30 Rock Jumped the Shark

There was a period of time when 30 Rock was one of my favorite shows on TV. But no longer. It's gotten to the point that I derive absolutely no pleasure from watching it. The show is boring, nonsensical, and tired. I can't think of any other show that went from so great to so bad.

When Community was temporarily taken off the air, I heard many people say that 30 Rock should have received the ax instead. I wanted to stand up for 30 Rock because, as much as I appreciate the intellectual and post modern acrobatics of Community, I've never really felt like it consistently includes good stories.

Now that 30 Rock is back on the air, I stand corrected. Community is superior to 30 Rock, as are a great many other shows.

New Girl

I'm really enjoying New Girl, the Fox sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel. But one really bizarre thing about the show is how they're revealing more and more about the setting.

Maybe I missed something, but when the show began I would have bet money it was set in New York. However, as far as I could tell (and I watched several episodes twice), they never explicitly said where the show was taking place.

Then, bam! Like a punch to the face, several episodes in the show gave us an establishing shot of LA. It was startling. And fascinating. Since then, I'd argue that the show has gradually asserted a stronger sense of place — scenes in the mall, at a very California-esque party.

Anyway, I think this method of revealing the setting (or perhaps choosing the setting) is both interesting and odd.

Hulu Commercials

What's with the commercials on Hulu that are either a still image, or a moving image embedded within a still frame? I get the idea that they are designed to be clicked on (maybe they're supposed to look like a website?) and that they're probably some new innovation. But these commercials are ugly. They're sort of confusing. And they really don't take advantage of technology the way their designers probably anticipated.

Sam Anders

Today I learned that both Battlestar Galactica and Clarissa Explains It All include characters named "Sam Anders." How could this be? Though Sam Anders isn't the most unique name out there, it's also not the most common. Could it be that the (re)makers of Battlestar Galactica were really, secretly fans of the Melissa Joan Hart teen classic? If only Clarissa was around, to explain this strange and miraculous "coincidence."

TV News

I really can't adquately express my disdain for network TV news. Before working at a newspaper, I thought it was just pointless fluff that existed as a relic from a previous time. At best, it was mindnumbing, and at worst it made (usually middle aged) people mistakenly think they are informed.

But since working for a newspaper I've seen an even worse side of the TV news business. After a recent rape hearing, camera's chased down the victim and stuck lights and lenses in her face. They literally chased her and her family into an elevator, despite the fact that new organizations pretty much all have a policy against revealing the identity of sex crime victims.

Earlier this week, I also saw a man get some tragic news (possibly that a family member died in a fire, though I was out of earshot). The man nearly collapsed on the ground with sorrow, and was sobbing uncontrollably. And of course, a TV camera man ran over with a huge light and got in the guy's face.

Of course, not every TV camera man is bad (I knew a cool one not too long ago), but I can't say I've ever seen a network news broadcast that wasn't pointless. And now, I can add insensitivity to the idiotic things TV news does.

(I should mention though that I'm talking exclusively about network affiliates of ABC, NBC, Fox, etc. not CNN and MSNBC.)

Rick Steves and Empathy

If you've never seen Rick Steves' Europe, you should check it out. Literally. The Provo Library has a bunch of DVDs you can get for free and if you live somewhere else, your local library also may have them.

For the uninitiated, Rick Steves is a travel writer and hosts the show mentioned above. He started out by writing a book called Europe Through the Back Door and has expanded his travel empire since.

As a travel writer, Steves' is both useful and cheesy. As he goes around Europe you get the distinct impression that he is a very much a tourist. He dresses like an American, he can't really speak any European languages, and he balances hard to find spots with very tourist-y places.

But the thing that really stands out to me about Steves is that he seems like a genuinely nice guy (don't know him personally, so I can only say here that that's how he comes across in his work). He also seems to have a genuine love for the places he visits and the people he meets. In other words, Rick Steves' travel approach is all about visiting places with empathy.

At certain times I've mentioned my love of Rick Steves' travel materials to friends and have been surprised to find out that some people look down on the genres of travel writing and TV shows. Certainly, the argument could be made that this sort of thing mainly appeals to bourgeois, middle-class Americans who want to "understand" a place by visiting it for an afternoon (or, worse yet, but simply seeing it on TV).

Yet, as I think about it, I'm not sure there is any genre of writing that is more empathetic to different people than travel writing. The whole point of the genre is to soften the visitor's impact on the culture he or she is entering. Travel writing is supposed to bridge cultural divides and is directly concerned with communication and understanding. Certainly some people use travel information to appropriate and totalize, but ideally it would be used to build understanding.

Rick Steves' is a master at this because he understands both the places he visits, as well as his audience (who, in my case, is sitting at home). He's an entertaining link that makes empathetic travel seem possible.

Broadcast Journalism is a Joke

If you have a Netflix subscription you may have noticed the recent ad on the envelop for CNN’s HLN.  The ad features headshots of three women—Jane Velez-Mitchell, Nancy Grace, and Joy Behar—with information about their respective shows.  As ads go, it’s an unremarkable bit of information that probably won’t prompt many Netflix users to tune into CNN.

 

What is remarkable, however, is that the ad it looks like it should be plugging a movie parody of broadcast journalism, rather than the real thing.  Most obviously, all the women are wearing dramatic makeup and have huge hair.  If style is admittedly a matter of personal taste, I’d at least expect news anchors to go with something that doesn’t look like a fashion disaster from 1995.  If that wasn’t enough, the photos of the women have actually been heavily airbrushed and doctored.  If there was a man in the midst of these pictures we could compare the doctoring between genders and perhaps come to a conclusion about the media’s biased portrayal of women.  That isn’t the case, however, and instead the pictures look like glamour shots of washed up 1970’s porn stars.

 

Compounding the awful headshots is the ad’s general failure to establish a serious aesthetic through its design choices.  For example, the bold, sans serif font along the top is a little too bold.  It’s also too “tall” as a font and gives the impression that the words are begins screamed, rather than simply asserted.  Likewise, the logo for Jane’s show, “Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell,” looks like its advertising NASCAR, not news.  Nancy Grace and Joy Behar’s respective fonts aren’t any better and convey a “daytime talk show” aesthetic rather than an evening news program.  As I look over the ad I’m finally struck by the fact that even the worst visual assignment I ever received as a teacher of rhetoric was more successful. 

 

While the ad is annoying, the real problem is that it serves as a kind of diagnostic on the state of TV news.  The programs it advertises begin at 7 PM and end at 10 PM; that’s primetime when CNN should have its highest ratings.  Accordingly, it would make sense that CNN would air its most important, serious material during that time.  Instead, I can only assume from this ad that CNN airs a lightweight combination of opinion editorializing and infotainment. 

 

Consequently, culpability for this absurdly ineffective ad does not lie solely with the women it depicts nor the inept graphic designers who put it together.  Instead, the entire profession of broadcast journalism should be blamed.  The ad suggests that “news” really isn’t the focus of the news.

 

While that’s all fine (after all, networks do have to get ratings), it seems odd that TV news has continued its march toward entertainment when real journalism in newspapers, on the radio, or online, is literally collapsing all around us.  Some of the country’s oldest and most venerable newspapers have folded this year, and there are tens of thousands fewer reporters now than before the recession.  That means that there are fewer outlets for people to read legitimate journalism.  If TV news like the kind on my Netflix envelop can be written off as a joke (which I believe it absolutely can), that means that there is simply less journalism out there and people are less informed. 

 

Obviously the news world is changing right now, but it’s unfortunate that in that environment CNN is either incapable or unwilling to advertise serious reporting.  There are many people in this country that would like to be informed about world events (and who need to be informed), but if this recent Netflix ad proves anything it’s that TV has completely failed as a part of the fourth estate.

Ice Road Truckers!

The other night I decided to watch some TV on Hulu.  I’d already watched Hulu’s first suggestion, Conan O’Brian’s debut on The Tonight Show, so I clicked on the second show that scrolled by: “Ice Road Truckers.”

 

The beginning of the show shocked me.  It started out by saying something like “last season these truckers drove their rigs across the thin ice of a frozen river.  This season they’ll be driving across… THE OCEAN!!!”  My immediate thought was “do they need to be driving across the ocean?  Are they doing this solely for the purpose of the show, or for some commercial endeavor?  Is this some sort of to-the-death contest, because I thought it was a documentary-type reality show?”  Maybe if I had watched season one I’d have known the answers to these questions, but for a first time viewer it seemed odd that a bunch of truckers would suddenly need to drive across the frozen Artic Ocean and that that need would conveniently correspond with the schedule of a TV show. 

 

The next few minutes provided more surprises, as well as some answers.  Apparently, the truckers were taking gear to a natural gas exploration post.  They were also veteran drivers who seemed to have been featured in season one, and who had decided to seek employment with this new company.  So it wasn’t some sort of daredevil contest.  The show also had some really cool visuals, like shots from beneath the ice and footage of lonely trucks completely isolated in the desolation and perpetual twilight of the Artic.  I can only imagine the difficulty of filming video like that.  It was also interesting to learn about how ice roads are built, which information was inter-cut with human-interest vignettes about worried family members.  The show was overly dramatic to the point of sensationalism, but the profession itself came across as authentically dangerous; apparently the ice cracks and changes all the time as plows and trucks drive over it. 

 

One thing that surprised me, however, was the absurdly simplistic premise that the show sets up: “brave men” fighting the elements in their effort accomplish a heroic task.  As I watched I couldn’t help but be flooded with a number of questions about what was really going on.  I don’t know much about natural gas mining, but I was left to wonder if “global energy exploration” is a hands-down positive thing?  The show certainly didn’t address that issue.  I also wondered what sort of impact this type of profession had on their families.  The show dealt with that briefly, but only as a method of raising the suspense later on.  (The producers asked family members if they were scared the truckers would fall through the ice, which they were, which then made me scared when I later watched them driving.)

 

What surprised me even more was that despite the show’s premise, many of the characters didn’t come off as ordinary working-class heroes.  While some were amiable enough, others were petulant or downright annoying.  In this way there was constant tension between the show’s writing, which tried to show brave men in dangerous places, and the reality of the situation, which included real people and complex relationships. 

 

In the end “Ice Road Truckers” is an interesting show with visuals that can’t help but raise questions about isolation and solitude.  Unfortunately, that aspect is often lost in the muck of mediocre producing and an unrealistically (an uninteresting) positive attitude.  In being purely focused on the drama of the profession the show ignored larger (more interesting) questions about the community, professional, and environmental impact of the job.