Golden Age of Television?

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Golden Age of Television?

Postby JackRiddler » Mon May 29, 2017 10:28 pm

.

Nice commentary. Its history of television is fatally incomplete, as becomes obvious if we instead say MEDIA. Reality TV is hardly the only main innovation prior to 2000, but rather an offshoot in the evolution of the live shows, news and sports. News became a 24-hour track of usually fake crisis generation, on the one hand, and a track of permanent dumb-down altogether merged with entertainment, on the other. Also missed is the advent of the rapid-fire form starting with rock video and MTV from around 1980 (coming at the same time as the switch from broadcast to dozens and then hundreds of cable channels). This stylistic revolution saw a shift from standard blocks of 13 minutes slowly unfolding stories (however stupid ones) according to traditional theater conventions to permanent speed-trips, an eternal-now sequence of momentary stimulations in which it need not matter if the pieces fit together. Anyway, that's just to note the faults in the author's opening attempt at a historical framework. The main argument, the critique of the new Golden Age, is pretty much on-target. Worth some riffs, I think.


MAY 14, 2017
HOW TV BECAME RESPECTABLE WITHOUT GETTING BETTER
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/ ... ing-better

On the rise of Prestige TV…
by MATTHEW CHRISTMAN

For a very long time, television was bad. A “vast wasteland,” as FCC chairman Newton Minow called it in his now-quaint 1961 speech Television and the Public Interest. Kinow went on to ask his audience to sit through an entire day’s worth of television programs. He promised that: “You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.”

Anyone who took Minow up on his challenge would have been hard-pressed to disagree. For every Twilight Zone there was a My Three Sons and two Lassies. Television had barely come on the scene before people started calling it the boob tube and the idiot box.

Time did nothing to improve television’s quality, variety, or impact on culture. The only real innovation in the medium over its first fifty years was the reality show, which, by the end of the 20th century, was threatening to consume Western civilization entirely with increasingly dystopian nightmare offerings. By the time of George W. Bush’s election it seemed like only a matter of time before primetime network television would consist entirely of live executions and Regis Philbin. But then, when all hope seemed lost, a shaft of light burst through the covering darkness. A shaft of light in the bulbous, gabagoolian shape of James Gandolfini.

The Sopranos changed what television could accomplish artistically. It utilized the serialized storytelling, the depth of characterization and theme of a novel, and the visual sensibility of film. Episodes ended without the pat resolution that defined traditional TV drama. Stories stretched out over episodes and seasons. Characters underwent the sort of transformations that would have confused and alienated the audiences of previous generations of shows that thrived on archetypes. Inspired by show creator David Chase’s accomplishment, a whole generation of creative heavyweights set to putting their own mark on the medium. The Davids, Milch and Simon, created a pair of HBO shows, Deadwood and The Wire, respectively, that failed to match The Sopranos in viewership, but achieved posthumous critical canonization. Then, the network AMC, which originally showed old Hollywood movies to a small audience of nostalgic geriatrics, really managed to copy the Sopranos formula with Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. These shows achieved levels of popularity and critical acclaim that had never been seen before, and certainly not on basic cable. TV got so good, in fact, that it wasn’t long before the dominant opinion among cultural tastemakers, from Vanity Fair to Newsweek, was that television had surpassed film as the most vital popular narrative art form.

As movie theaters were choked with sequels and reboots and soulless, obscenely-expensive comic book spectacles, the choice to stay home and absorb yourself in a rich, complex extended narrative just made sense. David Remnick, editor-in-chief of that ur-cultural tastemaker the New Yorker, said as much in a letter he wrote to the Pulitzer Prize committee recommending Emily Nussbaum, the magazine’s TV critic, for this year’s criticism award. According to Remnick, television is “the dominant cultural product of our age—it reaches us everywhere and has replaced movies and books as the thing we talk about with our friends, families, and colleagues.” (Nussbaum won that Pulitzer, by the way.)

This new artistic consensus only holds up if you put a rather fat thumb on the scale. Critics who make the case for the superiority of television to film invariably compare their preferred boutique cable or streaming experience to the latest blockbuster hackwork, but this is an absurd and unfair comparison. It ignores the vast majority of television shows, from NCIS: Pacoima to Toddlers and Tiaras to the latest Kevin James fart-fest. You know, the shows people actually watch. The Big Bang Theory, a show that somehow never makes it into articles about the Golden Age of TV, averages over twenty million viewers, most of whom are the same people filling theaters for Transformers: Knight of the Day. A direct, apples-to-apples comparison would be between the best TV shows the medium has to offer and the best films cinema has to offer.

It would be pointless to argue that a given film is objectively better than a given television series. Tastes are relative. The formats are wildly different. The most revealing contrast is between what kind of critically-acclaimed movies are being made and what kind of critically-acclaimed TV shows are on offer. Just in the past few years, we’ve seen a film about the painful coming-of-age of a gay black youth in Miami (Moonlight), a period horror film about colonial America (The Witch), a stop-motion animated film about loneliness and loss (Anomalisa), and a film about an alternative reality where people who fail to find a romantic partner get turned into an animal of their choice (The Lobster).

While there are many kinds of television shows being made at the moment, it’s worth pointing out that a significant majority of critically-acclaimed, so-called “prestige television” shows are about angsty white criminals (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad), angsty white cops (The Wire), and angsty white ad execs (Mad Men). The current generation of prestige shows, which are universally inferior to that first wave by all accounts, rely on an assortment of genre tropes and the template laid by those pioneering programs. Mostly crime. Mostly male. Mostly extravagantly unlikeable anti-heroes whose sheer awfulness makes us feel better about our own, more mundane foibles.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that television shows are, even more than films, advertisements for themselves. Issues of character, theme, story, setting, are, in practice, very often subsidiary to the primary objective of keeping people watching. All the cliffhangers and suspense sequences have less to do with artistic expression than in keeping the audience hooked. Even shows on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, where binge-watching is the norm, are angling for that second season renewal. A movie can do its own thing for two hours, leave the audience confused or alienated or angry, and everyone involved moves on to the next project. A show that did that wouldn’t get to come back, and therefore wouldn’t be able to complete whatever grand design its creators insist is animating the entire thing. Staying on the air in a fractured media landscape, where the difference between a hit and a quietly-canceled flop is a few hundred thousand viewers, is essential if one wishes to be Part of the Conversation.

As a result, the subgenre of “Prestige TV” has become a tautological concept, with show after show earning the label simply by aping the aesthetic sensibility and glossy production value of the shows that first defined the genre. Everything is brooding, tortured anti-heroes, stillness punctuated by sudden acts of violence, montage and ironically counterposed musical choices. Plus bad writing—really, howlingly bad writing. Kevin Spacey, in his Golden Globe-winning performance as House of Cards’s Frank Underwood, regularly looks into the camera and fake-Southern-drawls some fortune-cookie nonsense like “There’s no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt than with a flood of naked truth.” Jon Hamm’s Don Draper, meanwhile, routinely gifted Mad Men viewers with such high-level insights into the human condition as “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.” Were epigrams such as these accompanied by, say, a tender swell of orchestral music, it would be immediately obvious how banal and lazily-written they are. But when uttered over the rim of a scotch-glass in a moodily-lit room by an exquisitely-dressed actor, they are, somehow, imbued with profundity.

The dirty little secret of the Golden Age of Television is that the main reason we all know that we’re living in the Golden Age of Television is because we’re told so by an emergent class of TV writers who have risen to prominence in tandem with it. The rise of the internet has as much, if not more, to do with the rise of perceived TV quality than any show-runner revolution. The Sopranos debuted at almost the same moment that the World Wide Web started reaching into the majority of homes, creating an explosion of websites that demanded content directed at a class of office workers who needed something to read to distract them from their white collar drudgery.

And so an army of recappers and critics were called from the digital ether to ceaselessly whisper a constant consolation for the future that never came. After a century of intense economic productivity, you still don’t have space colonies or even shorter work-weeks, but hey, you do have your couch and your Seamless and hundreds of hours of streamable, premium television at your fingertips.

And these new TV shows are not only to be watched, but to be endlessly obsessed over and speculated on: plot puzzles and opaque character motivations offer endless opportunity for fans to take to the web and start theorizing. There are certainly strong incentives in the direction of manufacturing contrived mysteries and intentional plotholes in order to fuel speculation and drive clicks to websites.

Such is certainly the case with the last prestige TV show to dominate the cultural conversation: Westworld. When HBO, the Zeus from whose head the Goddess of Quality Television sprang, debuted Westworld, a show with lavish production detail, acclaimed actors, and a Nolan brother behind the camera, there was no real doubt as to how the recappers and critics would respond. But is there anything truly interesting, fresh, and groundbreaking about Westworld? The pilot seeps through 80 lugubrious minutes of recycled meditations on man’s inhumanity to robot, spiked with gratuitous nudity and violence, and climaxing with one of the cheapest bits of dramaturgy in the prestige TV toolkit. I won’t spoil it for new viewers, but it’s the same kind of tired old stylistic tricks that the genre routinely uses to make a show’s violent, titillating aspects (i.e. the main reason everyone was watching) seem artistic and rewarding. A character monologues optimistically over a montage of her fellow cast members looking stricken or sadistic, all scored with an ironically foreboding ambient score, punctuated by a small act of violence and an abrupt fade-to-black. There’s an ominous low tone that signals you’re watching Something Very Serious and Important. Behind it, you can almost hear another voice, the voice of the internet opinions to come, assuring you that all of this is as it should be in the best of all possible worlds.

After a few episodes, the fundamental insufficiency of Westworld as a piece of art became impossible to ignore even to the most fervent television evangelist, but the flagship prestige show on the flagship prestige network was simply too big to fail. So the Westworld articles spit out by content-mills focused mostly on decoding the show’s central plot mysteries (Who is the Man in Black? What is the Labyrinth? Who killed Arnold?), rather than analysis of banalities like “character” or “theme” or “emotional resonance.” The glossier outlets insisted that Westworld’s wooly-headed pretentiousness and compulsive mystery-mongering were actually a satire of prestige TV tropes. (“An exploitation series about exploitation, full of naked bodies that are meant to make us think about nudity and violence that comments on violence”—Emily Nussbaum) Anything to avoid the obvious fact that everyone watched the show because it had boobs and blood and because everyone else was watching it and it’s so lonely out here.

One of the bitterest of the many bitter ironies of the digital age is that the explosion of television options and web-based platforms featuring cultural writing has led not to a flowering of creativity and a golden age of critical insight, but an all-consuming monoculture. A cargo cult where the trappings of a few groundbreaking cable shows from early in the millennium have hardened into tropes that power a legion of inferior imitators. Even more disturbingly, dozens of writers at dozens of outlets that depend on clicks and engagement have forged a hive-mind of positivity about the whole thing, assuring their audience that a diet of cultural junk food is just as healthy as balanced meals, because television is the medium best suited to the lives of internet-addicted office drones. Hopefully, as the Golden Age of the Golden Age of Television recedes farther into memory, and as viewers’ working conditions grow more and more intolerable, there will be a collective realization that we deserve better than Prestige TV.


Yeah, well.

Related:

HOW LIBERALS FELL IN LOVE WITH THE WEST WING
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/ ... -west-wing

(I found that show even more unbearable than House of Cards.)

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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:30 pm

bump
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:58 pm

growing up in a very tiny town this was my window to the world and it showed me so much more than the BVMs ever could...I skipped school so much to watch I almost flunked 4th grade


In 1961, following its success with TV College, WTTW became involved with the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI). Transmitting from a four-engine DC-6 airplane circling a six-state Midwest region, MPATI tele-lessons were broadcast daily to participating high schools and colleges with a potential enrollment of approximately 7 million students. WTTW was selected as one of a small number of national production centers to produce two of the tele-courses, World History and American History




History

A NEW CHANNEL
In 1952, the Federal Communications Commission lifted a freeze on the number of television channels on the broadcast spectrum. Many of the new channels would be reserved for educational purposes, and Inland Steel Chairman Edward Ryerson made it his mission to make sure that Chicago secured a place on the dial. The Chicago Educational Television Association was formed by Ryerson and other civic leaders to lobby for, create, and fund a new public television station, and WTTW – Window To The World – was born.

At a temporary studio and offices in Chicago’s Banker’s Building, a new staff of writers and directors was trained for work in television. Report to the Teachers, WTTW’s first program, hit the airwaves on September 6, 1955. Under the leadership of Dr. John Taylor, former University of Louisville president and deputy director-general of UNESCO, WTTW’s staff of 54 regularly scheduled 40 programs a week, Monday through Friday. It was during this time that the station also served as a “working exhibit” in the east wing of the Museum of Science and Industry.

A SERIES OF FIRSTS
With an emphasis on a mix of information and entertainment programming, WTTW’s low-budget, offbeat offerings quickly escalated in number. By its first anniversary, WTTW had doubled its program output, telecasting 43 hours a week, and had scored several television firsts for Chicago and the nation: the first remote from Orchestra Hall, the first language course, and the first series on income tax preparation, which culminated in a two-hour SPEC-TAX-ULAR special.

In partnership with Chicago’s Board of Education, in 1956 WTTW became the first station in the country to televise college courses for credit via its TV College. Chicago-area students were able to enroll at one of the participating junior colleges and attend classes at home in front of their television sets. Within five years, approximately 15,000 students had enrolled for credit. A decade later, TV College’s annual report noted that 80,000 people had enrolled for credit, with an overall viewership estimated at 10,000 per broadcast.

In 1961, following its success with TV College, WTTW became involved with the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI). Transmitting from a four-engine DC-6 airplane circling a six-state Midwest region, MPATI tele-lessons were broadcast daily to participating high schools and colleges with a potential enrollment of approximately 7 million students. WTTW was selected as one of a small number of national production centers to produce two of the tele-courses, World History and American History.

SERVING KIDS
Beyond direct classroom-oriented instruction, children’s programming has always played a critical role at WTTW. In the early days, WTTW aired programs such as Story Time with Miss Bunny, The Storyteller with Val Bettin, and Totem Club.

Co-founded by Don Clayton and Rachel Stevenson, Totem Club originally starred Joe Kelly of Quiz Kids fame and, for most of its eight-year run, National Barndance featured celebrity Arkie the Arkansas Woodchopper. Short on budget but long on ideas, the series was broadcast live five days a week, offering children a specific viewing experience each day. There was Grandmother’s Kitchen, Funcraft for You, Let’s Make a Play, Dr. Andy Merrick’s Animal Clinic, Indian stories with Chief White Eagle, plus, over time, Science Day, Animal Day, Baseball with Hall-of-Famer Roger Hornsby, Water Safety Day, and Farm Day. For her work in producing Totem Club and her pioneering efforts to make the series available to deaf children, Rachel Stevenson was honored with McCall’s Golden Mike Award in 1962.

From his cluttered rolltop desk, or from the reasonable facsimile of a distant planet’s surface, Dr. Daniel Q. Posin of DePaul University explained astronomy and physics to viewers of all ages in ways that were unique, entertaining, and always informative. This respected scientist-academician would be honored time and again for his style of presentation and unusual use of the medium as developed in his Universe Around Us, Dr. Posin’s Universe, and Dr. Posin’s Giants.

Today, Arthur, Sesame Street, The Cat in the Hat, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Caillou, Wild Kratts, Dinosaur Train, Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Peg + Cat are beloved in the hearts and minds of Chicago-area children and families.

ARTS ON THE AIR
The station’s popular Festival series offered Chicagoans ballet, modern dance, music, satire, and drama. Festival would provide a foundation for future arts programming and, in the process, recall imaginative production/scenic techniques cultivated in the critically acclaimed Chicago School of Television days of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

On the heels of its first successful membership drive, WTTW celebrated its second decade of operation on August 15, 1965 by taking up residence in its current home at 5400 North Saint Louis Avenue on the northwest side of the city. Designed by architects Perkins and Will, the new facility was built on five acres of land providing 52,000 square feet of work space. Three studios were designed into the facility – large enough to hold an entire symphony orchestra and high enough to permit dramatic productions to fly in scenery and accommodate elaborate lighting plans.

During this second decade, WTTW programming moved to another level of distinction. In 1968, Book Beat, hosted by Robert Cromie, delivered a steady stream of literary notables into viewers’ homes, and became the first of seven WTTW offerings to win the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. One year later, in 1969, the legendary Burr Tillstrom and his Kuklapolitan Players, urged out of television retirement by WTTW Board Chairman Newton N. Minow, produced a series of half-hour specials resulting in an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Children’s Programming. It was also during this period that WTTW initiated its Auction as an entertaining and effective method of fundraising.

BUILDING AUDIENCE
The next important era in WTTW history began in 1971 when Newton Minow recruited Washington, D.C. career broadcaster William J. McCarter to assume leadership of WTTW. McCarter promptly expanded the broadcast schedule to seven days a week, introducing a wide range of general interest programming. Under McCarter, WTTW produced a large number of nationally broadcast series and specials, and having expanded to 120 logged hours of programming per week, the station continued its tradition of excellence with such memorable series as the local music series Soundstage, Consumer Game, Made in Chicago, and Prime Time Chicago. McCarter’s programming and financial successes led to the Harvard Business School’s selection of WTTW as a case study of a well-run major public television station.

Cited by A. C. Nielsen as the most-watched public station in the country (a status WTTW still enjoys today), WTTW began its third decade with an eclectic program lineup balanced between national and local programming, with a dash of international production mixed in. The highly acclaimed 26-part series on school desegregation, As We See It, and the profound examination of mandatory retirement, Miles to Go Before We Sleep, were both Peabody Award winners, as was Ruth Page’s ballet, The Merry Widow. Opening Soon at a Theater Near You (later retitled Sneak Previews), starring film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, became the first movie review series on television.

On the international level, WTTW’s co-productions with the BBC culminated in the three-part Atlantic Realm series and the six-part Peabody Award winner The Making of a Continent.

For local audiences, there was again a wide range of offerings, including sports with Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko’s World Series of Softball, The Do-It-Yourself “Messiah,” Joel Weisman’s Chicago Tonight: The Week in Review, Chicago Commodities Report, the innovative Public Newscenter, and the last broadcast home for Chicago’s legendary Kup’s Show. In turn, Image Union provided a much-needed showcase for independent film and video producers. In April 1984, WTTW’s flagship nightly public affairs series Chicago Tonight premiered, with host John Callaway.

NEW LEVELS OF EXCELLENCE
The organization’s fourth decade witnessed spirited political coverage on the local, state, and national levels, plus documentary production that gave new meaning to the term public affairs. Technically, WTTW became the first local television station in the country to utilize high-definition technology. Special programs, including Mozart by the Masters and Solti’s Beethoven: The Fifth Symphony Revisited, were applauded by Chicago audiences as was Wild Chicago and its offbeat view of the people and places comprising Chicago’s urban jungle. Excellence in children’s programming was encouraged through WTTW’s American Children’s Television Festival, culminating in the presentation of the Ollie Awards, named for the most gregarious of the Kuklapolitan Players and honoring the best in children’s programming. To this day, the Golden Apple Awards for Excellence in Teaching continues its long tradition of shining a spotlight on outstanding Chicago-area educators.

In the 1990s, the award-winning Chicago Matters series was a collaborative effort between WTTW, the Chicago Community Trust, WBEZ/Chicago Public Radio, The Chicago Reporter, and the Chicago Public Library, and focused on the tough problems of violence, racism, aging, and immigration policies – problems that confront many Chicagoans on a daily basis. Another Peabody Award winner, The New Explorers, a co-production with Kurtis Productions, Ltd., portrayed 20th-century scientists as adventurers working in space, under the oceans, or, possibly, with endangered species.

For contemporary music lovers, in 1993, the critically acclaimed series Center Stage – a Chicago Production Center and VH-1 Network co-production, made its national debut. Performers such as k. d. lang, Keith Richards, and Neil Young were free to explore their music “with as few frills and distractions as possible.”

And, combining lively music with pleasing visuals, The Kidsongs Television Show was designed to provide entertainment and educational experiences.

As in decades past, WTTW specials continued to bring unique experiences and messages to our viewers. In 1993, Love in Four Acts featured four of Chicago’s young choreographers sharing their interpretations of love by creating dance works specifically designed for digital television. The Real McTeague was aired nationally via Great Performances on PBS, and was selected from among 500 entries in 30 countries to be screened at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Italy. In 1994, Remembering Chicago, a magical reminiscence of our city in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s was watched by Chicagoans of every age. Weaving memories and film footage from a variety of sources, including WTTW viewers, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Historical Society, the program won the Chicago Headline Club’s 1995 Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism. The program’s success inspired the sequels Remembering Chicago Again, Remembering Chicago and World War II, Remembering Chicago: The Boomer Years, and Remembering Chicago: The ‘70s and ‘80s.

In 1995, WTTW president William J. McCarter received the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle Award in recognition of his more than 25 years of service to the television industry and his significant contributions to Chicago broadcasting.

In 1998, Daniel Schmidt took over as President and CEO of Window To The World Communications, Inc. Under his leadership, the station’s commitment to producing the best local and national programming continued to deepen. Check, Please!, Chicago Stories, Artbeat Chicago, Arts Across Illinois, Candidate Free Time, and Geoffrey Baer’s popular tour programs all created a direct connection between the station and our audience. The expansion of WTTW’s Chicago Tonight to an hour-long newsmagazine with host Phil Ponce and correspondents Carol Marin, Elizabeth Brackett, Eddie Arruza, Jay Shefsky, Paris Schutz, and Brandis Friedman furthers the station’s mission to cover a wider variety of local and national stories. In 2002, WTTW re-launched the Soundstage series, shot entirely in high-definition and distributed throughout the PBS system.

WTTW has gone beyond television to become a truly multi-platform media enterprise. In April 2002, WTTW began transmitting a digital signal of both the analog broadcast and at that time, the PBS feed of high-definition programming. In September 2003, WTTW opened the Digital Broadcast Operations Center, becoming a fully-digital broadcasting operation – for both the standard definition broadcast and high-definition broadcast. On January 1, 2004, the WTTW Digital channel was launched – the first customized, localized, and separate stream of digital programming. In August 2005, WTTW partnered with Comcast to offer its first menu of Video on Demand programming, and in December of the same year, WTTW launched a major redesign of wttw.com with video streaming and exclusive, rich content. Since that time, WTTW’s digital platforms (website, mobile apps, etc.) have been developed and redeveloped to offer both parallel and web exclusive content to our growing online audience. In January of 2006, WTTW Create was launched with a schedule of public broadcasting how-to and do-it-yourself programming; content from the WORLD channel was added in July 2013, when it was renamed WTTW Create/WORLD. And later in 2006, WTTW V-me was launched as the very first Spanish-language public broadcasting television service in Chicago.

Also during this decade, as an active participant in public broadcasting’s Ready to Learn initiative, WTTW was awarded major grants from the U.S. Department of Education to fund development of children’s transmedia properties which included the Emmy-winning series WordWorld and the interactive initiatives Mission to Planet 429 and UMIGO, designed to engage at-risk kids in low income neighborhoods in exercises to boost their interest and skills in science and mathematics.

WHERE WE ARE NOW
As a multiplatform public media organization, WTTW is committed to and excited about the emergence of new technologies and digital broadcasting, and we are preparing our organization for the future with an increased emphasis on alternate platforms as a way of distributing content and – in particular – localized content.

In keeping with that local focus, WTTW is also dedicated to finding ways to extend our relationship to the community. Whether through outreach events, neighborhood screenings and station meet and greets, building tangible connections to the community is a mission-critical endeavor.

Under Dan Schmidt’s guidance, today WTTW is one of the most-watched public television stations in the country, serving more than 65% of Illinois’ diverse population as well as areas of Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Its website, along with that of its sister station WFMT, attracts more than a half a million visits per month, where visitors have access to a wide variety of streaming video and audio, engaging blogs and other interactive web-exclusive features, mobile-optimized content, up-to-the-minute schedule information, and robust websites dedicated to their favorite series and specials.

In April 2014, Window to the World Communications, Inc. named its campus the Renée Crown Public Media Center to recognize a major gift by the Crown family to WTTW and WFMT in honor of Renée Crown and her tremendous contributions to the organization as a trustee and leader committed to exceptional public media programming and services.

In January 2015, WTTW announced, for the first time in its history, the naming of an on-air host position. The official title of the host of WTTW’s flagship nightly newsmagazine Chicago Tonight will be listed as the Alexandra and John Nichols Chief Correspondent and Host, a position currently held by Phil Ponce.
http://interactive.wttw.com/about/history
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Wed Mar 07, 2018 2:04 pm

BVM?
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Wed Mar 07, 2018 2:11 pm

You said you were Catholic... Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary?
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 07, 2018 2:17 pm

:)

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Wed Mar 07, 2018 2:18 pm



Looks pretty suspicious? Is that sorcery they're up to?
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Wed Mar 07, 2018 2:29 pm

Trope has become a dirty word in certain circles.

But there are tropes... and there are tropes.

Image

There are mazes and there are mazes.
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Wed Mar 07, 2018 3:10 pm

Let us turn bulk apperception into a trope, and in so doing, we will denigrate it.

Anyone?
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Mar 08, 2018 3:17 am

That's difficult to imagine.
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Thu Mar 08, 2018 11:01 am

Iamwhomiam » Thu Mar 08, 2018 1:17 am wrote:That's difficult to imagine.


Is that a bicameral mind joke?

Another cheesy trope from the golden age of television.
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby minime » Fri Mar 09, 2018 11:23 am

minime » Wed Mar 07, 2018 12:29 pm wrote:Trope has become a dirty word in certain circles.

But there are tropes... and there are tropes.

Image

There are mazes and there are mazes.


I don't have tv, but get the odd video from my local library. Almost nothing is binge-worthy, even in this, the golden age of tv. In my opinion. I'm sure it's just me. Usually I lose interest as soon as I discover what they're about, early in the first season: Not quite exclusively chakras one, two, three.

Of course, Westworld is not that. Finished the first season in three days. Clues to the enigma are strewn about carelessly. Though I don't imagine they'll take it any further in season two, preferring to leave it for later--other shows, other movies, other games, other realities. If ever.

Often literary criticism itself of such efforts is actually PR in disguise, another way to bring the underlying themes into the collective consciousness, such as it is, without addressing those themes themselves. Hard to say whether the above by Matthew Christman or the indifferent response by our very own Jack Riddler is such criticism.
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby Jerky » Fri Mar 09, 2018 3:22 pm

Oh, I don't know. A lot of the anti-Golden Age of Television rhetoric that I've seen popping up lately (and it has been a trend) feels like a thrashing reaction to the peer pressure that one shouldn't "miss out" on some of these shows. And while it's true that peer pressure thing can be annoying, it's also true that there have been some pretty great productions in recent years.

Westworld
For what it was - a sci-fi action show remake of a 70's sci-fi action movie popcorn movie - I thought Westworld was a fine, high quality, thoughtful entertainment. It kept me guessing until the end, and I thought it wound up rather well.

As for other recent "Golden Age" series, among the real deal (IMO) are:

The Wire.
Magnificent television. Definitely an all-time great series. For the essay quoted at length in the OP to dismiss it as "a show about angsty white cops" is so disastrously out-of-order and an inversion of reality, it approaches criminal levels of op-ed dereliction of duty. The word STUPID is perfectly suited for Christman's blathering cant.

Black Mirror.
Particularly the first two seasons, but the Netflix seasons have a lot to recommend them, too.

UTOPIA
A UK series which definitely should have been the subject of a lot more conversations here than it ended up being, particularly the first season. Too bad, really. If anyone would like to watch it, email me your gmail address to jerkyleboeuf at gmail dot com and I'll arrange it via Gdrive sharing.

True Detective
Pretty fantastic, despite some minor quibbles. Season one was the subject of more UNPAID scholar-level study and dissection than probably any series in recent memory. Maybe that's a key, if you're worried about the "culture industry" rising around these shows (although why you would be, God only knows): Look for fan generated stuff, not branded work (like those shows that have been popping up with the sole purpose of discussion the previously aired show).

There are so many more great shows out there, serving the same function as great literature always has... connecting us to deeper human truths, making us see things in a new light or from an unfamiliar perspective, helping us confront our preconceptions, or see the shortcomings of certain old ways of thinking... and certain new ones, too. Of course the majority of TV (and movies, and books, and everything) is dross. Twas ever thus. That doesn't mean we should throw away the good because there's so much bad. The opposite is true, in fact. We should cherish the good when it arrives... not whine about how there isn't more of it.

But it's true that Mad Men is way overrated. As is The Walking Dead. And Game of Thrones definitely jumped the shark this year.

Jerky
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby dada » Sun Mar 11, 2018 2:07 pm

"The consumer becomes the ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape."

"[Art] is perceived only from the point of view that it can serve as something else, however vaguely that other thing might be envisaged. Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish - the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art - becomes its only use value, the only value they enjoy." -Dialectic of Enlightenment

This is golden age television, to me. Outer Space International:

http://osi74.com/

What I watch when I occasionally binge. "By relating to its commodity-role, by drawing attention to it rather than mystifying us with claims to transcendence, artworks can get near the truth." as Ben Watson said. Lots of episodes of most of the shows can be found on vimeo. Here's the lineup:

OSI_Media_Kit6_2016web.jpg
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Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Golden Age of Television?

Postby Jerky » Sun Mar 11, 2018 2:49 pm

Yes, yes, I'm very familiar with those dreaded MarxCultists Horkheimer and Adorno's theories (altho Benjamin was the most intriguing MarxCultist on the topic IMO). And even tho I appreciated The Dialectic of Enlightenment, that doesn't mean I think their analysis is the final word on the subject (or even a fully satisfactory first word).

Maybe one has to have some experience actually creating cultural commodities like stories, comics, short films or what have you (as I myself do) to understand in a more primal, organic way the levels beneath the commercial and, can we call it "political", that the MarxCultists were obsessed with. Just because something was created with a profit motive, that doesn't mean its other qualities are always an illusion.

As for Ben Watson's take (and I may be one of perhaps 10 people on planet Earth who's read his Frank Zappa and the Dialectics of Poodle Play from cover to cover), I think his own blind spots re: the essential emptiness of Punk (both the music and the movement) make him a lackluster guide for navigating such incredibly turbulent philosophical waters.

I am very much intrigued by the link you posted, however, and will def be giving that stuff a watch!

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