BOLLOCKS TO THE BOX SET
by Joel Morris
Published in THE IDLER issue 49, 2016.
--
I think it was Mad Men that did it.
I’d wallowed happily in the adland saga’s vintage-chic-opera for four series. I’d given it my time, my head and my heart. And then, at the point I was poised to dive into season five, I paused, as if opening a book I’d found half-read at the bottom of a holiday suitcase. ‘Hang on,’ I thought. ‘Where are we?’
I made a little mental audit of where the story had got to, and realized that I couldn’t remember a thing about it.
I lie. I could remember three things. I remembered there had been a bit of melodrama about a stolen identity. And I recalled a very funny bit of black comedy where someone’s foot was threshed by an unexpected office lawnmower. And I had a vivid memory of a family swooping away in an Edsel through discarded picnic flotsam. And that was it. I could, at a push, do the characters’ names. But it hadn’t gone in. Over 48 hours of viewing - forty-eight hours! - had left less filed in the ‘keeper’ section of my head than I’d get from a decent episode of Lovejoy.
It worried me. I liked Mad Men. In fact, I liked it a lot. But its lengthy, unfurling storyline was so diffuse that it had slipped my grasp like a wet rope, and sunk without a bubble. I wasn’t remembering it as a story, or a TV series, but more like a mood, in the same way I might remember a place I’d lived for a while as a child. I had vague impressions of furniture, a sense of familiar voices, and some vivid memories of passing trousers, but nothing more.
The closest comparison was how it had felt grinding through some nineteenth-century breezeblock novel in a warm college library, and snapping fully awake two hundred pages in with no memory of what I’d been reading.
Was something wrong with me? Had I lost the ability to watch TV? Had my attention span been withered by Twitter and the failsafe narrative snap of Don’t Tell The Bride? Was I simply not up to the job of watching television properly? Oh, God. I’d failed the exam. I was too dumb for telly.
It was then that it dawned on me that maybe television had changed, not me. Everyone agreed that this brash and vulgar upstart that had once been ‘bad for your eyes’, a ‘chewing-gum’ dispensed through an ‘idiot lantern’ guaranteed to ‘rot your brains’, was going through a surprising Golden Age, thanks to the box set revolution: long form novelistic TV that had became a talking point and a badge of pride for discerning viewers.
TV had oustripped its competitors. The place where the big ideas went these days wasn’t Hollywood, or the Great American Novel. It was the big box set: the thing everyone was talking about. Breaking Bad. Mad Men. Game of Thrones. The Sopranos. Even silly Battlestar Galactica was suddenly bursting with ideas, where once it had survived on one (“How much can we make these spaceships look like the ones in Star Wars without being hauled bodily in front of a judge?”)
TV was more than respectable; it was essential. People who had happily trumpeted their high standards by insisting they didn’t watch the bloody gogglebox, could no longer claim to be arbiters of the best of modern culture. It didn’t matter how many operas and gallery openings you’d been to, if you didn’t have an opinion on Making A Murderer, you were half philistine, half hermit.
Telly was important. And when things become important, they often get a bit puffed up. I looked at my shelf of box sets, their spines displayed as proudly as the leatherbound Dickens my mum and dad had once ordered from the Reader’s Digest to make their lounge look posh.
What stories were in those boxes? I could probably sum them up quite quickly, as could their creators. Breaking Bad was Vince Gilligan’s attempt to take ‘Mr Chips and turn him into Scarface.’ Fewer than ten words. No matter how many hours you spend watching that, and how well the makers tell it, you’re watching that simple arc, extended over the length required by longform television.
The reasons for making long-arc TV are obvious. With dizzying choice, it’s a mercy for the viewer to not have to decide what they’re watching every night. Home from work, slump in front of whatever you and your partner have agreed is ‘your show’, no arguments, just wallowing in a familiar world. And for the makers, the commitment of a loyal fanbase is important whether you’re measuring your success using viewing figures, like the terrestrial broadcasters, or subscriber numbers, like Sky or Netflix. Finding out that a prestige series that wins you awards and the respect of your peers could also draw an audience as loyal as soap addicts or sports fans must have been like striking oil.
But stretching stories to keep viewers watching must surely change the way we absorb them. Maybe the trouble I was having grasping these series was because their extended form had diluted the content. Was box set TV like a homeopathic remedy, the effective narrative ingredients diluted until it was indistinguishable from not watching TV at all?
There’s a website called tiii.me that calculates how many of your precious minutes on Earth you will spend watching any chosen TV series, if you can contemplate that sort of mortality maths without bursting into tears. I ran the tally on possibly the definitive quality blockbuster series from the cheap and filthy bad-for-your-eyes days of TV, I Claudius, and it comes in at 11 hours. Breaking Bad lasts over three times that long. Granted, it’s a cracking bit of telly, but it’s hard to argue that it tells three times as big a story as I Claudius. A good old Play For Today could quench your narrative thirst in an hour or so. Had our current Golden Age come at the cost of crisp storytelling? And is that why it was struggling to make any impression on me?
In the 2014 documentary film Showrunners, the creative brains behind some of the biggest brands in the box set business happily admit that the long arcs of modern TV allow them to put the clutch down for the occasional episode, letting story elements drift and dripfeed at a languorous pace that would have been unthinkable in the wham-bam days of don’t-touch-that-dial telly. I’ve watched episodes of Game of Thrones where, though I’ve enjoyed spending some time in that beautifully realised world, I’d have trouble telling you exactly what had changed between the opening and closing titles; some marginal shift of loyalties or motive only detectable to the faithful fans, perhaps, but impenetrable to someone tuning in to check out this tits-and-dragons show everyone’s gone so nuts over.
It struck me that the combination of bloating alongside newfound respectability had happened to a formerly disreputable medium once before: Prog Rock.
In 1963, Times music critic William Mann compared the closing chords of The Beatles’ cheery moptop footstomper Not A Second Time to Mahler’s Song Of The Earth, much to The Fabs’ bemusement. Within less than a decade, Deep Purple were staging their Concerto For Group And Orchestra and Yes were treating us to their symphonic Tales of Topographic Oceans whether we wanted them or not.
Prog’s brief, ungainly spasm of kaftans-and-harpsichords now looks like an aberration, but at the time, it too looked like a Golden Age, a moment when chin-stroking fans distanced themselves from cheap, fizzy pop and developed a taste for something a bit more demanding.
Perhaps we were in the age of triple-album gatefold TV. Like Prog Rock’s masterworks, the must-see series were technically proficient, undeniably clever, occasionally brilliant, but every decent tune was bloated with drum solos to the extent that your milkman couldn’t whistle it any more.
So, if a punchy old episode of Columbo was Buddy Holly’s Rave On, then perhaps my un-watched second series of The Returned was Dark Side Of The Moon. I mean, I don’t mind Pink Floyd, but it’s not as much fun to jump around to. You have to sit down for it, and pay a lot of attention.
This was TV blown up to two or three times its natural size, to prove it was serious. And woebetide you if you didn’t give it the respect it deserved.
Try it yourself. Tell someone you’re watching some must-see bit of box set TV, and it’s surprising how often they’ll refuse to discuss it with you unless you can prove you’ve put the hours in. “Are you up to Season Six yet?” Nobody expects you to have seen all of EastEnders to have an opinion on this week’s instalment, but when I first told friends I was considering giving Game of Thrones a go, at the launch of season four, they treated it as a dilettantish quirk. They were convinced I’d watch a couple, become hooked, and go back to the beginning and eat all my greens, like a good boy. They’d talk to me when I’d done my homework.
Dare to say you’re not hooked after a few episodes, and the response is even more off-putting. “Stick with it. It only really gets going about episode eight.” Eight hours? Would you expect anyone to join you at an opera you promised got good eight hours in?
How had TV become such hard work?
With a lot of the TV shows I loved growing up, I probably caught two or three episodes. I definitely watched Starsky and Hutch or The Professionals or Sapphire and Steel, and can happily wax nostalgic about them, but my liking for them is based on the TV equivalent of a fondly remembered hit single. Their stories had caught my attention, entertained me, and then let me go. I didn’t have to sit cross-legged considering them for days on end. I didn’t have to somehow ‘qualify’ as a viewer. Culturally important telly - and all those shows are certainly that - was not closed to the casual enthusiast. Anyone who has tried to settle down with their extended family for the supposedly nation-uniting Doctor Who Christmas Special knows it’s like inviting someone to watch a Masonic ritual. Only the adepts have a clue what’s going on, and explaining it just makes it worse.
Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, it’s easy for us to see what our friends and favourite famouses are following on the box. The nation may not slump annually as a single chocolate-stuffed mass in front of Morecambe and Wise any more, but there is an unexpected level of digital peer pressure to all be watching the same thing. Nobody wants to miss out. That’s natural; television has always worked well as social glue. And it’s gratifying that, despite time shifting, streaming, torrenting, DVDs and four billion channels, that we all might be united by some shared culture after all.
Certainly, watching The Apprentice with all your mates twittering away at the same time is one of the delights of being alive in the 21st Century. Vote-off shows in particular share the be-there-or-miss-out quality of live sport. It’s electric. It’s fun. It’s what television has always done best.
But when it comes to the prestige box set dramas, is this what’s happening? You might discover a new show through social media, but the sheer length of modern story arcs means that the discussion often turns out to be far from communal.
Instead, we consume these shows on our sofas alone, or in pairs, out of sync with our fellow viewers. We squeal ‘SPOILERS!’ at anyone who dares to be an episode ahead, and we damn the dilettantes who dip in for an episode and fail to enjoy the meagre story pickings to be found in a 50-minute slice of a yarn that has been unnaturally elongated over multiple seasons.
What finally killed off meandering Prog Rock was the rude, fast, dumb blast of punk, and the cheery pop that followed in its wake. You didn’t have to study it, or pore over the gatefold Roger Dean sleeve to formulate an opinion. You could just enjoy it.
Maybe now TV has proved it can hold its own against books and films, it needs to remember what it used to do better than any other medium: turn up, week after week, in your front room, blow your socks off, and leave.
There’s craft in a three-minute pop song, and there’s art in making TV that tells a story quickly and satisfyingly for a casual viewer who doesn’t have forty-eight hours to spare. This current Golden Age has drawn some of the best creative minds of this generation into TV’s fold. I’d love to see what they could do if they ditched the drum solos and the seven-part song-cycles and turned out some big jukebox singles.
Then we could all join in.
by Joel Morris
Published in THE IDLER issue 49, 2016.
--
I think it was Mad Men that did it.
I’d wallowed happily in the adland saga’s vintage-chic-opera for four series. I’d given it my time, my head and my heart. And then, at the point I was poised to dive into season five, I paused, as if opening a book I’d found half-read at the bottom of a holiday suitcase. ‘Hang on,’ I thought. ‘Where are we?’
I made a little mental audit of where the story had got to, and realized that I couldn’t remember a thing about it.
I lie. I could remember three things. I remembered there had been a bit of melodrama about a stolen identity. And I recalled a very funny bit of black comedy where someone’s foot was threshed by an unexpected office lawnmower. And I had a vivid memory of a family swooping away in an Edsel through discarded picnic flotsam. And that was it. I could, at a push, do the characters’ names. But it hadn’t gone in. Over 48 hours of viewing - forty-eight hours! - had left less filed in the ‘keeper’ section of my head than I’d get from a decent episode of Lovejoy.
It worried me. I liked Mad Men. In fact, I liked it a lot. But its lengthy, unfurling storyline was so diffuse that it had slipped my grasp like a wet rope, and sunk without a bubble. I wasn’t remembering it as a story, or a TV series, but more like a mood, in the same way I might remember a place I’d lived for a while as a child. I had vague impressions of furniture, a sense of familiar voices, and some vivid memories of passing trousers, but nothing more.
The closest comparison was how it had felt grinding through some nineteenth-century breezeblock novel in a warm college library, and snapping fully awake two hundred pages in with no memory of what I’d been reading.
Was something wrong with me? Had I lost the ability to watch TV? Had my attention span been withered by Twitter and the failsafe narrative snap of Don’t Tell The Bride? Was I simply not up to the job of watching television properly? Oh, God. I’d failed the exam. I was too dumb for telly.
It was then that it dawned on me that maybe television had changed, not me. Everyone agreed that this brash and vulgar upstart that had once been ‘bad for your eyes’, a ‘chewing-gum’ dispensed through an ‘idiot lantern’ guaranteed to ‘rot your brains’, was going through a surprising Golden Age, thanks to the box set revolution: long form novelistic TV that had became a talking point and a badge of pride for discerning viewers.
TV had oustripped its competitors. The place where the big ideas went these days wasn’t Hollywood, or the Great American Novel. It was the big box set: the thing everyone was talking about. Breaking Bad. Mad Men. Game of Thrones. The Sopranos. Even silly Battlestar Galactica was suddenly bursting with ideas, where once it had survived on one (“How much can we make these spaceships look like the ones in Star Wars without being hauled bodily in front of a judge?”)
TV was more than respectable; it was essential. People who had happily trumpeted their high standards by insisting they didn’t watch the bloody gogglebox, could no longer claim to be arbiters of the best of modern culture. It didn’t matter how many operas and gallery openings you’d been to, if you didn’t have an opinion on Making A Murderer, you were half philistine, half hermit.
Telly was important. And when things become important, they often get a bit puffed up. I looked at my shelf of box sets, their spines displayed as proudly as the leatherbound Dickens my mum and dad had once ordered from the Reader’s Digest to make their lounge look posh.
What stories were in those boxes? I could probably sum them up quite quickly, as could their creators. Breaking Bad was Vince Gilligan’s attempt to take ‘Mr Chips and turn him into Scarface.’ Fewer than ten words. No matter how many hours you spend watching that, and how well the makers tell it, you’re watching that simple arc, extended over the length required by longform television.
The reasons for making long-arc TV are obvious. With dizzying choice, it’s a mercy for the viewer to not have to decide what they’re watching every night. Home from work, slump in front of whatever you and your partner have agreed is ‘your show’, no arguments, just wallowing in a familiar world. And for the makers, the commitment of a loyal fanbase is important whether you’re measuring your success using viewing figures, like the terrestrial broadcasters, or subscriber numbers, like Sky or Netflix. Finding out that a prestige series that wins you awards and the respect of your peers could also draw an audience as loyal as soap addicts or sports fans must have been like striking oil.
But stretching stories to keep viewers watching must surely change the way we absorb them. Maybe the trouble I was having grasping these series was because their extended form had diluted the content. Was box set TV like a homeopathic remedy, the effective narrative ingredients diluted until it was indistinguishable from not watching TV at all?
There’s a website called tiii.me that calculates how many of your precious minutes on Earth you will spend watching any chosen TV series, if you can contemplate that sort of mortality maths without bursting into tears. I ran the tally on possibly the definitive quality blockbuster series from the cheap and filthy bad-for-your-eyes days of TV, I Claudius, and it comes in at 11 hours. Breaking Bad lasts over three times that long. Granted, it’s a cracking bit of telly, but it’s hard to argue that it tells three times as big a story as I Claudius. A good old Play For Today could quench your narrative thirst in an hour or so. Had our current Golden Age come at the cost of crisp storytelling? And is that why it was struggling to make any impression on me?
In the 2014 documentary film Showrunners, the creative brains behind some of the biggest brands in the box set business happily admit that the long arcs of modern TV allow them to put the clutch down for the occasional episode, letting story elements drift and dripfeed at a languorous pace that would have been unthinkable in the wham-bam days of don’t-touch-that-dial telly. I’ve watched episodes of Game of Thrones where, though I’ve enjoyed spending some time in that beautifully realised world, I’d have trouble telling you exactly what had changed between the opening and closing titles; some marginal shift of loyalties or motive only detectable to the faithful fans, perhaps, but impenetrable to someone tuning in to check out this tits-and-dragons show everyone’s gone so nuts over.
It struck me that the combination of bloating alongside newfound respectability had happened to a formerly disreputable medium once before: Prog Rock.
In 1963, Times music critic William Mann compared the closing chords of The Beatles’ cheery moptop footstomper Not A Second Time to Mahler’s Song Of The Earth, much to The Fabs’ bemusement. Within less than a decade, Deep Purple were staging their Concerto For Group And Orchestra and Yes were treating us to their symphonic Tales of Topographic Oceans whether we wanted them or not.
Prog’s brief, ungainly spasm of kaftans-and-harpsichords now looks like an aberration, but at the time, it too looked like a Golden Age, a moment when chin-stroking fans distanced themselves from cheap, fizzy pop and developed a taste for something a bit more demanding.
Perhaps we were in the age of triple-album gatefold TV. Like Prog Rock’s masterworks, the must-see series were technically proficient, undeniably clever, occasionally brilliant, but every decent tune was bloated with drum solos to the extent that your milkman couldn’t whistle it any more.
So, if a punchy old episode of Columbo was Buddy Holly’s Rave On, then perhaps my un-watched second series of The Returned was Dark Side Of The Moon. I mean, I don’t mind Pink Floyd, but it’s not as much fun to jump around to. You have to sit down for it, and pay a lot of attention.
This was TV blown up to two or three times its natural size, to prove it was serious. And woebetide you if you didn’t give it the respect it deserved.
Try it yourself. Tell someone you’re watching some must-see bit of box set TV, and it’s surprising how often they’ll refuse to discuss it with you unless you can prove you’ve put the hours in. “Are you up to Season Six yet?” Nobody expects you to have seen all of EastEnders to have an opinion on this week’s instalment, but when I first told friends I was considering giving Game of Thrones a go, at the launch of season four, they treated it as a dilettantish quirk. They were convinced I’d watch a couple, become hooked, and go back to the beginning and eat all my greens, like a good boy. They’d talk to me when I’d done my homework.
Dare to say you’re not hooked after a few episodes, and the response is even more off-putting. “Stick with it. It only really gets going about episode eight.” Eight hours? Would you expect anyone to join you at an opera you promised got good eight hours in?
How had TV become such hard work?
With a lot of the TV shows I loved growing up, I probably caught two or three episodes. I definitely watched Starsky and Hutch or The Professionals or Sapphire and Steel, and can happily wax nostalgic about them, but my liking for them is based on the TV equivalent of a fondly remembered hit single. Their stories had caught my attention, entertained me, and then let me go. I didn’t have to sit cross-legged considering them for days on end. I didn’t have to somehow ‘qualify’ as a viewer. Culturally important telly - and all those shows are certainly that - was not closed to the casual enthusiast. Anyone who has tried to settle down with their extended family for the supposedly nation-uniting Doctor Who Christmas Special knows it’s like inviting someone to watch a Masonic ritual. Only the adepts have a clue what’s going on, and explaining it just makes it worse.
Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, it’s easy for us to see what our friends and favourite famouses are following on the box. The nation may not slump annually as a single chocolate-stuffed mass in front of Morecambe and Wise any more, but there is an unexpected level of digital peer pressure to all be watching the same thing. Nobody wants to miss out. That’s natural; television has always worked well as social glue. And it’s gratifying that, despite time shifting, streaming, torrenting, DVDs and four billion channels, that we all might be united by some shared culture after all.
Certainly, watching The Apprentice with all your mates twittering away at the same time is one of the delights of being alive in the 21st Century. Vote-off shows in particular share the be-there-or-miss-out quality of live sport. It’s electric. It’s fun. It’s what television has always done best.
But when it comes to the prestige box set dramas, is this what’s happening? You might discover a new show through social media, but the sheer length of modern story arcs means that the discussion often turns out to be far from communal.
Instead, we consume these shows on our sofas alone, or in pairs, out of sync with our fellow viewers. We squeal ‘SPOILERS!’ at anyone who dares to be an episode ahead, and we damn the dilettantes who dip in for an episode and fail to enjoy the meagre story pickings to be found in a 50-minute slice of a yarn that has been unnaturally elongated over multiple seasons.
What finally killed off meandering Prog Rock was the rude, fast, dumb blast of punk, and the cheery pop that followed in its wake. You didn’t have to study it, or pore over the gatefold Roger Dean sleeve to formulate an opinion. You could just enjoy it.
Maybe now TV has proved it can hold its own against books and films, it needs to remember what it used to do better than any other medium: turn up, week after week, in your front room, blow your socks off, and leave.
There’s craft in a three-minute pop song, and there’s art in making TV that tells a story quickly and satisfyingly for a casual viewer who doesn’t have forty-eight hours to spare. This current Golden Age has drawn some of the best creative minds of this generation into TV’s fold. I’d love to see what they could do if they ditched the drum solos and the seven-part song-cycles and turned out some big jukebox singles.
Then we could all join in.
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