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January 27, 2004
TT: Elsewhere
Lileks has a way of tossing off a trenchant little nugget of arts criticism right in the middle of a Bleat about something completely different. Like yesterday:People talk about the golden age of television (grainy, overexposed hard-to-watch kinetescopes of big braying vaudevillians in drag) or the golden age of sitcoms (Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family) and I suppose that's correct. But TV today is better than TV ever was. There was never a show like "The Wire." There was never anything as brutal and knowing as "The Office." "Curb Your Enthusiasm" would have made no sense in 1967. It makes perfect sense today.
For the most part--with some exceptions--I think he's right. But the exceptions are important, and worth remembering. It's true that the Golden Age of Television was mostly Milton Berle and low-budget westerns and mysteries. But it was also Ernie Kovacs, An Evening With Fred Astaire, Noël Coward and Mary Martin, Your Show of Shows, my beloved What's My Line?, The Sound of Jazz, New York City Ballet's Nutcracker on Playhouse 90, Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, and Toscanini and the NBC Symphony--not every night, but often enough.
We don't have anything like that today, at least not on network TV (nor is there nearly as much of it on cable TV as is commonly thought). What we do have is an unprecedentedly candid style of TV comedy and drama that reflects the brutal knowingness of our postmodern age with startling, even alarming clarity. I like it. I'm not so sure I like what it tells us about ourselves.
Posted January 27, 2004 1:21 AM
