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. 

"When I say it out loud it all falls apart." -Thoughts on The OA

On Friday at my friend Amy's recommendation, I started watching The OA. I finished it close to 9 hours later.

Then yesterday, I watched it all over again. 

And today...I'm considering watching it again.

As an English teacher, I do think my vocabulary is probably more expansive than the average person, but I am also very aware that I rarely even begin to utilize the capacity of words that I know exists within me. Instead I come to the table of description like an excited pre-teen, overusing words like awesome, great, brilliant, love, and most recently, fantastic. These words are all just different heights of the word good, capturing slightly different aspects and excitement levels of whatever song, movie, book, or TV show that I've recently experienced and happen to be sharing about. 

I have deep regret over this today as I type, because I have misused, and possibly even abused language in my previous descriptions of pop-culture. I should have been more specific, more measured, and more grounded in my enthusiasm for whatever it was I had just taken in. I cried wolf too many times.

My regret comes today because, like the boy who cried wolf, I want you to believe me this time. And I'm afraid I've wasted all of my words on lesser things. So I'm going to try to present my thoughts about The OA in this blog with more consideration than my usual tag-lines of: "Amazing! So good! Brilliant!" Though be sure, all of that and much more is true about this show.

Given that I have a blog that is dedicated to pop-culture, you can assume that I spend a lot of time engaged with it. I will watch just about anything, though I definitely have my preferences. If you're new here and trying to calibrate my tastes, my all time favorite comedy is 30 Rock and my all time favorite drama is Six Feet Under. Both are acquired tastes that many people don't see through to completion. So if Full House is your "go to" comedy and SVU is your idea of drama, (both of which I have watched), then I can't promise you'll enjoy The OA. It's definitely a risk.

The best way I can describe The OA is like this: If Lost and Flatliners and Stranger Things had a TV show baby, it would be The OA. For me it's the most reminiscent of Lost. The characters are strong, the music is good, the story is incredible, but there's this other-worldly element to it. I was hesitant at first, because once the writers of Lost confessed that they had no plan, it made me cynical toward anything with a "fantasy" component to it. They let us down, and that was rude and irresponsible to the fans and the story. So naturally, I did some reading and found out that The OA's creators started with a storyboard that led them through different dimensions, lives, and timelines. They storied it all out to completion before they ever wrote an episode. This should alleviate any lingering distrust for those of you who have been burned before. Not that EVERY loose end gets pleasantly wrapped up, but that there is POTENTIAL for it to be wrapped up. Everything is on purpose, even if it isn't addressed in the first season. And THAT is damn good writing. 

While there is talk of a second season, the first season can and does stand alone. That's a feat in itself for a show like this. There are only 8 episodes to work with in order to give the season enough completion but also, to stop the season with enough potential to keep going forward in a second season. In some ways this feels like a very long movie. I would highly suggest watching it that way if you can. The gift that Netflix gives us is that we get to experience things in their entirety all at once if we'd like to. Be sure that this is a gift. Think of it like listening to an album instead of just one song. Fleetwood Mac's album, Rumours, gave us the song Dreams, but you can't really understand and fully appreciate Dreams unless you understand The Chain. Maybe Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is the best example of this. Albums are meant to be consumed as a whole, and I think The OA is too.  

The OA isn't everyone's cup of tea. In fact, according to Twitter and comments on articles I've read, a lot of people have abandoned it. For this reason, I recommend that it is best viewed in solitude. There are some things that happen that you might feel silly about or maybe you won't know how to feel, and having someone else in the room going through that same thing will probably result in awkward giggling or comments, that I honestly believe will pull you out of the show and belittle the intensity and experience of it. 

Even though I think you should watch alone, I think you should definitely have a support group ready after you watch. Not because it's such a horrifying ending, but because I have never wanted to talk about a show as much as I want to talk about this one. For those of you who know me, this is me begging you to understand that THERE REALLY IS A WOLF THIS TIME. I'm sure I've said it before, but this show has left me with a deep desire to connect to others who appreciate, enjoy, and ideally, are as overwhelmed by it as I am. I'm ready when you are....

I want to address a few key moments, and while I don't intend to give outright spoilers, I don't want to ruin any of it for those of you who haven't watched and intend to. 

I will limit myself because I could truly go on and on, but I will save some material for actual discussions. Here are a few of my favorite parts/things about the show: 

1. Whoever thought to run credits almost 50 minutes into the first episode as Prairie starts to tell her story is a genius. I wasn't sure what was even happening. But when she begins her story and the music changes and suddenly you're flying over a snowy Russian landscape, it feels transcendent. I have never seen anything like that in a show before, and it drew me fully in.

2. Prairie (played by Brit Marling), clearly exists on another level, and her voice while she tells her story and her facial expressions are so perfectly acted. Marling had a hand in the creation of the story and her investment shows. 

3. My friend Amy, who recommended the show, described it as "intimate." And I completely agree. At times, I felt like I was intruding on the characters. The connections they develop made tears stream down my face uncontrollably and unexpectedly. I had no idea I would be moved the way I was, or that I COULD be moved the way I was. And through that feeling, I am so very aware of the need for intimacy in life, something that transcends the day to day catching up and pleasantries, and reaches deep down into me, stirs me and settles me simultaneously. It's a call to the deep, not in some religious way that overshadows faith, but in a coming home kind of way. The dialogue, the movements, it's all pushing you to access some part of yourself you've probably hidden away. Which is why it feels intimate. It's almost like the show is revealing that it knows you are capable of this, and it's calling you to show that side of yourself, it's reminding you that everyone has the capacity for this intimacy. 

4. That leads me to my favorite scene, which is in episode 5 toward the end. The song Downtown by Majical Cloudz plays during the scene, and at some point I just got lost in it. I won't spoil it, but this is probably the point in the show where people either bail or fall in. I fell in. And I've had the song Downtown on repeat, that is when I haven't been watching the show itself.

5. The ending is terrifying and gorgeous and breathtaking and full-circle enough, but full of curiosities all at the same time. Even though I was crying, I felt such a hopeful peace while I watched. I want to explain a little more about the feeling I'm talking about. 

This feeling can most closely be associated with the feeling I get at a Baseball game when everyone sings the National Anthem or when 9/11 happened, or even when Coldplay performs Fix You and the crowd sings the end together. The feeling I had, and still have, is more about the connectedness of humanity. The way we are constantly striving for that level of intimate connection and we all have it to offer and it's right there to reach out and grab, but we get in the way with pride and fear and even the mundanities of day to day life. We have told ourselves to ignore the need for that feeling, in order to survive, to not have to feel the deep hurts that come from really knowing and loving each other. But we sacrifice the beauty of being truly known and loved when we run from that feeling. Yeah, the show evoked all of that for me. (If you're reading this and you think I might need to be committed, can you just give me a 30 min heads up so I can go take a shower before they come for me?)

I could go on and on, and if you're my friend and you decide to watch, just know this might rival my obsession with Hamilton...you should probably just get out while you can...because I want to discuss this show.  With ANYONE and EVERYONE who is willing. In my classes I often talk to my students about the necessity to be versed in both politics and pop-culture because it's all connected. The key to making something meaningful is sharing it with someone else. The conversations that come because of shows like The OA are the gifts from the artists who created them. For those of you who think that pop-culture is somehow the lesser of possible cultural interests a person could have, you're doing it all wrong. If this were a book, we would be celebrating it and bragging about having read such a masterpiece, but for some reason, visual formats have to work harder and some never get the same kind of appreciation, or if they do, it takes decades. The conversation about the art is what builds its legacy.

In the 1993 movie, True Romance, Patricia Arquette's character, Alabama, says she likes to get a piece of pie and talk after she's seen a movie. If a character in an old Tarantino film, who has just watched a few kung-fu movies, can engage in a conversation about it afterward...I'm sure you and I can too. 

(Bonus points to anyone who can make a connection between True Romance and The OA)

Listen, I usually lean into things that are accessible to all. I like my poetry horoscopic and my horoscopes nice and vague. But in the case of The OA, I will just go ahead and acknowledge that not all of you will enjoy it. Please know that it is still very accessible to you, just maybe not today, or not in the room with the person who is sitting there with you now, or not in the midst of your multi-tasking. But if you will suspend your disbelief, open yourself up just a little, and let yourself get lost in it, I think you will find that The OA has more to offer than you can possibly imagine.

Did I do it? Did I get my words right this time?