I don't usually post articles I don't think are good, but this is instructive as bad TV criticism (imho). In a
Boston Globe op-ed, Steve Almond tries to
make us feel bad for watching TV, but first of all, the article opens with the inevitable admission that he doesn't actually watch TV (would a newspaper let someone write a serious op-ed on, say, politics if that person doesn't actually follow politics? No, they wouldn't. But TV? Sure, go for it!). Second, because he doesn't watch TV, he's limited to grounding his points in a few episodes of
24 (one shouldn't conclude anything on the basis of just a few episodes; it's a long-form medium) and magazine advertising of
CSI (yes, he saw something about it in a magazine, not on TV). And third, he writes this -- "The traditional rap against television is that it’s an energy sucker that sells us products we don’t need. But these days TV seems to be fulfilling an even more insidious role: It’s selling us the psychological myths we need to believe." -- apparently without realizing that those two aspects (TV's commercial base and its storytelling myths) are wholly fused together and that they always have been, on TV and really anywhere else there's ads (which is, well, everywhere). So yeah, this won't end up on my top ten list of the smartest things said about TV this year. Not that I'm doing one, but it would be fun to do one, if only to not put this on it. /rant
