The Golden Age of Visual Narrative: A Defense of Watching TV

As I type this, I'm sitting in my loft, which is also my library. The walls are lined with hip-high bookshelves and every inch of them is full. I love the way it looks. It looks like I'm the kind of smart person who has shelves upon shelves of books. It looks like I'm as informed by Neil deGrasse Tyson as I am enlightened by Thomas Merton. 

It looks like I actually read.

But I don't. 

Don't get me wrong, I do read. Just not like I want to. And I really do want to, intend to. Like I tell my students, when I do read, I feel accomplished. I love the feeling of my fast fingers as they turn the final page, and the way my eyes spasm as they search along the print sending my brain the signals it needs to process what I've just read, I feel proud. Reading is physical, it's discipline, it's respectable, it's expanding.

But when I'm done writing this, I won't walk over to my fiction section (yes, that's right, I organize my books by genre) and grab the mystery I've been meaning to read. I won't even reach for the book on my table right in front of me, the memoir I've been crawling through for the last 3 months. Nope. I'll head downstairs and I will spend my night with the people I love. The ones who inspire me, who make me sad, the ones I laugh at, and sometimes with. 

I will turn on my TV and get lost for hours, even days, in a story eerily like the one I'm living, only a more sanitized and contained version. And somehow, that will be enough for me. And most likely for you too.  

I have said this to my friends and students many times, but I truly believe we are living in the golden age of visual narrative. The list of contributors as to how we got here, is long, but honestly that's a different more technical essay than the one I'm wanting to write here, so I'll let you research that on your own. I want to deal with the idea of what is happening within storytelling right now. The stories that are being told through episodes and seasons of television are delivering some incredible content. 

I should say up front that I take in a lot of TV. I watch almost everything at some point. I have some guidelines and preferences of course. My ideal way to watch is to binge an entire series of something. I hate it when there is no end in sight. I will most likely never finish Grey's Anatomy as it's just gone on too long, and also, because I'm a purist and like it when the characters are consistent. I don't like waiting for the next episode to release. That being said, a few of my recent favorites have made me wait from week to week, and I have survived. The ability to binge watch has changed the way we watch TV. It has transitioned us from a weekly rotation of stories to one story at a time, allowing us to immerse ourselves in the experience of the story being told. Combine that experience with the sentimental realism at the core of the majority of shows currently being made, and you're basically working your way toward a simulation. 

Of course, none of that would matter if the right content weren't being produced. At the heart of this golden age, is a sophisticated and calculated character design. The laugh tracks are gone, the stage lighting and studio sets are vacant. These new characters live in the real world. They talk like we do, they are flawed and misguided, and they evoke our empathy with their brokenness. They develop deep and wide and seem to feel what we feel. But the writing only works if the actors can deliver the emotional content being explored with subtlety and nuance in a believable way. We have to think we know them. We have to think we are them.

Carrie Coon as Nora, one of my recent favorite characters, in The Leftovers.

The brilliance behind the right casting is that when these stories shift into something other-worldly or fantastical, we follow the actors and their characters with ease into these unknown places because we trust the heart of what is being communicated to us. This is how we end up with shows like The OA, The Leftovers, and Westworld...all of which are barely rooted in realistic circumstances, yet draw the watcher in through solid narrative, relatable characters, and the promise of an emotional payoff. 

Is it better than reading? I'm an English teacher, and so this shouldn't be a tough question. But it is. Because as a teacher, I'm a lifelong learner, and I recognize that language evolves, trends in narrative change, methodologies develop. What doesn't change is that stories have something to say, and usually that something is meant to be accessible to all of humanity. Yet the only thing we truly share access to as humans are the feelings we feel. Our emotional banks seems to hold the same currency across all lines of diversity, if we are making frequent deposits and withdrawals. So if the goal of storytelling is to deliver an emotionally universal message that validates the experiences and challenges the perspectives of a person, or opens their minds to more possibilities than what they currently know, does the medium matter? 

Some will always say that it does. Watching TV is lazy. It's passive. It's escapism. But I believe many current TV shows require a level of critical thinking from us that many books don't. Take for example House of Cards, season 5, a recent dig at Jimmy Carter is made, but in order to get the dig, one would have to understand the public opinion of Jimmy Carter's presidency, as well as his work with Habitat for Humanity. Without those connections, the line of dialogue lands, but it lands one-dimensionally. The line at its intention commands action from the watcher. A quick thumb through the Rolodex of presidents in your mind, a critical comment you heard a conservative friend make once a few years ago, a tweet commending Carter's charity work. The connections click almost instantaneously and the line of dialogue now lands in all dimensions, creating context that contributes to the plot of the show. And this happens in almost every scene at least once if not more. 

To prove that this is not isolated to drama, let's talk about The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Titus, one of the best characters ever created, thinks his boyfriend is cheating on him and decides to go Lemonading. We are treated to a serenade of Titus' clever Beyonce parodies throughout the rest of the episode, but without having viewed Lemonade, the parodies are shallow and fail to produce the intended satirical results. The cultural context is crucial to the comedy. 

I realize this is nothing new to TV, but it is more frequent and less niche. It used to be reserved for SNL or Mad TV watchers. But now it even shows up in prime time, not letting us look away from the spotlight on societal trends, even when we want to. Binge watching this kind of content creates a much more invested experience as those connections fire rapidly, working our memory, calling upon references, searching for the synchronicity of it all.

The good news is that we don't have to choose between reading and TV. We truly have the best of all world when it comes to our narrative access at the moment. Even Twitter threads have found a place in narrative! I know that's a big ask, so I won't even go there in this blog. But how about this? Maybe it's time to stop thinking of TV as something that eats away our brains. Maybe there is work to be done in TV watching. A critical thinking connection-making kind of work. Or maybe it's something more intuitive and sacred. A therapy kind of work, where the storyteller whispers to us, "You're going to get to relive that grief without it being yours this time....you're going to experience that love without the heartbreak this time...you're going to make the right choice time...." The big and small mysteries of whether our beloved characters will validate our lives with their stories, keep us going episode by episode, all the way to the inevitable ending. Which really seems like a loose metaphor for life. The primary difference being that you can watch again and again, the solidifying similarity being, it doesn't matter, nothing will change.