And in the End...

The Boob Tube

Watching television doesn’t require any critical thought.

It’s not a very bold statement—I think we can all agree with it. TV is made for the masses, not the highbrows. But does that mean it has to be “mere” entertainment? Can it be art as well? Could it even… dare I say it… make us think?

TV-viewing has long been deemed a passive activity, but I agree with the idea only to a certain extent. True, an audience can watch the same show for years without ever reflecting on why they enjoy it, or what the show is really about underneath all the episodic goings-on, but maybe that only accounts for a small percentage of today’s TV audience. (For the sake of this argument, we’ll have to disregard reality shows and their fans.)

Okay, assume for a moment that TV is completely meaningless.



Now consider series finales.

Last episodes often generate big audiences; even non-fans, even people who have never seen the show before will tune in. And they don’t want the finale to be just like every other episode, oh no. They want it to be climactic, to look back and to move forward. They want the series to finish off with a bang, leaving them satisfied yet paradoxically wanting more. And if a series finale isn’t conclusive, isn’t monumental, then viewers complain, journalists write angry editorials, and, we suspect, the writers sit back and laugh at our expense. We hate those writers. But if the entertainment has been completely mindless all along, then why do we expect the finale to rise to a higher standard than the rest of the series?

Perhaps it is because unconsciously, viewers are finally expecting to think. They feel that listening to a sitcom’s concluding thoughts will shed light on what the series meant as a whole. They hope the finale will redeem their time for them and give them a legitimate reason for having spent so many hours devoted to that program.

But then again, when you consider the colossal hatred given to ambiguous endings, as in shows like The Sopranos, then it seems I may have given the viewer too much credit. It’s not that they want to think; it’s that they want the meaning handed to them!

Now, I need not spend any time arguing for why critical thinking is better than mindless absorption (see entire text of Fahrenheit 451). But because this is so, the “best” TV endings are the ones that do not have all the answers. Ambiguity encourages viewers to analyze the series for themselves and reflect on what they have been following, and to find the meaning, if there is any to be found. Ambiguity is also more creative. It’s the difference between a Robert Frost poem and a Hallmark card. It’s what separates art from entertainment.

But the idea of conclusively ending a sitcom does not make a lot of sense when you consider that the genre was originally designed for one episode to have no effect on the next. Main characters could have boyfriends or girlfriends that appeared in one show, proposed marriage, ultimately got rejected, and then disappeared into whatever vacuum guest stars get sucked into, never to be discussed or heard from again. Every episode was a clean slate. Nothing ever changed. But finales have always been a big deal because that’s when things finally do change. It’s when the Korean War ends, the crew gets fired from WJM, and Bob Hartley wakes up from the eight-season dream that was Newhart. For many old sitcoms, changes were rare until the very end. But audiences clearly liked them, or else the two-hour movie that concluded M*A*S*H wouldn’t be the most-watched U.S. television broadcast of all time.

Thus it seems that, despite the disjointed structure of past television sitcoms, viewers still yearned to ascribe meaning to the series overall, regardless of the triviality of each individual episode. This is healthy critical thinking, and perhaps it is why ongoing character and story arcs are becoming more popular in today’s comedies. Audiences do want to think. They don’t want to watch characters that never grow. They want their favorite shows to evolve, to change, to be more like literature. To be more like art.

A sitcom is worth more than the sum of its parts. It is only passive if we allow it to be.

That is what I believe. And that is why I started this blog.