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I remember “stupid” being my parents’ blanket response to any kind of fictionalised television that was thoughtful or approached being thought-inducing, because they were conditioned to expect all fictionalised TV to be dumb. Star Trek raised their ire, when all it was capable of was hinting of something better (usually without subtlety), but so did SCTV, which had continuity and multi-layered humour, because it failed to conform to the constriction that all episodic television be predictable and obvious. To me, this was insane. Almost all of the situation comedies, even acclaimed ones like Taxi, were based on stupid people, a kind of red-state brainwashing. I wanted something that rewarded, instead of wasting, my attention.
So I’m in agreement with the central argument of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, which posits that audience expectations and retention have increased dramatically. It had taken American TV decades to reach the level of interaction available in Marvel Comics during the 1960s, but once it achieved this, it began soaring beyond it. Television like The X-Files, Spooks and The 4400 would have been unthinkable twenty years ago; even series which resolve storylines within single episodes are much greater in their complexity and sophistication than even Johnson gives credit for (he tends to dismiss shows such as Law and Order: SVU too cavalierly; they are considerably richer in detail than any of their predecessors). Even though Johnson’s argument is largely self-apparent to me, he’s facing an uphill battle to persuade most of America, who still keep PAX alive.
