apple’s strategy has been to open its checkbook and sign up A-list names — Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, M. Night Shyamalan — to make broadly palatable, uncontroversial shows. (This did not work out too well with Jon Stewart .) According to reports around its founding, the Apple chief Tim Cook was concerned that the service not go overboard with violence, profanity and nudity — not exactly the mission statement of somebody looking to reopen the Bada Bing.

Apple’s investment bought something. Its shows feel professional. They look like premium products that no one skimped on. “Palm Royale” has a loaded cast (Kristen Wiig, Laura Dern, Carol Burnett[!]) and an attention to period detail that recalls “Mad Men.” But its class farce is toothless, its atmosphere of ’60s cultural ferment warmed over. Comedies like “Shrinking” and “Platonic” and “Loot” are more nice than funny, dramas like “Constellation,” “The New Look” and “Manhunt” classy but inert.

These are shows built like iPhones — sleek, rounded, with no edges you can cut yourself on.

THERE IS, OF COURSE, great and innovative TV on Apple as well. I’m dying to see another season of the brain-bending sci-fi thriller “Severance,” and its first crop of shows included the alternative space-race history “For All Mankind” and the screwball literary history “Dickinson.”

It is exceptions like these series that make me an optimist about TV long-term. Even in the face of pressures and incentives to aim for the middle, creativity wants to find a way. Just a year ago, I was writing about wild, adventurous series like “Beef,” “Reservation Dogs,” “Mrs. Davis” and “I’m a Virgo.” (This year, two of the best new dramas so far are a remake of “Shogun” and a re-adaptation of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”)

But the bulk of TV right now — the packing peanuts that fill up the space between “The Bear” and “FBoy Island” — feels flattened out in the broad middle. No, not flattened: Smoothed. That may be the biggest but most intangible defining feature of Mid. It’s friction-free. It has an A.I.-like, uncanny luster, like the too-sharp motion-smoothing effect that you have to turn off when you buy a new flat-screen.

TV is far from broken, but it does feel like someone needs to go in and tweak the settings. The price of reliability, competence and algorithm-friendliness is losing the sense of surprise — the unmoored feeling you get, from innovations like “Fleabag” and “Watchmen” and “I May Destroy You,” of being thrown into an unpredictable alien universe.

I don’t think it’s only critics and TV snobs who want this, either. “The Sopranos” and “Twin Peaks” were revolutionary and rewarded close viewing, but they were also popular. Even if you watch TV as escapism, how much of an escape is a show that you can, and probably will, half-watch while also doomscrolling on your phone?

We lose something when we become willing to settle. Reliability is a fine quality in a hybrid sedan. But in art, it has a cost. A show that can’t disappoint you can’t surprise you. A show that can’t enrage you can’t engage you.

The good news is, there is still TV willing to take chances, if you look for it. You may have loved or hated “The Curse,” but I would be surprised if anyone who watched an hour of it ended up indifferent to it. This month, HBO premiered “The Sympathizer,” Park Chan-wook’s frenetic adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s satire of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, a raucous, disorienting rush down the back alleys of memory.

With risk, of course, comes the possibility of disappointment — you might get another “The Idol.” I’m willing to accept the trade-off. The price of making TV that’s failure-proof, after all, is getting TV that can never really succeed. Come back, bad TV: All is forgiven.

James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. More about James Poniewozik

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The Trouble with Television

15 questions

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No student devices needed.   Know more

According to Robert MacNeil in "The Trouble With Television," how many hours of television does the average American watch?

10 hours per day

10,000 hours per year

100 hours per decade

10,000 hours per decade

What is author Robert MacNeil trying to persuade readers to do in "The Trouble With Television"?

watch more educational television programs

don't buy products made by television advertisers

avoid watching violent television programs

watch less television

According to Robert MacNeil in "The Trouble With Television," what is "one of the most precious" human gifts?

the ability to read and write

the ability to focus your attention yourself

the ability to share your knowledge with others

the ability to be entertained

According to Robert MacNeil in "The Trouble With Television," what problem in the United States is linked to watching a lot of television?

unemployment

mental illness

What is one main point Robert MacNeil makes in "The Trouble With Television"?

Television is only useful as a tool for advertising.

Escapist entertainment helps relieve the stress of modern life.

News stories should not be shown on television.

Television decreases a person's ability to focus on worthwhile pursuits.

What is one idea Robert MacNeil uses to support his argument in "The Trouble With Television"?

Television encourages violent behavior in both children and adults.

Television requires no effort on the part of the viewer, but provides instant gratification.

Television encourages children to bother their parents for trivial new products that are advertised on television.

Television has too many comedy programs that have no educational

In "The Trouble With Television," Robert MacNeil says that much of television news is "machine gunning with scraps."

Television news stories are dramatic and exciting.

Television news stories are too short and are presented too quickly.

Television news covers too many incidents of violent crime.

Television news stories concentrate too much on war.

Which of the following sentences from "The Trouble With Television" is most clearly a statement of fact ?

"One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are 'functionally illiterate' and cannot read or write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle."

"But I see its values now pervading this nation and its life."

"Television's variety becomes a narcotic, not a stimulus."

"I think it tends to make things ultimately boring and dismissible (unless they are accompanied by horrifying pictures) because almost anything is boring and dismissible if you know almost nothing about it."

Which of the following sentences from "The Trouble With Television" is most clearly a statement of opinion?

"You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20."

"I believe that TV's appeal to the short attention span is not only inefficient communication but decivilizing as well."

"If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television."

"Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends working on a bachelor's degree."

According to Robert MacNeil in "The Trouble With Television," how do television programs hold viewers' attention?

They are brief.

The characters are funny.

They include a lot of violence.

They are realistic.

What persuasive technique does Robert MacNeil use in the following sentence from "The Trouble With Television"?

It has become fashionable to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving, impatient public.

an appeal to emotion

an appeal to authority

a rhetorical question

What persuasive technique does Robert MacNeil use in the following passage from "The Trouble With Television"?

Some years ago Yale University law professor Charles L. Black, Jr., wrote: "… forced feeding on trivial fare is not itself a trivial matter."

an appeal to reason

Which answer choice best states the meaning of the word constructive?

tall and strong

relating to labor and construction

leading to improvement

spreading throughout

Which word is closest in meaning to the word trivial ?

insignificant

In which of the following sentences is the word diverts used correctly?

Baseball games are diverts from schoolwork and boredom.

He counted the diverts in the essay.

It diverts us to hear bad news on TV.

My friend Alice often diverts me from my schoolwork with the latest gossip.

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