Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch
•
1 like•588 views
This lecture was presented at Bodega in Philadelphia onFebruary 25, 2012 and published as part of Document, a new online distribution project featuring PDFs by artists. "Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch" is an lecture about what it means to be American and watch TV. The talk examines fifteen core American values, as established by sociologist Robin M. Williams, Jr. in 1970, through the lens of the long-running primetime situation comedy Cheers (1982). "Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch" uses personal history to interrogate the myths of success, family, love and identity that are learned though watching thousands of hours of television. A close reading of Cheers is contrasted with the parallel story of US commercialism to explore how television creates value.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch
Similar to Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch
- 1. Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch
- 2. I told her I once heard a comedian say that if you put an apple on television everyday for six months, and then placed that apple in a glass case and put that on display at the mall, people would go up to it and say, Oooh, look, there’s that apple that’s on television. America’s a lot like that apple.
- 3. iBeer QuickTimeª and a mpeg4 decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 5. I believe that television directly reflects the moral, political, social and emotional need states of our nation. [I believe] that television is how we actually disseminate our entire value system.
- 6. NVC
- 7. SFU
- 8. Television is how we feel.
- 9. I Love Lucy
- 10. American Values
- 11. Cheers Pilot
- 12. Teaser Intro
- 13. “This is the thanks we get.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 14. Moral orientation Activity and work Nationalism and patriotism
- 15. “Wouldn’t you like to get away.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 16. Activity and Work Humanitarianism External Conformity
- 17. Act One
- 18. “Symbols are important.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 19. Material Comfort
- 20. Hallway
- 21. “I looked up from my Proust.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 23. “I was a good drunk.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 24. Achievement and Success Progress
- 25. “One’s trying to move into my neighborhood.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 26. Racism and Group Superiority
- 27. Carla’s Late
- 28. “Okay. I’m late.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 30. “What are your perspiration patterns?” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 31. Science and secular rationality
- 32. First Customers
- 33. “I’m a student of life.” QuickTimeª and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
- 34. Fade out.
Editor's Notes
- I told her I once heard a comedian say that if you put an apple on television everyday for six months, and then placed that apple in a glass case and put that on display at the mall, people would go up to it and say, Oooh, look, there’s that apple that’s on television. America’s a lot like that apple. — Paul Beatty, Slumberland Tonight I’m going to talk about what it means to be American and watch TV. I’ve been thinking about nationalism a lot over the past few years because I live in Chicago, a true American city. Philadelphia is not a true American city, but it is the first American city, so in many ways you’ve won. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, which is also not a true American city. In fact, a stranger once told me that by “European Standards” Los Angeles is not a city at all. I used to be one of those pretentious assholes who longed to be an expat. I wanted to live in Europe and have good sex and eat good cheese and go to good museums. I desired citizenship. America is defined most fundamentally by its commercialism. At best to be an American is to buy for a dollar and sell for two; at worst, it’s to be bought and sold. Every American exists between product and merchant. We’re a market, not a public. While this is problematic, it is the condition of living in the United States—it’s the dream we speak so fondly of. I’m interested in the possibilities of commercialism. And I don’t mean that I want to be a millionaire, although for the record, I would like to be a millionaire. Capitalism overlooks institutions that are important, but have no profit motive. At the same time it creates the circumstances for consumer-citizens to over fund whatever ridiculous ideas they value.
- For example, the iPhone is absurd. I have one and 80% of the time I can’t make calls on it. Instead I can send an email, schedule an appointment, take a picture, check bus arrivals, listen to music, tweet, accept credit card payments, scan documents and invoice clients, among other tasks. The first person I knew with an iPhone was a student of mine. Miles was fifteen and spent the beginning of each class pretending to drink a beer, after which I would confiscate his phone. At the time iBeer cost $2.99. iBeer is on an estimated 60 million smartphones.
- Commerce and conceptual art are the only contexts in which something so wildly unreasonable can be that popular. I’m interested in both traditions. I want to know how to create value. Which leads me to a series of questions, like “What is value?,” “What do we value?,” “What is the difference between value and capital?,” and “How is that value/capital embodied, objectified or institutionalized?” These are the questions I ask myself when I’m really stoned.
- Television has always been in my life. I was born in the late eighties, after the tube had become fully integrated into American society. Young urban professionals like my parents had seen JFK’s assassination, witnessed the Televised War, watched the Watergate trials and gotten their MTV. Ted Turner splintered the three channel monopoly and FOX was born. Nonwhites and gays were regularly on TV. The Cosby Show (1984)—which followed an upper-middle class black family; Roseanne (1988)—a sitcom in which the title character worked in a factory; and A Different World (1987)—a series about students at a historically black university—were the highest rated shows of my birth year. Compare that to today when American Idol (Wednesday) and American Idol (Thursday) claim top ten spots. I have no nostalgia for the past. I don’t think the 80s (or the 70s or the 60s) were any better, I think they were different. I believe that television expresses the values of its culture. To quote, Lauren Zalaznick, Chairman, NBCUniversal “ I believe that television directly reflects the moral, political, social and emotional need states of our nation. [I believe] that television is how we actually disseminate our entire value system.”
- Nonviolent Communication, a method developed by psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg, provides a useful framework for understanding how television communicates our desires. Nonviolent Communication has four components: observations, feelings, needs and requests. The basic NVC process involves observing the concrete actions that affect our well-being; stating how we feel in relation to what we observe; identifying the needs, values, desires, etc. that create our feelings; and requesting concrete actions in order to enrich our lives. In the language of NVC, every conflict is a result of our needs not being met and every joy is a result of our needs being met. American television replicates this approach in a commercial setting. Television is an advertising medium and its economic engine is driven by demographics—the statistical characteristics of a population—by which we can interpret need states. In fact, according to $10,000/hr corporate marketing guru Seth Godin, demographics don’t even matter anymore. Need states, or what Godin calls “psychographics,” are much more important. Psychographics include our personality, attitudes, interests and lifestyle. We commonly refer to these attributes as “taste.” In his 1979 masterwork, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu revealed that taste was so entangled in social structure that it had almost nothing to do with the individual. If social conditions like class undeniably inform taste, then they undeniably inform need, which shapes television. So although our feelings remain unspoken, we can tune into various programs roughly organized by emotion. Note the use of sentiment in generic labels: drama, comedy, thriller, mystery, action, etc. Television is suspended in steps two and three of the NVC process; it states how we feel and acknowledges why we feel that way.
- The first show I was completely obsessed with was Six Feet Under (2001), an HBO series about a family that owns a funeral home in Los Angeles. Six Feet Under began during my freshman year of high school and ended my sophomore year of college. For the last two years of school, I would re-watch the series in its entirety whenever I was feeling depressed. I did it mostly to cry. I’m a bawler. My eyes well up and my mouth turns itself upside down. Sometimes it feel good, but usually I want it to stop. I know I’m being manipulated by the music, the pacing or the narrative. I know that I know better, but I can’t help it. I like a sad ending and Six Feet Under was built on a sense of loss. I only stopped this ritual because I moved in with my boyfriend. He was working long hours at the time and I wasn’t. It was dark and cold and I had the urge to watch my favorite television show. My boyfriend would come home to me planted in front of the screen with my knees in my hands, enjoying “home-comfort transcendence.” He’d wake up at 5am and find me in the same position. One morning he got angry and yelled at me. He thought it was sick. I apologized—eyes glazed from hours of watching, dried tears on my face—and told him I only had six more episodes to go. I’m comfortable sharing this moment because I know I’m not alone. Americans currently watch a little over five hours of TV every day; a few years ago we were doing eight hours a day. Our habit has appeared to decrease because of the internet, but if you think people aren’t watching TV on the internet, you’re obviously a 60 year old television executive. A terrifying statistic claims that watching TV is “the number three activity” for the average American, after “sleep and work.”
- Television is how we feel. In the words of Feel Tank, television is a “container that incites, creates, collects and records emotional scenes” and delivers them to advertisers and audiences to be “inspected, [organized,] discussed, distributed and diverted.” The medium allows both producers and viewers to explore ”the emotional investments, temperatures, traumas, pleasures, and ephemeral experiences circulating throughout the... cultural landscape.” We are all “hucksters of the symbol.” We remake and recombine the metaphors that surround us “to create an object that works, which is to say that sells—which is also to say that objectively synthesizes a relation between cultural categories, for in that lies its saleability.” The television viewer is equal to the creator in the making of meanings. We buy the symbol and we buy into the symbol. I recently read an article in The Atlantic that characterized adulthood as home ownership, marriage and parenthood. It argued that there were economic reasons that my generation, “The Millenials,” weren’t hitting these milestones. While I appreciated the author’s attempt to throw me a bone, I couldn’t help feeling like he had missed the point.
- Life isn’t a parlor game or a sitcom, so why do we want it to be? American culture promises us a home, a husband or wife and two healthy kids in a linear timeline, typically at or around the big 3-0. Lived experience teaches us otherwise. I’m still waiting to land the big job I was supposed to get after college. “Television arbitrates the ideological tensions created by disparities between” what we’ve been trained to expect and what we’ve learned ourselves. Historian George Lipsitz writes “ Guided by emotion and empathy, working through ritual and repetition, television’s core vocabulary reflects its role as a therapeutic voice ministering to the open wounds of the psyche. As a ‘close-up’ medium whose dramatic and social locus is the home, television addresses the inner life by minimizing the heroic while maximizing the private and personal aspects of existence. Where motion pictures favor the panoramic shot, television privileges the zoom shot, looking in rather than out. To represent conversation, film directors use the ‘shot-counter-shot’ effect while television directors employ the tightly constructed ‘two faces east.’ Thus motion-picture conversation emphasizes the separations between people, while television depicts people as closely linked to one another.” The oldest and most popular form of television is the situation comedy. The sitcom is based on a simple comic premise that is played out by an ensemble cast set in a recurring locale, typically a domestic or professional setting. Sitcoms do a lot of the ideological work involved in defining such myths as “family,” “success” and “love.”
- In 1967, sociologist Robin M. Williams, Jr. wrote an essay unassumingly titled “Individual and Group Values” for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. In this text Williams distinguished fifteen “major value-belief clusterings” that influence American society and individuals, as follows Activity and work Achievement and success Moral orientation Humanitarianism Efficiency and practicality Science and secular rationality Material comfort Progress Equality Freedom Democracy External conformity Nationalism and patriotism Individual personality Racism and related group superiority Although Williams’ research is forty-five years old, it still rings true to me. The contradictions in his list accurately convey my constant—and perhaps distinctly American—anxiety. How can we value equality and still believe in group superiority? How do we cultivate our dogged individualism if we must conform to external pressure? Why is being a good person so often conflated with having a good job? Williams studied mass fiction to derive these fifteen values and analyzed how they changed over time. He notes that fiction is typically targeted toward certain audiences, and didn’t “reflect reality in a total way,” rather it showed “specific kinds of transformation” within a given population.
- I could pick any sitcom from the past fifty years and identify all of these American values, but I’m going to focus on Cheers (1982). The series is about the owner, employees and patrons of a Boston bar. I chose Cheers because production company Charles/Burrows/Charles got the formula right with this show. Cheers is rigid in its multi-camera proscenium set-up and fixed location. It was successful, but didn’t break any records, resulted in two spin-offs— The Tortellis (1987) and Frasier (1993)—one of which also became a hit, and the series lived on for years in syndication. My favorite part about the Cheers story is that the bar was so beloved by fans that it was defictionalized into a Boston tourist attraction. The bar that was used for the exterior shots in the opening credits, Bull & Finch Pub, was renamed “Cheers Beacon Hill” in 2002. The proprietors also opened a second location that was an exact replica of the television set. We’re going to look at excerpts from the pilot episode, “Give Me A Ring Sometime.” In her memoir, Bossy Pants , Tina Fey explains that a pilot is “ [P]articularly difficult to write because you have to introduce all the characters without it feeling like a series of introductions. You have to tell a story that’s not only funny and compelling but also dramatizes your main characters’ points of view and what the series would be about thematically (love, work, investigating sexy child murders in Miami, etc.).” She also says, “If you want to see a great pilot, watch the first episode of Cheers . It’s charming, funny, and well constructed.”
- Cheers begins with a “cold open,” a 2-5 minute scene to introduce the episode. Fade In: Int. Bar — Early Afternoon Cheers: A bar in Boston, somewhere in town near The Common: attractive, friendly traditional decor, with a sports orientation—photographs and mementos here and there. The bar is open for business but no customers or bartender are in sight. Sam Malone enters from the back room carrying a box of glasses, which he starts to unpack. He's in his thirties with the body an ex-athlete. A young teenage boy enters , and sits down at the bar. He's dressed in a suit, trying to look as old as possible.
- [video clip]
- In this scene we learn that Sam Malone (Ted Danson) is a stand-up guy. We see that he takes pride in his work as he straightens the picture frames and cleans the coffee mugs. “Activity and work” is one of the themes of the show. We’ll see it come up multiple times. Cheers was written in the tradition of seventies “city” sitcoms that followed primetime’s twenty year focus on the suburbs. When Sam says “War is gross” and the teen says “This is the thanks we get,” the show is working with the popular historical legacy of Vietnam for laughs. It addresses the truth of the urban industrial city—in this case the disappointment felt by returning veterans and the ambivalence about the war itself. On to the opening sequence. Cut to: Main Title
- [video clip]
- “ Where Everybody Knows Your Name” was written by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo and performed by Gary Portnoy. My boyfriend, who had never seen Cheers before last week, was captivated by the tune. After the first few notes, with utter sincerity, he remarked “This is a great song” and began humming the refrain. “ Activity and work” appear in the first line of the song. “Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.” Cheers maps familial relationships onto the workplace. Your co-workers and drinking buddies are the ones that know your name, not your family. Americans are defined by their occupation. The easiest way to throw me into an existential conundrum is to ask “What do you do?” I read a self-help book that described the so-called cocktail line as a “sacred distilling process of your reality” that must “convey your talent, your dreams [and] your power.” That’s a lot of pressure. I also hear “humanitarianism”and “external conformity,” respectively, in the lines “Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot... you wanna go where people know people are all the same.” Cheers was originally broadcast on Thursday nights at 9:00pm. It’s likely that many of the viewers were watching after a long, stressful day. They too needed respite and these comforting words soothed the tension of their 9 to 5. It’s almost like meditation. “Wouldn’t you like to get away.”
- Int. Bar — A Few Minutes Later Sam goes into the back room. The boy starts out. Diane Chambers and Sumner Sloan enter , carrying suitcases. She’s in her twenties and pretty. He’s forty-ish, distinguished, professorial.
- [video clip]
- “Symbols are important.” Here is confirmation of what we already know. Objects confer status and communicate to the world that we’re powerful, rich or otherwise superior. Sumner Sloan (Michael McGuire) is so intent to show his love symbolically that he neglects the reality of his relationship with Diane Chambers (Shelley Long). With this morality lesson the writers reinforce “family values” while atomizing the familial unit into discrete consumers.
- He exits down the hallway . The bar phone starts to ring . Diane looks around. No one comes to answer it, so she does, just as Sam Malone enters from the back room. He's eating a sandwich and his mouth is full.
- [video clip]
- The writers position Sumner as an obnoxious, blue-blooded academic. Intellectualism is classed and the audience is instructed to identify with Sam. We aren’t impressed with the fact that Sumner writes for Harper’s or that he teaches at B.U.. Although Sumner is clearly “successful”— he’s attractive, well-bred, highly educated, distinguished and urbane—he isn't a hero. We don’t even like him. Television stirs our feelings of unease and addresses them superficially, so we are spared another moment of deep reflection. Most of us often wonder if we made the right decisions in life. If we don’t connect with Sumner, a character who chose correctly, we feel more comfortable with our own path.
- [video clip]
- For those same reasons, Sam is the hero. He’s an ex-baseball player, former alcoholic and now small-business owner. He’s made some mistakes. Sam also illustrates our belief in progress. He’s better today than he was yesterday. American storytelling promotes the ideology of optimism.
- [video clip]
- The entire run of Cheers features a benign class war between various characters. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) is the most well-known snob of the show, but he isn’t introduced until Season 3. Until that “lovable pompous” arrives, Diane is the resident elitist. She grows more tolerant over time, but as renegade educator Jane Elliott suggests, “no one wants to be tolerated, they want to be appreciated.” I find the line “I understand, one’s trying to move into my neighborhood” extremely discomforting given the lack of diversity on Cheers and the small screen in general. This is a reference to discriminatory housing practices that restricted ethnic minorities to specific parts of the city. Up until very recently, property values dropped if Blacks, Asians, Jews or Hispanics moved into a neighborhood. The TV industry observes similarly racist practices in terms of which shows are considered “primetime.” Shows with non-white themes and casts are not seen as financially viable. “ Racism and related group superiority” is a core belief in our society. All of us operate as if some men are more equal than others. To paraphrase theologian Peter J. Gomes, our forefathers did not escape oppression to sing Kumbaya in the woods, they escaped in order to oppress.
- Carla Tortelli enters , angry. She's late twenties, small, dark, Italian. The cocktail waitress.
- [video clip]
- The whole Cheers gang is full of strong personalities, but Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman) makes the most memorable first impression. Her individualism also makes her a terrible employee, playing against our value of efficiency and practicality. In Episode 3, after assaulting a customer she says, “Look Sam, I grew up on Federal Hill. I had six older brothers and sisters. I worked all my life to get this mean and you're telling me I have to learn nice.” Her explosive anger was amusingly contrasted with her small frame and we ate it up. Perlman won four Emmys for her portrayal of Carla Tortelli and was nominated ten times. We admired Carla because she was comfortable in her own skin.
- [video clip]
- Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger) is the “bar know-it-all.” In every episode he provides a few gems of enlightenment. Americans want to make the uncertain certain. Science is important because it gives us the hope that we can control and predict all natural phenomenon. Like Cliff, we stretch facts until they mean more than they do, so we can to claim to know things that we don’t know for sure.
- Fade In: Int. Bar — Day The bar is nearly empty. Our four employees are in their places. A nicely-dressed couple enters the front door and looks around. Diane looks at Sam. I’m going to end with a clip of Diane describing how the social space of the bar promotes equality, freedom and democracy. With her lengthy monologue producers James Burrows, Glen Charles and Les Charles explain to the home audience why they created Cheers and why we should watch it. I enjoy this expository message because it offers a glimpse into the context of production.
- [video clip]
- Thank you for letting me ruin Cheers for you. Goodnight. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Paul Beatty. Slumberland. 2009. Lauren Zalaznick. The Conscience of Television. 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/lauren_zalaznick.html Marshall B. Rosenberg. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. 2008. Pierre Bordieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1979. Alan Ball. Six Feet Under. 2001-2005. Feel Tank. http://pathogeographies.net. Marshall Sahlins. Culture and Practical Reason. 1978. George Lipsitz. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. 2001. Robin M. Williams, Jr. Individual and Group Values. 1967. Paul L. Klein. Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch. 1971. This lecture was presented at Bodega in Philadelphia on February 25, 2012 and published as part of Document, a new online distribution project featuring PDFs by artists. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. Martine Syms 2012