The 4 Best Dramas Of The Last 25 Years

At this point, Breaking Bad just ahead of The Wire. I've still only seen the first episode of Mad Men.

(Vulture's next four, ftr: Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Buffy, The Shield ... never realized the latter was so well-regarded.)

sopranos 4ever

They are all very good, though BB is by far the most fun (though also the trashiest, but who cares).

The Wire
Mad Men
The Sopranos

in that order

lol at Mad Men making this list. Also last 25 years? I guess nothing good happened before 1999?

The X-Files doesn't hold up/together. I enjoy it, but people who call it one of the greatest of anything haven't watched it since the '90s. I'd swap it out in favor of Deadwood or (controversial) Six Feet Under. Otherwise, I'm okay with that top 8 (again, haven't seen The Shield yet either but heard lots of good stuff).

last time i voted in one of these i voted for the wire, so this time i'm going to spread the love around and vote for sopranos

The poll I probably SHOULD have done is which of these four shows' fan bases are the most unreasonable. (In which case, I def would've swapped out Mad Men for Friday Night Lights or Buffy.)

Also last 25 years? I guess nothing good happened before 1999?

That's the way it shook out at Vulture, but tbf to CK, he was only talking about shows from the last 10 years.

I have never seen a single minute of any of these shows. And it's not like I skimp on the TV watching. ¯\(°_o)/¯

I really don't like "The Sopranos," and the first season of "Mad Man" was not enticing enough to get me to watch future seasons (though people swear it gets better!). Also, these four are weird finalists, given that two of them have yet to run their course, and wrapping things up plays an important role in how a lot of TV shows are perceived. That said, I think "Deadwood," "Buffy" and "The Shield" are more than adequate contenders. Though "Buffy," "X-Files" and "Sopranos" are notable breakthroughs for reasons beyond their narratives.

I don't know. Of this list, I'd say "The Wire."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sNZ7ulO1RQ

NSFW, I guess^^

baywatch

lol at Mad Men making this list. Also last 25 years? I guess nothing good happened before 1999?

― Thoughts? You must have loads. (a hoy hoy), Friday, March 23, 2012 9:30 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this

The fanboy angle on Buffy has ensured I will never watch it, unfor.

It's really good, though, for the first four or five seasons. Why would Buffy fanboys turn you off, but not Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men or whatever stans?

I mean, it's not like X-Files, which at its best was rarely consistent and hard to defend at its (prolonged) worst.

xxpost

That would be a shame. There are a couple of Buffy seasons that are among the best television series ever. Don't allow the tastes of others dictate or restrict your own!

Why would Buffy fanboys turn you off, but not Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men or whatever stans?

Fanboys vs. fanmen

I dunno, something about Buffy just made it look like a slightly more sophisticated Kevin Williamson joint.

(Then again, I dug Dawson's Creek for a couple episodes.)

Pretty sure that's most people's initial reaction (including my own and that of the people I got hooked). Watch seasons 1 and 2 and then just try to stop watching.

I think the show is ultimately worth watching but if you have fan issues, just watch "The Body" and discard the rest.

I'll try, but I've still got all of The Wire to get through.

buffy, x-files, twin peaks all better than the top three, never seen the shield, also there really should be a totally proceduralist crime show up there, monk or something, destroy our new realist tv overlords

I can't believe all of you haven't seen The Shield.

The best episodes of Buffy work, well, best if you have the emotional context down, which makes The Body and the musical ep sort of weird introductions. I'd say watch Hush, which is fun, scary and smart.

X-Files had great episodes, but the overall conspiracy arc made for some really dodgy moments.

i think if your idea of what constitutes a good tv show is consistency you're denying yourself much of the fun of tv

'some'. xp

Horror seems more a singles genre, I guess. I'd rather just watch a handful of good Tales from the Crypt episodes.

lol at Mad Men making this list.

my thoughts exactly.

I may have noted this before, but fwiw the vast majority of Mad Men fans I know are women, who readily concede what attracts them to the series are the fashions, the period details, the hunky men, the bad boy behavior and all that sort of stuff. I've never heard anyone discuss the story. Don't know what to make of that. When I watched Downton Abbey, another show with I presume a larger than usual female audience, I kept thinking of Mad Men.

Don't think of Buffy as horror, because it's really not (X-Files is more straight horror) and please don't think of it in terms of Tales from the Crypt. Buffy's really quite intelligent and perceptive about the adolescent experience, with the supernatural stuff both metaphor and vector for emotional development.

i think if your idea of what constitutes a good tv show is consistency you're denying yourself much of the fun of tv

Why should we set the bar low when plenty of shows have been plenty consistent? Reminds me of this person once who asked me if I liked a particular book. I said no, so she asked why. I said it was poorly written, and she didn't argue, but then claimed something like "there's more to a book than the quality of the writing." I guess, but good writing is a pretty good place to start.

write in vote for - THE I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX THREAD FOR THE MENTALIST

sopranos
sopranos
sopranos
sopranos

The best episodes of Buffy work, well, best if you have the emotional context down, which makes The Body and the musical ep sort of weird introductions.

OTMFM. I've long cited the gut punch of "The Body" as a prime example of one of the things television/serialized narrative is uniquely qualified to do well. It wouldn't be a fraction as effective if you didn't have five seasons of investment in the characters.

so, basically the Sopranos and then three TV shows that Tumblr whites used to comfort themselves into thinking TV was "important" since there wasn't a show like the Sopranos on TV anymore

may have noted this before, but fwiw the vast majority of Mad Men fans I know are women, who readily concede what attracts them to the series are the fashions, the period details, the hunky men, the bad boy behavior and all that sort of stuff. I've never heard anyone discuss the story. Don't know what to make of that. When I watched Downton Abbey, another show with I presume a larger than usual female audience, I kept thinking of Mad Men.

Don't think of Buffy as horror, because it's really not (X-Files is more straight horror) and please don't think of it in terms of Tales from the Crypt. Buffy's really quite intelligent and perceptive about the adolescent experience, with the supernatural stuff both metaphor and vector for emotional development.

i think if your idea of what constitutes a good tv show is consistency you're denying yourself much of the fun of tv
Why should we set the bar low when plenty of shows have been plenty consistent? Reminds me of this person once who asked me if I liked a particular book. I said no, so she asked why. I said it was poorly written, and she didn't argue, but then claimed something like "there's more to a book than the quality of the writing." I guess, but good writing is a pretty good place to start.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 23 March 2012 14:22 (4 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow, you sure have problems with women

I do! That's exactly right!

"oh no mad men's on hiatus! quick what show can we pretend is john updike so we can still comment on onion episode recaps. whew thank you based breaking bad"

i think if your idea of what constitutes a good tv show is consistency you're denying yourself much of the fun of tv

I would counter by saying: there is good TV, and there is enjoyable TV.

Voting Breaking Bad btw.

Whiney helped me make up my mind.

"oh no mad men's on hiatus! quick what show can we pretend is john updike so we can still comment on onion episode recaps. whew thank you based breaking bad"

john updike basically is the middlebrow tv of literature, though?

I would counter by saying: there is good TV, and there is enjoyable TV.

why would i want to watch good tv when i could be watching enjoyable tv??

why BB wins, again

The fanboy angle on Buffy has ensured I will never watch it, unfor.

― Eric H., Friday, March 23, 2012 9:48 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the fact that it;s like quippy proto-Twilight dramaclub vampire brony trash has ensured I will never go near it in a thousand years. i couldn't imagine what would make a grown man think it's ok to even watch a Teen Dracula Can't Lose show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" let alone rally around its creator to the point where he think it was acceptable to release something called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog."

The whole cult around all of this makes me sicker to my stomach than furry conventions

I didn't say it was a dichotomy, thomp. There's a ton of overlap, but there's also a lot of "just enjoyable but not particularly good" overhang.

tbf Whedon's new horror movie is pretty awesome

i think part (most) of what makes good tv enjoyable and interesting is how the all-hands-on-deck nature of making it is something that any auteurist version of it (or just any single sense of it) has to work with or against in productive ways

i think mad men is a terrible example of an aesthetic getting totally emptied out and flattened for the sake of 'consistency' and 'quality'

i like sopranos and breaking bad for such different reasons, even though they have a lot of superficial plot/character similarities.

Hard to choose between The Sopranos and The Wire. Breaking Bad is awesome but not quite up to their standards, Mad Men isn't even close.

Whiney, do you just, like, read a book or something while your smug sense of uninformed self-satisfaction is posting on ILX? I can imagine that it's a really fruitful symbiosis.

Consistency often implies sticking to a set formula and not taking any risks. Enjoyed the first three seasons of Mad Men well enough -- mostly for the styles and prettiness of the characters (w/some of the story arcs whose effecttiveness or otherwise have been discussed on here) and this is surely fair enough. A certain quality of style (which Mad Men often achieves) can be quite substantial in itself, is perfect when illustrating the illusion of that world.

what Number None said.

for such a supposed exemplar of "good" "quality" TV,mad men sure does rely on a lot of cheap gimmicks and tricks.

and for the record, i liked the 1st season of mad men. sometime after that, i realized that i neither liked nor cared about the antics of a bunch of largely unlikeable stiffs.

The main thing with Mad Men is I never ever find myself wanting to rewatch an episode whereas i've seen The Sopranos and The Wire front to back multiple times

Consistency doesn't mean playing it safe. I think of it as seeing a show's story and themes through, which is why I loved "The Shield" so much. It never seemed to lose sight of its goals for the sake of extending the show's run or whatever. Unlike "Buffy," which surely bobbled, or even "The Wire," whose final season comes a little too close for comfort to running off the rails. Or definitely "The Sopranos," which has a superfluous season or two, imo (though I'm in the minority, I guess). Like, so far "BB" is doing an awesome job keeping it together without getting rote.

Some of the best TV watches like a good novel reads, with each episode like a chapter.

Yeah, you're pretty OTM w/r/t the consistency of the shows you mention. I'm still upset that HBO gave David Chase an extra half a season to dick around with at the end of The Sopranos run. Completely deflated the tension he'd so masterfully built up.

The main thing with Mad Men is I never ever find myself wanting to rewatch an episode

Almost this. I did watch "The Suitcase" at least three times.

Some of the best TV watches like a good novel reads, with each episode like a chapter.

p sure you mean 'some of the best tv watches like a 19th-century novel reads, delivered in regular instalments of equal page counts interrupted by advertisers, with high production values to gloss over inconsistencies created by the format, p.s. i hate women'

I watched all the options bar BB. I'll watch it once, repeatibility has no bearing -- often something could be really good and hard to watch at the same time.

Shame that Oz has been written out. Possibly my single favourite. I'm sentimental about it..haven't seen it again.

I think these are all v strict definitions of good novels or TV -- its an easy thing to keep a theme going for a while, not sure why any prizes for quality shd be handed out for that. xp

The Wire keeps its consistently worthy themes going until it detours to McNulty's playing around.

McNulty

Fuckin' McNulty

Shame that Oz has been written out.

I've said it before: Oz was a soap opera with wangs and shivs. Entertaining, but not exactly top-tier entertainment.

No 'quality'...yes, I get it.

tradition de qualité

Sorry for suggesting that we use 'quality' as a signifier of what might make one thing better than another.

that's not really how the term gets used though

i mean it's a really nebulous thing when ppl start scarequoting it: smth like 'art which naturalises its aesthetic decisions by promoting itself and being in the world in such a way as to suggest that those aesthetic decisions were already the ones which made it good art'

i suspect it's ultimately as much as a mental copout as the attitude it's supposedly mocking, though

thx for the new screenname Deric

More how quality is being defined to promote this kind of television -- which is v good and likeable, but maybe not as good as ppl say it is. So Oz used a lot of elements from sopa operas maybe...well so what, that can make for great TV.

Someone start Wangs 'n' Shivs Repetory Summer Theatre in the Park.

I'd take the Shield over all these. But I'll go with BB.

Okay, with respect to serialized fiction (not procedurals, necessarily, because they do their own thing), I'd say that one aspect of quality is the extent to which the narrative strives for something more than "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened". The extent to which you are building something (character, a world, etc.) that is greater and more coherent (a better word than 'consistent')than the sum of the individual parts. This is a lot of what ultimately pissed me off so much about L O S T: they pretended for so long that they were building up to something, but it really was just a series of relatively meaningless events that led pretty much nowhere. Oz was good at what it did, but it wasn't pretending to be, like, some intricately-woven tapestry.

Eric, you're very welcome.

one aspect of 'quality' is the extent to which the narrative 'strives for something', yes

Oz ws done as a world, just bcz it was played for laughs or didn't go anywhere doesn't make it any less valid.

And its not as if The Wire was building to something so incredibly profound, there ws no incredible reveal as it ends at the beginning (and the last season fell apart so getting there was hard enough, hardly indicative of an 'intricately-woven tapestry'). Don't get caught up in destinations..

I think you guys think I'm hatin' on Oz, but I'm not.

I don't think you are -- what you are saying is that at least 3 items in this poll are better. That's fine, I don't care, but I am struggling at the reasoning being applied.

At the end of the day, it's largely about subjective judgment based on a number of criteria that are probably discrepant with the criteria being used by someone else who is also judging subjectively. I think people get wound up about stuff like this when they start taking it at all seriously or thinking that it actually means anything (which I have to refrain from myself, given that I could easily get wound up about The Vulture eliminating Six Feet Under in the first round by matching it against The Sopranos...I mean, A-DOY, I WONDER WHICH ONE YOU WANTED TO WIN, THE VULTURE).

Yeah, its all subjective, why bother :-)

Not wound up, haven't even read the article and not going to either.

fwiw, Vulture (via MZS) calls The Wire the winner: http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/drama-derby-finals-the-wire-vs-the-sopranos.html

whiney otm about buffy tbf

Yeah, The Wire over The Sopranos is a pretty easy choice for me (their uneven final seasons more or less cancel each other out).

Yeah, Whiney otm about something he won't lower himself to even watch. Sure.

Is it just the 5th season of The Wire that pales? I thought the 4th looked interesting, at least.

The fourth season is my favorite, one one of my favorite seasons of any show period. The fifth is okay, but a lot of it hinges on a plot point which is knda ridiculous and OTT (but which isn't exactly out of character for the person who sets the events in motion and is at least resolved in a satisfactory fashion).

I think Sopranos will edge out the Wire for me, just because Sopranos was able to maintain their tone/humor/quality for so long before any noticeable drop-off. Wire had a shorter run, same level of quality IMO, just the misstep in that last season really jars with me, compared to those first 4 seasons that were SOOOO great.

Whiney did you have a bad run-in with a vampire during a childhood halloween or something? Let's get to the root of these ISSUES, man.

I should get around to the Wire one of these days, huh.

I started with Breaking Bad over the summer but the like ever-building "and now this bad thing happens, bwahaha" sort of arc structure got sort of grating in a sort of P.G. Wodehouse way but with meth.

Breaking Bad is fun, and has fantastic twists and turns, but I guess I just feel I resonate more with Silv and Bunk than Jesse.

silby so otm, i find Breaking Bad and a lot of shows of its ilk really tiresome and not very rewarding for that reason

Maybe half-seriously, I would nominate the second season of Veronica Mars as one of the best (dramas) of the last 25 years. To continue the book analogy, It isn't Serious High Literature but it's a lovely tongue-in-cheek potboiler.

I wrote "sort of" three times in eleven words up there. I could use an editor.

yeah Veronica Mars is one of my favorites but it's never gonna be in the big consensus discussions (and of course very few people will rep for the show's whole run)

total # eps of the four series I've seen: 3

What are you watching then? Movies?

My So Called Life and Freaks and Geeks sadly overlooked. ;_;

I'm not watching a story that takes 90+ hours to tell, that's for sure.

xp

Get one attention span, whippersnapper.

what makes a 2-hour story so much better than a 90-hour one?

cf: Berlin Alexanderplatz

the deafening metronome of mortality

the deafening metronome of mortality

I've never "gotten" Breaking Bad. The bleakness/meanness/dry humor in the initial five or six episodes was, to my tastes, toxic. It felt like self-consciously Important Television, and I've resisted going back... although I know I'd probably find things to like in it. Is it worth it? Are the episodes (as discrete units, and not strictly as they contribute to the season drama) enjoyable? At least as of the halfway point of the first season, didn't like any of the characters, I don't get off on suburban nihilism (or whatever the tone was), and I wasn't really concerned or hopeful about the outcome. If I re-tried the show, would I find more in it to like?

Probably lot. I, like many others here, absolutely love it, but your tolerance for the bleak and nihilistic has to be fairly high. The first season is a shining beacon of happiness and ease compared to a lot of later eps. I rewatched the very first three epsiodes recently and was surprised by how light and goofy it all was in retrospect.

Probably not, sorry.

Breaking Bad is absolutely worth it. Arguably the best show (sort of) currently on television. And as I said elsewhere, I never would've imagined saying that during the first season (which I thought was fine but nothing mindblowing).

what makes a 2-hour story so much better than a 90-hour one?

Leaves more time for baseball and fucking.

I agree with you Deric, but even as a massive fan you have to concede it's not for everyone.

And I'd argue that it isn't all bleak nihilism. There are actually a number of episodes where not a lot "happens". People sitting around and having long conversations in the living room and whatnot. Plus the show definitely has a sense of humor throughout.

Oh, yeah, chap. Not for everyone. You pretty much need to have the stomach to watch a relatively sympathetic character become increasingly evil and the collateral damage caused by that transformation along the way.

what makes a 2-hour story so much better than a 90-hour one?

also, concision aka narrative economy; usually yields better results than sprawl.

Sopranos hands down

Yeah, I'll take the narrative economy of Norbit over the sprawl of The Wire anyday.

Tell it to dickens. Wait, bad example. Tell it to Eliot. Scratch that. Tell it to, uh, Proust or, well...

I've only seen a couple of episodes of the Sopranos and it seemed kinda corny to me. Is it actually kinda corny, or is that quality something that goes away if you watch more of it and get immersed in it?

whenever I feel like I might vote for The Wire, I remember this episode of the Sopranos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7vBbEG0zH0

Sopranos always reminded me of a Barry levinson film

the only recent show I can think of that left me as cold as Mad Men is How I Met Your Mother

I've never watched The Wire or Breaking Bad, so out of this list I have to vote The Sopranos by default

Two of the shows on this list I obstinately refuse to watch because their fans are so offputting.

my biggest impediment to being interested in Buffy is that it just LOOKS terrible/stupid/goofy

xp

remy - i hadn't thought of it before, but yes, that's what it reminded me of - and i'm not a levinson fan.

The Sopranos also has a sense of humor about itself that I could see coming off as corniness if you just saw bits and pieces of it (particularly if you just tuned in when Little Stevie was onscreen). It's something of a heightened reality, but it's also dead serious when it needs to be.

Buffy is decent enough while it's on but I can count on one hand the number of episodes that made me want to actively seek it out to watch.

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc287/colmprunty/angel5.jpg

seriously can't see myself watching anything involving this as a character

I'd replace Mad Men w/ Deadwood and then vote for it. As it stands now, The Wire.

Another point in its favor. xp

well duh Shakey, if you completely averse to the baseline premise of the show there's sort of no point in pursuing it (see: me + Mad Men)

it's not the premise, it's the depiction

It's funny that most of the distaste in this thread is either "I watched a couple episodes/scenes and didn't dig it" (which, with respect to shows of this nature, is equivalent to "I read a few random pages in the bookstore and didn't dig it") or "Ugh, how could I watch something that those people enjoy?!" (which...is kinda adolescent, if you'll forgive my saying so).

that is funny

I'm laughing.

Deadwood would have been all time if it didn't just suddenly stop.

Sopranos for me because i take it be a fairly heartbreaking account of searching for meaning/spirituality in a landscape devoid of that possibility.

Breaking Bad is the most fun to watch though.

fwiw I've watched the entirety of 3 out of 4 (just haven't gotten around to Breaking Bad)

xp

well I watched like a dozen episodes of Breaking Bad before I lost patience so in my case it's more like putting the book down 1/5 of the way in and not getting back to it in a timely fashion.

kind of interesting comparison to be made between the respective nihilism of the Sopranos and Seinfeld. "no learning, no hugs!"

"I watched a couple episodes/scenes and didn't dig it" (which, with respect to shows of this nature, is equivalent to "I read a few random pages in the bookstore and didn't dig it")

this is a completely valid way to evaluate a book you are considering reading, btw

I mean...it's fine if long-form narrative shows aren't a thing that you care to engage with, but I don't feel the need to go into I Love Baseball threads and be all like, "Yeah, I've watched a game or two. Seems pretty stupid, guys in dumb costumes running in a circle. YAWN."

I'd watch guys in dumb costumes run in a circle

Leaves more time for baseball and fucking.

Yeah, but what do you fill your time with?

Deadwood would have been all time if it didn't just suddenly stop.

This, totally. It just kept getting better and better.

i just started watching Deadwood last week, and for some incomprehensible reason, whenever Timothy Olyphant comes on screen, I think he is David Cross for a split second.

And, to chap, if you've gotten far enough in the first season to get to the scene where Walt calmly, rationally tells the rest of his family his reasons for not wanting to get chemo, and you still feel nothing for any of the characters in the show, then yes, by all means bail out and don't look back.

It's not me who hasn't watched BB, I'm a big fan! I was just playing devil's advocate as to why some people might not like it.

just started watching 'the sopranos' - re: the corniness, ehh a little but the milieu portrayed in the show is one i identify with kinda so i'm maybe willing to overlook it a bit. i'm fairly wrapped up in it so far though.

i watched four or five eps of 'breaking bad' and am undecided if i want to pursue it any further tbh, i can only take so much bleakness

devoured 'the wire' and 'mad men' all in one summer - at this very moment i'd vote the former in this poll, given the above two caveats. i didn't start feeling invested in MM at all until about halfway thru s2

"I watched a couple episodes/scenes and didn't dig it" (which, with respect to shows of this nature, is equivalent to "I read a few random pages in the bookstore and didn't dig it")

this is a completely valid way to evaluate a book you are considering reading, btw

Fair enough, but it's the difference between simply deciding to not read the book and feeling as if you're qualified to judge the merits of the book that...kinda makes up the DNA of ILX, I guess. The defense rests, yer honor.

d'oh, i guess i meant remy bean

i did like that scene eric just described tho

i'm definitely more willing to overlook corniness in a tv series than in a movie.

"I watched a couple episodes/scenes and didn't dig it" (which, with respect to shows of this nature, is equivalent to "I read a few random pages in the bookstore and didn't dig it")

i see nothing wrong with this approach to TV shows, films or music at all. time is precious/money/life is too short/you don't have to eat yer broccoli/etc.

(for the record, i try to give TV shows at least one season before i give up on them for good. i gave mad men 3 seasons, even though somewhere in the middle of the 2nd season i realized that i just didn't give a fuck what happened to any of these characters and life was too short/too many other good shows on/certain "Mad Men" fans get on my nerves etc.).

life is also too short to let other people's fandom annoy you

I think watching six hours of a show and disliking it for specific reasons /does/ give you a little right to opinion!

everyone has a right to an opinion!

debates about 'good tv' are the most embarrassing things in the world and just proof of our ages essential emptiness that shit is trashier than getting high on oxy and spending all day w/ a 'teen mom' marathon

yeah i mean most of these shows don't have very sharp peaks and valleys, so unless your impression of it is formed from, like, only season 5 of The Wire or a bunch of scattered non-sequential episodes that make a lot less sense outside the context of the seasonal arc, i think it's kind of ok to form impressions based on not seeing everything.

that said, i've seen all of BB and a whole season of MM, but not much of Sopranos, so i'm quicker to vocally criticize the former two than the latter although in general i think The Wire is leagues above them all

Lamp, you are too easily embarrassed.

can we talk about whatever valuable pasttime Lamp was engaged in before he showed up itt to look down his nose at everybody?

i was getting high on oxy and watching teen mom, if u must know

voted teen mom

xp - maybe he was chatting with Whiney, who did the same thing 100 posts back? Like they're taking turns?

real talk i just spent the weekend hanging out w/ someone who works on teen mom, it's fun to hear about the behind the scenes of stuff like that

did you have her autograph your list of the top 100 shows of 2012

did you drool when you saw a chance to use the only some dude zing you know once again?

maybe he was chatting with Whiney, who did the same thing 100 posts back? Like they're taking turns?

lool i didnt bother reading that far itt - kudos tho for managing to go rabid on buffy nerdz AND shoehorn in a brony reference

idk the whole 'good tv'/blogosphere/tumblr whites thing is just so despairingly pseud-ish and self-satisfied, do something better with your time yuppies maybe try reading books idk

no there are other zings they're just meaner

thanks for being 'nice,' go play in traffic

some people watch "good tv" and read books, Lamp.

Yeah, but what do you fill your time with?

Watching baseball and thinking about fucking, you tiresome spinster.

I mostly don't "care to engage with" long-form television dramas (formerly just called SERIES before TV was gifted with a generation of pretentious critics) --Deadwood being an exception -- but I assumed from the title this would be a choice among Angels in America, a few August Wilsons, etc.

idk the whole 'good tv'/blogosphere/tumblr whites thing is just so despairingly pseud-ish and self-satisfied, do something better with your time yuppies maybe try reading books idk

This is a meaningless conflation in service of a snooty argument, lampy.

it's almost like he wants people to make chillwave jokes

the whole 'good tv'/blogosphere/tumblr whites thing

what is this thing? What is a tumblr white?

if people who read books only talked about 4 books and thought there was this important book renaissance cause 4 good books came out that might make sense as a comparison

don't ask

I mean I'm starting to wonder if TV is better than books (in my world TV being better than movies is a settled issue).

Let us not forget the bathetic death show where Laura Linney emotes.

well i mean there is an actual definite culture of middlebrow nerds taking TV and especially cable drama way too seriously on the internet, and that almost everyone who's not trolling itt is easily indicted in that, you can't really take that away from him

I'm pretty comfortable being a middlebrow nerd tbh

I think it's worth separating the shows (and even discussing the shows seriously) from the (pretty obnoxious) culture that has sprung up parasitically around them. yes, i am free to ignore the infinite "mad men" recaps that showed up this morning but at the same time I wanna grumble about it.

if ur an informed reader then ten pages is often plenty to reasonably assess a book's merits

you don't even need that baseline level of competence here because protip all of these shows are awful

I'm pretty comfortable being a middlebrow nerd tbh

― Nicholas Pokémon (silby), Monday, March 26, 2012 1:50 PM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me too but i think we're a rarity on ilx, lotta the vibe around here these days is just dripping with anxiety about that

you guys are all so mean to each other

I mean I'm starting to wonder if TV is better than books

aren't there more productive things you can wonder about?

I mean if we were really going to be highbrow nerds we'd be having a thread where we bitch about the Met's production of the Nibelungenlied and talk about how many times we've been to Bayreuth right?

xp no I honestly have nothing to do right now but sit here in my underwear making sweeping generalizations about massively different cultural genres

what is this thing?

idk maybe the oppressive professional class pop realist worldview hasnt descended over the east bay but it def qualifies as a 'thing' & is a grotesque that substitutes an ability to engage w/real culture for mad men recaps that mistake fan fiction for narrative and tireless mentioning the one 'artful' use of the camera per episode also animated .gifs

k3vin i would never tell you to play in traffic fwiw

kinda with Lamp (despite really loving like 3 of these 4 shows).

watching tv is easier than reading. less words. sometimes there are words on like books the characters are reading or in newspapers or whatever but often you can skip those words bc they aren't super important to the plot. also, if it's a foreign show there might be subtitles so i avoid those bc bleh too much reading. sometimes tv shows also want you to think about stuff but i prefer to just enter catatonic glazed over drooling into my popcorn tin state where the only thing my brain thinks is the lines being spoken on the screen as some kind of fading echo repeating over and over only to be replaced by new lines and then commercials for detroit car industry and finally the screams of consciousness as it is fully excised from my soul.

so... you're voting Mad Men?

Lamp is absolutely describing a real thing in fairly (if loaded) terms but stomping into the thread to declare it the way he did was a bit eye-rolling imo

fairly ACCURATE meant to say

real culture

gtfo imho

idk maybe the oppressive professional class pop realist worldview hasnt descended over the east bay

i'm sure my region is not immune to it, it is just something that hasn't penetrated my personal bubble.

Mordy otm, sounds lovely

i'd say mad men is about the same level of quality as like jonathan franzen maybe not as say marilynne robison but if you're getting all excited bc you read shitty middlebrow literature instead of watch shitty middlebrow tv than idk what to tell you

my son reads elmo books while he watches sesame street, it really taught me that there's no reason you have to choose between one or the other

a grotesque that substitutes an ability to engage w/real culture for mad men recaps that mistake fan fiction for narrative and tireless mentioning the one 'artful' use of the camera per episode

can we chuckle at this for a second because, the way it's currently written, it seems that Lamp is accusing people of confusing faction fiction with artful camera use

wtf "fan fiction", I should get lunch

omg yes lunch is the best, everybody let's break for lunch.

when we get back we can decide whether or not DVD loops of art sold at the MoMA gift shop count as "television"

if we can get two more people to go for lunch this qualifies as a lunch renaissance

i wish people would get over their anxieties about whether or not their tastes are "middlebrow" or whatever. besides, ALL of these shows are middlebrow (if anyone gives a shit) so fussing over that is pointless IMHO.

Lamp seems v disappointed in all of us

imagine how revered "The Fugitive" would've been if HBO had been around in 1963.

eating lunch now

who's lunch?

i think it's possible to like all of these shows and also think the the whole 'good tv'/blogosphere/tumblr whites thing is kind of annoying? like it's not like being a fan of any of these means you automatically subscribe to that world also

idk the whole 'good tv'/blogosphere/tumblr whites thing is just so despairingly pseud-ish and self-satisfied, do something better with your time yuppies maybe try reading books idk

Wow, what an eye-opening suggestion. I might just have to try one of these so-called "books" sometime. Thank you so much for your brilliance and your insight.

I mostly don't "care to engage with" long-form television dramas (formerly just called SERIES before TV was gifted with a generation of pretentious critics)

TBF, I used the "long-form narrative" whatever whatever term all on my lonesome. It's a form that I enjoy. I also utilize the term when discussing the pretentious medium of comic books.

I'm pretty comfortable being a middlebrow nerd tbh

Ab-so-LUTELY.

Lutely is two syllables just sayin'.

i'd say mad men is about the same level of quality as like jonathan franzen

Can't think of any descriptor I've read which has more successfully turned me off to the idea of ever watching Mad Men. Thanks, Morby.

Lamp - did your childhood bedroom have a nautical theme?

i think it's possible to like all of these shows and also think the the whole 'good tv'/blogosphere/tumblr whites thing is kind of annoying? like it's not like being a fan of any of these means you automatically subscribe to that world also

― althea and (donna rouge), Monday, March 26, 2012 2:11 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah totally. i mean even Whiney eventually admitted to liking The Wire while still villifying the act of liking The Wire too much as some kind of horrible cultural plague.

Lutely is two syllables just sayin'.

Feel like the true middlebrows will get the reference nonetheless.

Mad Men is like a Xanax'ed Young and the Restless with period clothes/furnishings.

If you like furtive glances this is the show for you.

(Totally trolling here, I actually love the show).

I could give one single solitary fuck about the 'blogosphere', et al, by the way. ILX is pretty much the only place online where I read or talk about TV (aside from the occasional 'OH NO THEY DI-INT' FB post after a Breaking Bad ep or whatevs).

Can't think of any descriptor I've read which has more successfully turned me off to the idea of ever watching Mad Men. Thanks, Morby.

absolutely. if that turns you off you should not watch Mad Men. you won't enjoy it.

also, dyslexia? :(

I know that I could be gardening, reading a book, building a birdhouse or, teaching myself Esperanto but if I like watching x show, and I like talking about x show with other likeminded ppl, who does this harm exactly?

Except Lamp and Whiney, I mean.

As an Updike fan, I voted for Mad Men. The Wire is really great, too, although my appreciation of it feels a bit more detached.

I've never seen The Sopranos. I know it's about more than just mobsters, but I just haven't been able to bring myself to care. I watched the first season of Breaking Bad, and I feel p. similar to Remy about it. I'll eventually watch the rest, but it hasn't gripped me yet.

IMHO, the notion of TV discussion as middlebrow owes a lot to historical prejudices and not a lot to the reality of its influence and waxing quality. It's a nascent and evolving medium, and it misses more than it hits, but it's definitely worthy of serious consideration. Doubtless, some lit department of the future is bound to look back on today's shows (series, seasons, whatever) in the same bracketed way that today's students look at Aphra Behn or William Wycherley and think them basically crappy but not trivial in their influence.

A meaningful consideration of the relative merits of four of the most prominant and appreciated series conveyed via (one of the) dominant modes of cultural transmission that takes into account both the business/corporate and the creative/artistic is necessarily 'middlebrow.' I guess I mean 'middlebrow' in the sense that it can't be abstracted and academically taxidermied for 'highbrow' conversation (whatever that is), and entirely shorn of its "low" commercial, panderous, origins. Elsewise, middlebrow is a specially nasty term of zingy castigation for the blogo generation in that it suggests something that isn't good enough to like sincerely, but not lame enough to like ironically.

every word in that post is middlebrow, and also could have a little qualifier attached to it ^

i don't think that's a complete reading of 'middlebrow' which often means dealing with sentiments of interest to upper middle class, bourgeois viewers

Just watched Walt Stillman's middlebrow new comedy and think it would've made for a better ABC Family series.

like if you don't think there's aspirational stuff going on with watching mad men, i think you're missing a huge chunk of reception stuff here

also, dyslexia? :(

Ha ha. Sorry Mordy. I've been "engaging" with Morbs so much lately that his name is hardwired into my typing fingers.

xp that'd be petit-bourgeois, wouldn't it?

yeah, but all drama is aspirational, isn't it? i don't think most tv producers (read 'writers, artists, actors', not 'money guys') create shows with the intent of them being received by a specific economic group any more than playwrights, monologuists, filmmakers, dudes filming their cats for youtube.

i don't think all drama is aspirational

xp yes

xp - Is The Wire aspirational?

the aspirational element might not always be class-based

IMHO, the notion of TV discussion as middlebrow owes a lot to historical prejudices and not a lot to the reality of its influence and waxing quality.

Absolutely. Honestly, I tend to use 'middlebrow' as shorthand for "I like what I like and I'm fairly critical and discerning but I don't feel beholden to what other people feel I should like and I also just enjoy some things because they're fun and have no pretensions towards 'importance' so dealwithit.gif basically".

yeah, but all drama is aspirational, isn't it? i don't think most tv producers (read 'writers, artists, actors', not 'money guys') create shows with the intent of them being received by a specific economic group any more than playwrights, monologuists, filmmakers, dudes filming their cats for youtube.

― aka vanilla bean (remy bean), Monday, March 26, 2012 2:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh c'mon people who work in TV are far more concerned with the demographics of their audience (and have to be, for job security) than most of the other types of entertainers you named. it's just the nature of how their money is made and how advertisers break down the numbers.

obv if The Wire has an aspirational element, it isn't class-based in the same way as Mad Men

like every single person who works in television can tell you how much of their following is 18-24 or younger or older or male or female. i don't think that's the case nearly to the same extent even for people working in theater who can literally look out and see who their audience is.

Given that the Weiner guy said that if he had read Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road before he started Mad Men, he might not have done the show (too intimidated by the similar milieu & period), I wonder how many MM watchers have read RR?

I wonder how many MM watchers have read RR?

I wonder who cares.

like every single person who works in television can tell you how much of their following is 18-24 or younger or older or male or female. i don't think that's the case nearly to the same extent even for people working in theater who can literally look out and see who their audience is.

If they had a way of measuring, they would! (I used to work for a concert promoter who would crunch numbers all Moneyball after Naughty By Nature gigs to determine subsequent gigs).

didn't they make that into a movie?

well the fact that the measuring apparatus exists for some industries and not for others is a factor, obviously, but that doesn't make it less true

yes sarahell, greenlighted bcz of MM I'm pretty sure.

i guess what i mean is that the 'money guys' seem to infiltrate the mindset of what the creatives think about in TV more than in other art forms, for better or worse. (xpost)

I haven't seen this Naughty By Nature play yet. Is that the new Sam Shepard?

Treach(erous) by David Mamet

all culture industries have some sort of audience demographic measuring apparatus -- some are more high tech or expensive, some are more accurate. Some measure more frequently than others. But considering how many options there are for watching tv shows (cable, online, torrent, dvds) - I don't think the tv people have the most accurate measurement of audiences.

Absolutely OTM. It's kinda shocking to me that the Nielsen people still put so much stock in people who watch television according to a broadcast schedule when it seems like that particularly way of watching is quickly on its way out.

p sure I've read that's just the 'overnights', they do have ppl logging their timeshifting in the weekly diaries.

Theoretically, a medium that is performance-based (theater, opera, music, dance) could have better demographic data if they collect it for every ticket purchase.

curious how many other ILXers have been a "Nielsen family" besides me

I wonder how many MM watchers have read RR?

I have. I don't see how the question matters though.

I have. I reported I had watched You Can't Do That On Television and nothing else every day.

it doesn't matter, just curious

oh lol xp

Like, I get that RR and MM both deal with similar themes, but MM takes a more panoramic view encompassing numerous social concerns, historical moments, fab fashion, interesting characters. RR is pretty frenzied, hysterical about two particular ppl and their particular crumbling relationship. also, while MM looks at a ton of different ppl coming from various backgrounds, places, etc, RR is really a very particular couple. who on MM is most like decaprio/winslet in RR? maybe ken and his gf/wife(whoever she is) aka aspiring writer trapped in dead-end job? but ken really seems so much more straight and staid than decaprio in RR and i often forget that he has literary ambitions. peggy seems more ambitious and not quite as trapped. which of these characters wish they could move to france and pursue an artistic lifestyle?

the Leo-look-alike's wife! ... oh wait, that's Boardwalk Empire n/m

who on MM is most like decaprio/winslet in RR?

ah, Richard Yates now has his characters subsumed by Sam Mendes' mediocre, reductive film.

wasn't Richard Yates the name of a Tao Lin novel?

yes

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/books/review/Bock-t.html

Morbz, I try not to get frustrated with you these days but seriously:

I wonder how many MM watchers have read RR?

ah, Richard Yates now has his characters subsumed by Sam Mendes' mediocre, reductive film.

are you just fucking trolling yourself at this point?

nm, my bad. i got confused by the acronyms.

IMHO, the notion of TV discussion as middlebrow owes a lot to historical prejudices and not a lot to the reality of its influence and waxing quality. It's a nascent and evolving medium, and it misses more than it hits, but it's definitely worthy of serious consideration. Doubtless, some lit department of the future is bound to look back on today's shows (series, seasons, whatever) in the same bracketed way that today's students look at Aphra Behn or William Wycherley and think them basically crappy but not trivial in their influence.

A meaningful consideration of the relative merits of four of the most prominant and appreciated series conveyed via (one of the) dominant modes of cultural transmission that takes into account both the business/corporate and the creative/artistic is necessarily 'middlebrow.' I guess I mean 'middlebrow' in the sense that it can't be abstracted and academically taxidermied for 'highbrow' conversation (whatever that is), and entirely shorn of its "low" commercial, panderous, origins. Elsewise, middlebrow is a specially nasty term of zingy castigation for the blogo generation in that it suggests something that isn't good enough to like sincerely, but not lame enough to like ironically.

― aka vanilla bean (remy bean), Monday, 26 March 2012 18:29 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ feel like this post outclasses all the other posts in this thread to a remarkable degree

i aspire to remybrow

So do I!

I think what remy's post misses about tv being middlebrow is that middlebrow traditionally means following art for the sake of aspiring to being classy, as opposed to being authentically moved by the art. We follow tv as a medium partially (maybe entirely) because we watch along with other people - it's a communal art experience (cf laugh tracks), so we're always watching tv to 'keep up.' No one is watching it in a vacuum. That's probably what ppl respond so negatively to in the recap threads - that it wears that 'keeping up'ness on its sleeve, instead of pretending like we watch the Wire simply bc it is good (as whiney/lamp types would have you believe) as opposed to that we watch it bc our friends watch it and our neighbors watch it and we want to watch it too.

you know I don't really care about middlebrow shaming but online tv criticism is not a nascent and evolving medium, it's a bunch of people talking about the same 4 shows again and again. is the wire 'worthy of serious consideration'? sure, whatever, good show. but tv is prob less important than its ever been, most of it is terrible, terrible, terrible trash and I don't think the model that allows $2mil an ep shows to be funded is going to survive much longer. it mostly works because everything else is trash / there is very little competition. I don't see a 'nascent and evolving medium' I see 3% of the ilx database dedicated to people ranking these 4 shows.

i enjoy reading him but there's no question alan sepinwall poisoned the well of tv crit

Ehh, so is looking at paintings!

but tv is prob less important than its ever been, most of it is terrible, terrible, terrible trash

Thank goodness that television is the only medium this adequately describes.

well TV is almost by design mostly genuine trash (i.e. commercials, the cheapest filler networks can possibly grind out to fill their broadcast day, endless reruns) in a way that bad movies, bad music, etc. isn't really. but i think it's ok to talk about TV as art form or medium in terms of the higher end of scripted programming only in most conversations.

it's a communal art experience (cf laugh tracks), so we're always watching tv to 'keep up.'

some of the music threads read this way too though!

TV is hardly the only social medium.

Hunger Games/Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/Harry Potter etc lol

Yeah, but music and movies are more selective media than television at the moment. You don't pay a monthly flat movie theater rate and just pop in whenever you're bored. If you did, there'd probably be a lot of The Haunting of Jerry Van Dyke's Garage-type movies playing regularly.

xpost to some dude

yeah, of course. but i mean when people talk about "film" they're generally excluding a whole world of stuff that is made and screened by someone somewhere but is not part of the cinema conversation. when people talk about "TV" they're more likely to have infomercials and daytime talk shows in mind as they shovel the whole medium into the trashbin.

you know I don't really care about middlebrow shaming but online tv criticism is not a nascent and evolving medium

Uhh, it is! TV's still very new! People in their 80s lived before it even existed, and people in their '60s i.e. my parents grew up before most people had TVs in their homes.

it's a bunch of people talking about the same 4 shows again and again.

This is reductive to the extreme. i'd come up with a music analogy, but it's not even really necessary.

it mostly works because everything else is trash / there is very little competition. I don't see a 'nascent and evolving medium'

The billions of intelligent, discriminating people who enjoy TV every day and learn/receive entertainment would disagree with you heartily.

learn/receive entertainment

wat

lol @ the inauthentic discernment of the tv snob

tedious ^

seriously

lol @ the inauthentic discernment of the ilx snob. let's be honest, if you're posting here, maybe you shouldn't be so proud of your highfalutin pristine and refined taste

Uhh, it is! TV's still very new! People in their 80s lived before it even existed, and people in their '60s i.e. my parents grew up before most people had TVs in their homes.

nah I didn't mean it like that, I meant it's not going anywhere cause a tv is already basically archaic

ahh, okay. i don't mean to poke holes, and figured you'd be a little wiser than that. apolgies.

xp to mordy:

yeah, I have nothing profound to say about my love of Hoarders

ps i don't read the internet (except ILX) on TV.

i read a book of 'tv criticism' by a guy who basically invented it once and it was kind of interesting

Lamp otm

where's some hummus when you need some

lamp and whiney = get a room

You don't pay a monthly flat movie theater rate and just pop in whenever you're bored

this is essentially netflix's business model, isn't it?

one of the worst characteristics of this generation is the impulse to wax psuedo-intellectually about low art, ultimately culminating in Grantland and the 1,000 sub-KillScreen Grantlands where people talk about like the hauntological aspects of RedTube and the dissonance of Yo Gabba Gabba. Our constant, childlike mewing for a "TV show that matters" at all times is so transparant and is mostly just a desperate plea to "relate" with other middle class people and feel superior to those who don't "understand" populist horseshit like Dr. House on our "level."

Breaking news, Whiney is carles

feel superior to those who don't "understand" populist horseshit like Dr. House on our "level."

wait what is the proper way to appreciate Dr. House I R confused

or Breaking Bad or whatev

so we should be talking about books, is what you're saying?

or not talking at all?

Is Dr. House that show with Bob Villa on PBS?

Whiney, you realize that you're in danger of becoming our generation's Morbz with all this, right?

i'm kind of sympathetic to at least part of Whiney's argument ... i'm old (and snobby) enough to get a little, um, dumbfounded when i hear that there are university classes on Spiderman and comic books (excuse me, "graphic novels") and The Wire or when i found out that the cast of Battlestar Galactica spoke at a UN symposium.

Whiney isn't a member of my generation iirc

we published zines about how much better The Brady Bunch was than our real life families.

Whiney prefers all his dissertations to be on old MTV "buzz band" clips from the 90s

I don't see why anyone should be bothered about the amount of intellectual energy expended on cheap media - 'twas ever thus

Whiney you're about as much fun talking about TV as the fanboys who supposedly prevent you from watching the shows worth talking about.

one of the worst characteristics of this generation is the impulse to wax psuedo-intellectually about low art

wait isn't this your chosen career

i'm old (and snobby) enough to get a little, um, dumbfounded when i hear that there are university classes on Spiderman and comic books (excuse me, "graphic novels") and The Wire

you're a lawyer, right? In law school, and as part of requirements to practice, don't you have to study contemporary case law and new precendents, and what have you? I think of these things as the equivalent for cultural studies.

the fact that it;s like quippy proto-Twilight dramaclub vampire brony trash has ensured I will never go near it in a thousand years. i couldn't imagine what would make a grown man think it's ok to even watch a Teen Dracula Can't Lose show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" let alone rally around its creator to the point where he think it was acceptable to release something called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog."

The whole cult around all of this makes me sicker to my stomach than furry conventions

― action bronieson (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, March 23, 2012 10:33 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you are missing out

i've almost never seen any of these shows on an actual tv, during air time, with commercials (when available - does hbo not show commercials? what about amc?). i basically saw them on dvd or on my computer by torrenting them. and that seems to go along with the sense they can give, apart from the delivery mechanism, that they're not quite tv. they have too many filmic pretensions.

'the wire' is pretty great but when i think about tv as tv, i would much rather pick 'homicide'. if you want to talk about a tv show being good at doing what is characteristically 'tv', i think you need to pick a show that ran on a major, free network and had to deal with commercials, network execs, long-run cast and staff changes, and all that business.

along the same lines i would take a show like 'nypd blue' seriously. i don't know if i've ever seen all of them, but when it was running on cable i must have seen a lot of them. sipowicz was a great character. and it seems like there's a value in having genuinely public stories that are about things that are not (like e.g. 'lost') bullshit even if it can be questioned whether it's 'art' on some brow-scale. especially in the mode of tv where it's not an event or an object of consumption, it's just... there.

the fact that it;s like quippy proto-Twilight dramaclub vampire brony trash has ensured I will never go near it in a thousand years. i couldn't imagine what would make a grown man think it's ok to even watch a Teen Dracula Can't Lose show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" let alone rally around its creator to the point where he think it was acceptable to release something called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog."

The whole cult around all of this makes me sicker to my stomach than furry conventions

― action bronieson (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, March 23, 2012 10:33 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also wish you could have found a way to criticize the show without casting aspersions on the masculinity of dudes who like it. for a lot of reasons, but one of them the implication that it's to be expected that female tv viewers, absent critical faculties, like such trash, but Men ought to be ashamed.

i realize by rising to the bait i am living up to the unreasonable fanbase expectation but i am who i am

*applauds*

horseshoe, maybe we could sing some songs from Buffy's musical episode. Which will either a) convince Whiney that it's the greatest show ever, or b) chase him out of the thread entirely...

I don't for a second believe wgw isn't straight trolling this thread.

I don't either but NO ONE MAKES FUN OF DR HORRIBLE'S SINGALONG BLOG

well lamp has an established background in ~high culture~ to fall back on for the culture snob wars, whiney is mad that people like the wrong low culture

i know it's whiney's thing and i often enjoy it but lol humorless brainless buffy fans i guess

I'm sorry, I just don't connect with Hillbilly Handfishin'

no whineys big problem as a cultural critic is how often he resorts to using 'problematic' ideas of race and masculinity in order to malign stuff like he gets onto this orwell at the end of 'road to wigan pier' tip about bon iver or w/e

no matter how tedious it seems i think its worth pointing out the ubiquity and conformity of a lot of these cultural products and the narrowness of vision that sustains them. like i dont think the av club recapper critical worldview is a good one and i think its increasingly becoming a rubric through which other potentially good and idiosyncratic cultural products are analyzed/consumed/understood. even daniel mendelsohn in his essay trashing 'mad men' seems to implicitly accept that these dominant values are the 'right ones' hes just arguing that mad men is actually kinda trashy and limpid.

he resorts to using 'problematic' ideas of race and masculinity

class too

well you wonder how much of it is people wearing the av club/tumblr white glasses while watching tv and how much of it is just a logical progression for 'internet culture' - like, if these shows didn't exist, the av club would still be more or less the same thing, and a lot of the middlebrow critical institutions would be playing the same game w/ something else. maybe.

i think it's strange that people on ilx are being criticized for liking these ubiquitous, easily approached, pieces of low culture when many ilxors have very engaging, complex interests (it's one of the things that i love about ilx) ranging from politics to 'high art' to philosophy to foreign affairs. often it seems that ppl quickest to call ppl out for liking, for example, Mad Men, are the very ones who seem so mired in that kind of low brow of-the-moment disposable culture. i guess in part it's because when this shit is all you deal in, it can be very frustrating to have to deal in it. if you had some other points of interest you could lower yourself to watch an ep of mad men, or even entire seasons, bc you know your identity isn't fixed to this one particular cultural constellation.

oooh burn

ftr my problem w/ mad men is not w/ its place in the culture spectrum, my problem w/ mad men is that it is a boring, boring show

yeah fuck mad men but i get confused whenever the conversation becomes about "tumblr whites" and the reasons people watch things

but i guess that's because i am a tumblr white by whiney's reckoning. i guess we can't see ourselves very well.

tumblr whites just makes me think of laundry and I get mad

whiney's problem is he can't hate on something without diverting that hatred directly onto its fans

xp

tbf to whiney i do think his interest is sociology of taste or whatever you want to call it

like he actually does hate the fans, not the cultural commodity

but where is his DATA is my issue

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ZP6GKY6RL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

often it seems that ppl quickest to call ppl out for liking, for example, Mad Men, are the very ones who seem so mired in that kind of low brow of-the-moment disposable culture

well i mean part of my problem is that 'the culture' doesnt really seem to see 'mad men' et al as disposable or lowbrow. and i mean i dont really think any one persons particular interests are really germane

fwiw i mean i dont think an 'authentic' highbrow culture exists, at all, in the_west anymore nor do i endorse ideas about low/high/middlebrow culture but w/e

wrt Whiney the stuff about Buffy/etc feels kinda, jocks vs nerd vehement level of disdain that makes me over-protective of the shows I like because goddammit I do like the tv shows I like and why can't I? What's it to anyone else what I am enthusiastic about?

I get squirrelly like he's coming in here shouting LOOK AT ALL YOU NERRRRRRRRRRRRDS and I get mad instead of discoursing like a grownup

and I'm not even that nerdy.
much. okay fine.

sopranos is totally corny, the wire is totally boring, mad men is straight up trash, never seen breaking bad but joe frank liked it so it's probably good.

if mad men were trash i would probably like it, so i don't think so.

well it's finely tuned trash, it wishes it were trash. *moved goalposts*

dude come back here with those

are we beginning to see diminishing returns with new drama series these days? the tone especially seems to be getting codified and just middlebrowed-out.

lol at ppl itt bitching about what is/isn't lowbrow/middlebrow/highbrow/good/bad/etc in the language and syntax that tweens use to ask each other if Timmy wants to go to prom and what was the math homework tonight

<3 middlebrow tbh

any show I like isn't highbrow. will let u know which ones I like

I think Whiney's proven himself to be completely dismissable in this thread and probably with respect to this topic altogether. DISMISSED, SON.

sonned by Haircare in televised beef

lol at ppl itt bitching about what is/isn't lowbrow/middlebrow/highbrow/good/bad/etc in the language and syntax that tweens use to ask each other if Timmy wants to go to prom and what was the math homework tonight

I have no idea what this means but it is an ickle bit funny

wish more ppl would save their 'buffy' hatred for 'firefly.'

you best step off right now...

speaking of transcendent trash, why no love for terminator sarah connor chronicles?

Terminators should be feared, not ogled

i think its worth pointing out the ubiquity and conformity of a lot of these cultural products and the narrowness of vision that sustains them.

as opposed to the ubiquity and conformity of sitcoms, or news shows, or action movies, or scifi, or sketch comedy ...?

like i dont think the av club recapper critical worldview is a good one and i think its increasingly becoming a rubric through which other potentially good and idiosyncratic cultural products are analyzed/consumed/understood.

what is this critical worldview? I kinda feel like you are making these gross generalizations about how people watch these shows, in terms of what related discourse they also engage with.

also wish you could have found a way to criticize the show without casting aspersions on the masculinity of dudes who like it. for a lot of reasons, but one of them the implication that it's to be expected that female tv viewers, absent critical faculties, like such trash, but Men ought to be ashamed.

― horseshoe, Monday, March 26, 2012 7:21 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The implication was that ADULTS were watching a show made for 14 year old CHILDREN, I wasn't intending to put a gender binary on it

haha okay retracted next time say "adult" not "grown man"

or " a man long of arm and deep of voice, having spilled his seed "

The implication was that ADULTS were watching a show made for 14 year old CHILDREN, I wasn't intending to put a gender binary on it

How DARE people watch something that wasn't made for their particular DEMOGRAPHIC? That must make them SEX OFFENDERS. I'm so ashamed of watching Men Of A Certain Age and Babe.

At least within the context of this particular thread, Whiney, you're coming off like kind of a boring idiot.

i think it's strange that people on ilx are being criticized for liking these ubiquitous, easily approached, pieces of low culture

but the shows in question aren't low culture. Like, we're not talking about the television equivalent of ke$ha or Drake or Lil Wayne or the autotune car-jam of the week. It's got the same fraughtness as arguments about U2 or Radiohead.

as opposed to the ubiquity and conformity of sitcoms, or news shows, or action movies, or scifi, or sketch comedy ...?

well, yes. i mean i dont watch news shows or sketch comedy but the others, sure.

what is this critical worldview?

haha articulating this precisely is somewhat of an 'on-going project' but i clicked on the most recent tv club review, the first sentence of which is: I’ve spent a few recent episodes discussing American Dad’s ability to be effectively emotional so i guess i just let work as summary for now

i can't believe me and Lamp didn't get along for so long

i'm having a total markers-style re-evaluation of dude

\^o^/

man this is turning into that uncomfortable episode of The Facts of Life...

my question is, is this critical worldview worse than that of the New York Times or Gene Shalit or whomever middle class people paid attention to pre-internet?

The Lamps of Life

Blair's disabled cousin was on Deadwood!

Whiney G. Lampgarten

brundlefly

Wait, Whiney's telling us what ADULTS do? Is it irony day?

whoever said upthread that MM was the TV equivalent of Franzen was otm except that Franzen is occasionally a shrewd observer. At least in MM you don't get the filmic equivalent of Franzen's cutie-pie authorial voice pouring condescension on easy targets while at the same time fetishizing these targets. The problem is the hype. The internet has made old people who still run TV and their media sycophants so desperate for a piece of what's left of the old Nielsen demographics that you get Slate 'think pieces' about the "novelistic" grandeur of "The Wire" -- a show I really liked but praised in terms that make me embarrassed. As for MM it's shallow fun, ruined by students posting shit like "Appearance vs Reality in Mad Men" which, you know, fine but I learned about appearance vs reality on the "Dallas" episode where we learned Bobby hadn't died but was actually masturbating in the shower or whatever

I reserve Spongebob Squarepants for my quieter, more introspective evenings, fyi

i fuck w/ spongebob tbh

J'ACCUSE

is the issue that people are writing about these shows as if they were important works of literature, or that what they are writing is garbage? I've read really interesting and good essays about The Wire, and I've read mediocre writing about it.

xpost it appears we've found our common ground :D

i fuck w/ spongebob tbh

GROSSSSSSSSS! Chris Hansen alert!

i feel like molly lambert does the thing whiney and lamp critique itt (she even writes mad men recaps, now for grantland) but i don't think they're prima facie evidence that she's naive about what tv is (commerce). (i do think her grantland tabloid recaps are a depressing waste of her talent, so i half-agree with you guys, i guess. generally her work was better pre-grantland.)

aaand you just ruined it, Sarahell

*barf*

xpost it appears we've found our common ground :D
--Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl)

:D

I feel better now that I can relate to you as Squidward.

(runs)

seriously though, Whiney, you have these elaborate descriptions of this character that is supposed to be reprehensible. But I feel like it's actually just an alternate version of you. An alt-Whiney, like in that Soderberg movie, "Schizopolis." And you would be the scientologist copywriter, who gets a big promotion to write the L Ron equivalent's big speech, and your wife will leave you for alt-Whiney who likes Mad Men and Joss Whedon shows.

think i'll rewatch The Singing Detective

(26 years ago, i checked)

The implication was that ADULTS were watching a show made for 14 year old CHILDREN, I wasn't intending to put a gender binary on it

It sounds like you're deliberately putting blinders on here, I mean the basic idea is that it's a show with an obviously silly & childish-sounding premise & it explores its themes and expands its vision in ways that make it appealing to non-14 year olds. I wouldn't call it the greatest show ever and I tend to reflexively cringe at academic studies of TV shows but honestly I was only ashamed of liking it when I was a teenager & way too self-conscious about my tastes.

no, it is absolutely the greatest show ever

spoogeblob queerpants

One could make the argument that Spongebob achieves with cartoon seacreatures what Buffy achieves with vampires and teenagers...

not very well, but it could be made

The point is whatever we are watching, we could, nay, should be watching Robocop

I thought TV was going to win the other poll I started, but now I know it's movies in a landslide.

look the point of all of this is that we should be watching Spongebob Squarepants

my question is, is this critical worldview worse than that of the New York Times or Gene Shalit or whomever middle class people paid attention to pre-internet?

does this really matter? i mean, my feeling is that it is but i obv dont have any ~data points~ although i guess my argument goes something like 'the combination of the internet's reach and the 'discerning omnivore' approach to cultural consumption allows this worldview to appropriate and then subsume both 'low' and 'high' cultural products in a way previous professional class critical apparatus did not thus making it more hegemonic and troublesome'

but i don't think they're prima facie evidence that she's naive about what tv is (commerce)

i dont think 'mad men' is a good or sophisticated show but my main problem is more with the idea that it represents some kind of ideal and that the recap/think piece critical model that feeds off these shows is 'worthwhile'. i mean i think a really basic argument is that these shows and the blogosphere that sustains/explains them become symbiotic and like now even sitcoms have to provide 'emotionally engaging characters' and 'relevant character arcs' and 'david foster wallace references' instead of jokes in order to be 'quality tv'.

but like scottpl had an essay posted to the av club recently that a friend linked to me that really disgusted me and kinda sums up my ~~issues~~ w/ this stuff and its the assumption of accessibility on the part of consumers, that anything that isnt friendly to some blog-driven narrative that the professional class can identify with is suspect or bad or 'disposable' as scott put it. but at heart w/ a lot of this stuff theres this idea of availability that things shouldnt be too difficult or overtly trashy or obscure to lay beyond the reach of any bored office worker w/an internet connection. i mean im aware of the irony of posting this on ilx but the idea that every cultural niche should be open to being appropriated and rated and then assimilated into the 'best korean barbershop quartets your not hearing' content churn is really dispiriting to me!

I understand being put off by fans or critics or fan fiction writers or the media's engagement with a particular cultural object, but the only reason I can think of for these peripheral modes of engagement to stoke distaste towards the cultural object itself is the idea that anything but an expression of distaste is an implicit expression of acceptance which poses, by association, an imagined threat to one's ill-formed sense of self. Just to unpack what I meant when I said that it's really adolescent to let one's feelings towards Buffy fans or people who write online capsule reviews of Mad Men episodes affect one's own taste or level of engagement.

pug waffle (Whiney G. Weingarten) wrote this on thread The Artist -- the latest film by Michel Hazanavicius ("OSS 117: Nest of Spies") on board I Love Everything on Jan 8, 2012

this was my favorite movie of 2011 :(

the 'discerning omnivore' approach to cultural consumption allows this worldview to appropriate and then subsume both 'low' and 'high' cultural products in a way previous professional class critical apparatus did not thus making it more hegemonic and troublesome'

i don't think it's really subsuming them though -- maybe that is their goal, maybe in the eyes of their audience they are (but in a positive sense) -- i don't think the audience is that large. And the core audience, that doesn't just like, read what the av club or whatever else belongs to this sensibility clique has to say about one particular show -- is even smaller. is this the equivalent of arguing about pitchfork's effect on contemporary music? It feels like it is.

Honestly you should just start a blog that reviews their reviews

Missed lamp's point with gusto, DWH

Well this is a tedious thread.

I just want to step in and defend Mad Men because it's more than just fashion/Downton Abbey whatever. Downton Abbey, fwiw, is pretty enjoyable soap opera trash gussied up but it also displays a disgusting restorative nostalgia Tory Bullshit thing but whatever.

Mad Men is about identity and is really great about it when it wants to be. The same way, for me, Sopranos was in a lot of ways about Old World (or Old Fashioned) values bumping up against modernity. So you can bitch about the fans who just loooove the fashions and get all "ooooh, adultery" the same way people bitched about the Sopranos fans who just wanted to see people getting whacked.

You can like or not like these shows, whatever, but fucking hell don't write-off all of the fans as just boring nerds or white middle class trend-followers who feel self-important. That same argument is hurled at people who watch foreign films. Morbz is taking the wrong side here, I think, but he's also pimping mini-series instead of actual series so this is obviously not his territory.

Deadwood is the best but I'm not sure how I'm going to vote in this poll.

In regards to 'recap' culture, if I read any it is either Seitz, Van Der Werff, or Myles McNutt (the latter because he has a great grasp of the functionality and the former two because they're just very good at digging into themes, etc...).

Anyways, fuck this "middlebrow lame-o" rockism bullshit.

nb i've been drinking as usual so that was a little more aggressive than I meant it to be.

i just don't assume that the cultural consumption of my friends and acquaintances are representative of society at large, or even my age/education demographic. if i were to make that assumption, then i would assert that the most popular, most blogged about tv show is Doctor Who by a very wide margin

that most of the people getting uptight about mad men on this thread are also turning out to have really bad reading comprehension is like ... huh ... whod've thunk ... (ironic .gif)

how many americans do actually watch doctor who, by the way? in the u.k. it's sunk a bit now people are used to the idea of it being back but it is solidly top ten drama-type-shows still in terms of viewing figures

like now even sitcoms have to provide 'emotionally engaging characters' and 'relevant character arcs' and 'david foster wallace references' instead of jokes in order to be 'quality tv'.

Welcome to 1972, I guess? Or, I mean, at least as far back as Cheers.

Welcome to 1972, I guess? Or, I mean, at least as far back as Cheers.

― jpattzlovevampz 2 hours ago (Phil D.), Tuesday, March 27, 2012 6:21 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i mean it's actually the idea of sitcom as a breathless, soulless joke-injection that is the more recent concept

i dont really have an opinion on this but i think lamps perspective is interestin'

i guess my argument goes something like 'the combination of the internet's reach and the 'discerning omnivore' approach to cultural consumption allows this worldview to appropriate and then subsume both 'low' and 'high' cultural products in a way previous professional class critical apparatus did not thus making it more hegemonic and troublesome'

like i dont think the av club recapper critical worldview is a good one and i think its increasingly becoming a rubric through which other potentially good and idiosyncratic cultural products are analyzed/consumed/understood

not disagreeing but do you have any examples re: the subsuming?

also a link to the avclub article that disgusted you

I think I'll vote for BB because... Well, it's fresh in my mind. Sopranos was pretty ace too.
The Wire was amazing as well. Fuck

Morbz is taking the wrong side here, I think, but he's also pimping mini-series instead of actual series

I'm doing no such thing, my TSD remark was just a one-off. I watched MM twice and didn't see much there that would reward further viewing, with the fact that I worked for ad agencies for 8 years and loathed everything about them admittedly a big factor.

I have no problem with "brows" either, there's great and awful stuff across the spectrum.

you also mentioned Angels in America

which is a play first and foremost, and how I first experienced it.

I've never seen the mini – is it worth watching?

Yes although Meryl Streep is as usual distracting.

Missed lamp's point with gusto, DWH

My post was only tangentially in reference to Lamp's post (it was more generally in reference to Whiney's posts itt), but the point kinda stands. There may be an extent to which some shows cater to a particular type of critical favor, but I think it's being blown a little out of proportion here. And at the end of the day, again, I don't understand why anyone cares. I don't view art/entertainment as existing in an inextricable web of its own criticism any more than I view it as something that's irreducible from the weirdos who are a little too creepy about their fandom.

think i'll rewatch The Singing Detective

just wanted to chime in that I will totally stan for prime Dennis Potter as superior to pretty much all the series listed here, with the exception of the Sopranos

esp Lipstick on Your Collar

it's really adolescent to let one's feelings towards Buffy fans or people who write online capsule reviews of Mad Men episodes affect one's own taste or level of engagement.

^^^also this is completely OTM

yeah, but watching a fucking vampire show on teevee is pretty "adolescent" too; so what can you do

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110419172357/uncyclopedia/images/b/b4/Count-chocula.jpeg

TS Adolescence V Autism

adolescence is definitely a special need

as low-brow as they may or may not be, i wouldn't call any of the 4 shows being polled above "adolescent"

no offense whiney but i really have no idea how to square your position about stuff like Buffy (which i also avoid like the plague but not really because of subject matter) with your assertion last week that everyone's taste in comedy as a teenager is frozen in amber for the rest of their life and you'd be lying to yourself if you didn't still rep for Billy Madison or whatever juvenile thing you loved at 13.

yeah but even in high school i knew that Buffy was for the LARPer kids

no, me neither. nor would i call them low-brow. dumb, maybe, but not low-brow.

i think it's bc of the famous quip that anyone who likes something juvenile that i do not is a child, and anyone who likes something sophisticated that i do not is the monopoly man

whiney's new rep as the dude who sits by the fireplace reading proust, drinking expensive wine w/ opera on the antique turntable doesn't seem to square very well w/ the dude who likes kevin smith

that's not his new rep.

what mad men really needs is two slackers selling weed in the lobby and quipping about all the square advertising executives. one of them never talks.

I think the definition of "arrested development" is a culture of adults obsessing over a show that exists to play out liberal jack-off fantasies of powerful white people, then dressing up as the characters and making "manhattans" on Sunday; then retreating to discussion on a website on Monday famous for satirical headlines demeaning handicapped people .

http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/strawman.jpg

i thought "arrested development" was a comedy with Jason Bateman

whiney's new rep as the dude who sits by the fireplace reading proust, drinking expensive wine w/ opera on the antique turntable doesn't seem to square very well w/ the dude who likes kevin smith

― iatee, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 12:31 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i have no idea what this is. Being "anti-pseudo-intellectual" doesn't automatically make me "intellectual"

I'm mostly just anti-LARP crap

it makes you kinda Archie Bunker-ish

I think the definition of "arrested development" is a culture of adults obsessing over a show that exists to play out liberal jack-off fantasies of powerful white people, then dressing up as the characters and making "manhattans" on Sunday; then retreating to discussion on a website on Monday famous for satirical headlines demeaning handicapped people .

this is definitely something, but it's not the definition of arrested development. there's a whole history of adults playing dress-up and throwing 'history' parties and shit so i think maybe you're just ahistoricizing this.

Twin Peaks parties were stupid too iirc

fucking children

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Venezia_carnevale_7.jpg

I don't see how mad men costume parties aren't a little better than game of thrones costume parties

whiney, i think your war on the arrested development of our generational cohort would be better taken if you were offering anything in the way of an aesthetic alternative instead of just more juvenilia

Maybe I'll hold a 'Hoarders' party and invite my friends over to play Sardines and throw shit under the table.

Yeah, Mordy, going out an vomiting on Tchoupitoulas Street at 3 am is way less cool than an part-time web designer dressing up like Pete Campbell

They both suck!

whiney, i think your war on the arrested development of our generational cohort would be better taken if you were offering anything in the way of an aesthetic alternative instead of just more juvenilia

― Mordy, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 12:44 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How about if we just watch and enjoy TV shows like we used to instead of trying to treat every one that's better than 'Whitney' like Pitchfork treats an LCD Soundsystem album; OH THIS CAPTURES THE ZEITGEIST SO EMOTIONALLY RICH THIS IS IMPORTANT HEART STOPPING JUST HEART STOPPING

yes, it is way less cool. if your alternative to mad men fetishism is bourbon street tulane students experiencing decadent freedom for the first time in their lives, then I don't see why your opinion on either should be taken seriously.

oh noes mordy doesnt take my opinion seriously on the rich white men in suits show

How about if we just watch and enjoy TV shows like we used to instead of trying to treat every one that's better than 'Whitney' like Pitchfork treats an LCD Soundsystem album; OH THIS CAPTURES THE ZEITGEIST SO EMOTIONALLY RICH THIS IS IMPORTANT HEART STOPPING JUST HEART STOPPING

how do we 'watch and enjoy tv shows like we used to'

no need to get so sad about it, dude. it's just an ilx thread. xp

iatee:

http://popculturehasaids.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tv_set.jpg

whiney's new rep as the dude who sits by the fireplace reading proust, drinking expensive wine w/ opera on the antique turntable doesn't seem to square very well w/ the dude who likes kevin smith

― iatee, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 12:31 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tru dat. OTOH, i sometimes think of Kevin Smith as a poor man's/idiot's/filmmaker-who's-illiterate-to-film-as-a-medium's Ernst Lubitsch. dude's films are definitely comedies of manners.

I mean I am sorta vaguely on the whiney/lamp side of this argument but not because I think the av club culture is an important or substantial thing but because

a. I think almost all tv is really bad, worse than its ever been
b. pretending like 'good tv' (all 4 shows) is this real and important cultural shift seems like it misses the bigger shift that's going on - tv really doesn't 'matter'

welcome to the team

b. pretending like 'good tv' (all 4 shows) is this real and important cultural shift seems like it misses the bigger shift that's going on - tv really doesn't 'matter'

That's a little disingenous! TV itself might not matter, but long form drama's here to stay. TV's the primary means of distribution, and a significant means for distributing stories and shared experience. Because you don't like/watch/value it doesn't mean that a humungous number of people aren't participants in it.

iatee - 'good tv' matters about as much as LCD Soundsystem, or Pitchfork, or whether tacos are better than pizza

your comment is totally pointless itt

Mad Men Season 5 premiere: 3.5 million
Adele 21: 310.300

remy otm long-form drama is really fucking ancient and isn't going anywhere

That's a little disingenous! TV itself might not matter, but long form drama's here to stay. TV's the primary means of distribution, and a significant means for distributing stories and shared experience. Because you don't like/watch/value it doesn't mean that a humungous number of people aren't participants in it.

right, that's true, and this is what they participate in:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/nielsens-charts.htm

so yeah 5% of people in the country watched the top rated show of the week, a trashy endless talent show

so are we just going to do some fucking Horkheimer now bc tbh the whole Marxist critique of culture industry is a) probably right but b) one note and boring

i don't understand what the number next to the Adele album means. it's sold 18 million copies and is probably the fastest selling album of the last 10 years though.

How about if we just watch and enjoy TV shows like we used to instead of trying to treat every one that's better than 'Whitney' like Pitchfork treats an LCD Soundsystem album; OH THIS CAPTURES THE ZEITGEIST SO EMOTIONALLY RICH THIS IS IMPORTANT HEART STOPPING JUST HEART STOPPING

Whiney, between this and your sub-moronic LARPer comments, I wonder if there's even a legitimate opinion anywhere under your pile of strawmen.

i dunno Mordy, what do you think Adorno would have had to say about LARP-ers and their fandoms?

lol Whiney is ILX's Theodor Adorno

LOL xpost

I was just provoking a bit, some dude – thinking about 'merit' as weekly sales/influence. I don't really believe it, I was just sort of thinking out loud.

you guys are strictly adorko

As a "14 year old arrested development LARPer" ie Buffy fan I just have to say: fuuuuuuuuuuck you whiney you trolling motherfucker

did a girl in a vampire costume turn you down at a Halloween party? or did a group of costumed vampires steal your Halloween candy? let's get to the root of this. Talk it out bro, let it out.

xp pretty sure Adorno would've hated the crappy late 90s nu-metal garbage that Whiney likes.

adorno hated everything. anyway, i guess my broader feelings about tv is that ppl generally watch tv the way they used to. i can't speak for everyone in the world, or those hip college students with their hulus, but i sit on the coach on sunday after the baby is put to sleep and my wife and i watch mad men together. i don't love it, and we spend much of the episode talking about whether it's boring, or what we think about different things, or i'll smoke a bowl and try to deconstruct whatever is on my mind while peggy babbles on in the background. but like, that's the purpose of tv. i don't watch tv to have a deep engagement w/ idk the fabric of reality or the beauty of whatever or whatever it is that whiney wants out of media (which, tbh, seems to be just some sort of unpretentiousness). it's supposed to run in the background. so when ppl are yelling at their tv for being too pretentious, or yelling at av club for discussing it too much in depth, it's like -who the fuck cares? if av clubbers feel a sense of community and a brief respite from life (and capitalism)'s unyielding misery, then good for them. we all live a short period of time and then we're gone forever and then one day humanity will be gone and it will all be the void and emptiness and the nothing and if we can waste some time before that watching a fucking show about white ppl wearing suits and the civil rights movement showing up on Madison Avenue i think we can all be forgiven for not being quite sophisticated enough.

xp pretty sure Adorno would've hated the crappy late 90s nu-metal garbage that Whiney likes.

yeah ... but then again, who w/ a lick of good taste doesn't?!?

nb: i also despise buffy and its offspring.

i kind of think whiney's hairsplitting about different kinds of navel-gazing niche interests is impossible unless you really believe on some deep level that you're The Right Kind of Nerd and you've got the right to slam the wrong kind of nerd into the proverbial locker as much as any jock. which is just ludicrous to me.

haha i hate and disagree with everyone itt

i kind of think whiney's hairsplitting about different kinds of navel-gazing niche interests is impossible unless you really believe on some deep level that you're The Right Kind of Nerd and you've got the right to slam the wrong kind of nerd into the proverbial locker as much as any jock. which is just ludicrous to me.

― internet somebody (some dude), Tuesday, March 27, 2012 1:19 PM (48 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nb i should note that adorno didn't actually hate everything, he loved mahler and beckett and his bf walter benjamin

when i hang out with film people or lit people or sci-fi people or hard science people i have fun hearing about their sphere of interest and where it intersects with mine, and sometimes i get to play the music nerd card and be the coolest guy in the room by default but i totally recognize what a farce that is.

There are a lot of "watch Mad Men" "drink Mad Men" "wear Mad Men" ads around NYC right now, by the by. I like the show but it _is_ being marketed as a "lifestyle choice"

though this is a valuable resource for furthering my picture of whiney's fandom cosmos

zoolander-the corrections

buffy-my little pony-LARP

is community fandom separate?

adorno hated everything

well.... adorno pretended to hate everything. he was a funny old crank, and I think he trolled before it was a thing. MC Teddy A with DJ Horkheimer on the steel wheels of doom.

oh... just saw you already addressed this.

like i said, adorno did like some things. i don't think he was trolling about the other stuff tho. i think he was legitimately disgusted by 99% of american popular culture (and probably rightfully so). like, when a guy says he hates donald duck, u gotta take him at his word

parks and recreation is better than fucking community.

trying to align all the things i remember whiney disparaging as "things ilxors like": the wonder years, judd apatow, bad santa, the jonathan franzen novel the corrections, zoolander

― horseshoe, Monday, January 17, 2011 5:48 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw the av club is pretty terrible

also, i don't think it's a coincidence that the stuff that he did love dealt directly with shit like the apocalypse, the end of history, the end of meaning, the empty void, etc. probably a relationship between that stuff and his reactions to auschwitz too xxp

haha the wonder years? i missed that one, sounds like a blast

i wholeheartedly agree with that but i watch so much tv and talk about tv so much that i recognize my irritation with the avclub on tv is pretty squarely narcissism of small differences territory

xxp

tbf to whiney i think he clarified in that thread that he likes the wonder years

Adorno was an old-school/early 1900s German dude who had Goethe and Beethoven and Schoenberg and Thomas Mann and Karl Marx and Max Weber crammed down his throat ... and b/c of circumstance beyond his control (i.e., Hitler), he ended up in Mad Men-era America. it almost sounds like a TV reality show.

the dude who recapped buffy for the avclub was tragically dumb though

i like Mad Men. it's not my favorite show ever. i want to watch it w/my mom and have her tell me "what it was like back then" stories, like how comfortable/uncomfortable were the foundation garments women wore, or like how my grandmother caused a mild stir at the school where she taught when she wore bright pink capri pants to class. Also, she'd like the fact that Robert Morse is in it, because she really loved the movie of "How to Succeed in Business ..."

i like how the last 2 posts look like they're comparing the intellectual merit of Adorno vs. the AV Club's Buffy recapper (xpost)

xxp he wasn't just some thoughtless guy tho repeating what he had been taught. he liked lots of innovative stuff (like i said, beckett + mahler in particular) that wasn't crammed down his throat.

whiney is no Adorno

why did adorno come up? person itt who had come closest to sounding like adorno is iatee afaict. is that why?

lol i was about to say i love adorno and you, sirs, are no adorno.

mordy mentioned Horkheimer iirc

xp yeah, that's why bc of iatee's post about nelson demographics + marketing in tv

well okay then

tru dat, Mordy. just b/c he didn't cotton to Dave Brubeck or Ornette Coleman didn't mean that he was just a crusty old Kraut.

i kinda know where iatee stands on these things also so a little bit is shorthand, but also the current conversation re whiney was just so dumb and so vacuous that at least i thought this might be a little more interesting to talk about

i am going to go finish sewing my brony costume

I have Buffy LARPing to do and fruit rollups to eat.

the dude who recapped buffy for the avclub was tragically dumb though

― horseshoe, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 1:30 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not as dumb as the saddo in the comments section who had an 800-word thesis ready to go right after each recap was posted.

i wish i could reveal at this juncture that i am that saddo but sadly it's not true.

I had my fingers crossed.

I have a toy Harry Potter wand that I think proves I am that saddo.

:D

I have Star Wars toys on my desk at work, I'm not here to judge.

ironically (maybe?) the only toys i have on my desk at work atm are throws i got in nola

At my desk:

Ash Evil Dead toy
T Brown Raiders action figure
Dwight shrute bobblehead
Iron Maiden action figure
Crow T Robot action figure
Joan Jett barbie
too many Nightmare Before Christmas figures
Dalek
P-51 mustang model plane
Samurai Baker action figure
Borg water bottle

SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADDDDO

Crow T Robot action figure

<3

borg water bottle?

Even though I've repeatedly made the argument in this thread that it's stupid to judge a show based on its fans, I wouldn't even judge the superfans of anything as much as I'd just say it's not a thing I've ever gotten into (he says as he attempts in all futility to hide his mountains of Muppet paraphernalia).

PREPARE TO BE ASSIMILATED, AND REFRESHED

i'd rather it be Tom Servo but Crow is cool too

Borg water bottle: It's like a sports bottle with a 3D borg head as the top of the bottle. There's a straw coming out of the side of his head. It's kind of awesome. Mr Veg gave it to me 100 years ago, I have no idea where he got it.

I'll take a picture.

fwiw ive been picking on the av club itt because it seems like a good 'representative sample' of all the different mostly-online outlets for this mode of thinking - the awl, grantland, p4k, slate, times book review &c &c - and because its sort of unabashed in its terribleness

not disagreeing but do you have any examples re: the subsuming?

i think the av club's 'new cult cannon' is a good example of this - creating a kind of 'cool cubicle guy' binary around a bunch of interesting films, the insidious way it groups these disparate things together. the 'martyrs' essay in particular is the kind of parameter-setting i mean but a lot of them default to a kind hedging about how even tho the film deviates from the tiresome pop realist aesthetic that theyre really good or ok to like or w/e. that i guess 'worries' me. another good example is s.thing like 'the awl' (i think?) or really any of these places and the way they write about reality tv, which feels both condescending and exploitative. really i think theres often this kind of permission-granting, parameter-setting thing going on with the sort of cultural products that are 'beneath' the professional class from video games to real housewives to fantasy novels: the 'is it art' think piece, the 'what it tells us about ourselves' essay, the mocking recap all work to appropriate. even the endless and seemingly pointless list-making and ranking feels like a way of asserting control over other groups culture again it comes back to this assumption of access and availability, that all culture belongs to the sort of people who have mad men themed parties

idk i have a whole big thing about adorno and the emptiness of culture but i mean i guess idk

one can put too much weight on a tv show's fans and go overboard trying to analyze them/figure out their importance in the scheme of things ... but i still think that's it's worthwhile to ask what is it about the TV show that attracts its fans. even if (ESPECIALLY if) said fans are obnoxious.

it's sociology of taste and it's a fully valid field of inquiry. i guess what whiney lacks in accuracy he makes up for in style in that arena.

Lamp i don't really hate you itt i am just a creature of the phenomenon you're describing/worried by.

i mean, i think adorno is basically right.

thanks

lol

lowbrow interlude:

http://i412.photobucket.com/albums/pp201/sharonjoy666/f7f0d098.jpg

oops hueg sorry

lol i was about to say i love adorno and you, sirs, are no adorno.

― horseshoe, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 1:33 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

no adorno (camron voice)

Ash Evil Dead toy
T Brown Raiders action figure
Dwight shrute bobblehead
Iron Maiden action figure
Crow T Robot action figure
Joan Jett barbie
too many Nightmare Before Christmas figures
Dalek
P-51 mustang model plane
Samurai Baker action figure
Borg water bottle

This sounds awesome. I wanted that Joan Jett barbie!

Holy shit, I totally guessed on "Prepare to be assimilated" AND IT CAME TRUE.

xpost It was a birthday present! Her hair is not v Joan, but still awesome

I know Phil, ITS LIKE YOU'RE WATCHING

that sports bottle is incontrovertible proof that star trek: first contact is the ultimate expression of friz lang's metropolis.

lol

also are those stills from alphaville behind the borg head? star trek: first contact is also ultimate expression of godard.

'borg water bottle' is the kind of thing that seems funny but plausible when mentioned offhand but actually seeing it is like holy shit that exists, someone made it and someone else bought it

Water Borgle

Mad Men is definitely presented as a lifestyle choice -- there's a Mad Men collection at Banana Republic, after all. (Also, remember the little create-your-own Mad Men avatar meme that was used to promote Season 4?) That said, the show is more than just its marketing, and there are ways to engage with the narrative without engaging in all of the surrounding habits and discourses.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UUAh02DpXvU/TgAqQw70NgI/AAAAAAAADfk/KnGxlAjlgv0/s1600/jar-jar-binks-candy-tongue.jpg

behind water bottle: l-r Rat Pack, William S Burroughs

Mad Men is definitely presented as a lifestyle choice -- there's a Mad Men collection at Banana Republic, after all. (Also, remember the little create-your-own Mad Men avatar meme that was used to promote Season 4?) That said, the show is more than just its marketing, and there are ways to engage with the narrative without engaging in all of the surrounding habits and discourses.

idk you could frame harry potter as a lifestyle choice if you wanted

really i think theres often this kind of permission-granting, parameter-setting thing going on with the sort of cultural products that are 'beneath' the professional class from video games to real housewives to fantasy novels: the 'is it art' think piece, the 'what it tells us about ourselves' essay, the mocking recap all work to appropriate.

but these are manufactured products of mass culture. it isn't like they're talking about folk culture, or its contemporary equivalent. it isn't the same kind of appropriation that was at play in modernism.

http://lh3.ggpht.com/-1qr7zKu_P3s/RyVXoGFJo-I/AAAAAAAAAdI/4-B6bIrUcrc/helping%252520nerds%252520become%252520snobs%252520sticker.jpg

idk you could frame harry potter as a lifestyle choice if you wanted

― iatee, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 2:09 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh c'mon there's a pretty big difference between dressing up like wizards and fetishizing the clothing and social mores of the country you live in a couple decades before you were born

depends where you're from

xpost

Which is...?

Hogwarts

http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2004/02/29/ba_adams29.jpg

Full clemency.

i guess i missed Banana Republic's Harry Potter collection

what are we arguing about now?

i broke my own rule about getting lost in the rabbit hole of iatee's endless pointless devil's advocate act

i think there were fashion tie-ins with it, but it was the British schoolchild look, with blazers and knee socks or whatever

wesley crusher could be a mad men character -- he'd be the most likeable & interesting of the lot of them, too.

i think there were fashion tie-ins with it, but it was the British schoolchild look, with blazers and knee socks or whatever

oh sara, that's actually the Angus Young fashion tie-in.

wesley crusher could be a mad men character

character's name is Pete Campbell btw

Pete Campbell is way way way less annoying than wesley crusher was

Provided there aren't swastikas or pointed hoods involved, dressing up in costumes is dressing up in costumes, afaict.

u read my mind, shakey

what madmen needs is a worf.

what if Don Draper was a wookie?

actually isn't the madmen timeline now concurrent with historical airings of original series? maybe draper and co can visit the desilu studios and have drinkathons with shatner and nimoy

http://screeninvasion.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/scvp-mad-men.jpg

too meta ... and the OG star trek wasn't a hit when it was originally on network TV. draper et al would be more likely having drinkathons with the cast of i dream of jeannie or bewitched.

lol the title sequence to mad men could be a fight scene b/w Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker ... with one of them falling into the void.

Done and done.

Oh, never mind. They missed the obvious joke.

but these are manufactured products of mass culture. it isn't like they're talking about folk culture, or its contemporary equivalent

well except they are

But they're not -- they're just, no, it is a different dynamic. Perhaps it's condescending, but it isn't co-opting or appropriation in the way that term was orginally used

The Real Housewives of Buttmunch produced and aired on network television is not folk culture

^^^: an XXX parody

animated gifs are better examples of folk culture today, real housewives is entertainment as a product

lol lamp there is no fucking way that anything that airs on tv - except on local access community channels maybe - is folk anything

LARPing and A.V. Club comments are better examples of folk culture today.

animated gifs are better examples of folk culture today

i can agree with this

I agree w/ dwh also agree w/ sarahell agreeing with me

But they're not -- they're just, no, it is a different dynamic. Perhaps it's condescending, but it isn't co-opting or appropriation in the way that term was orginally used

yeah, sure, its a weak position really. but i mean the folk culture argument is p peripheral and im annoyed that i let bait me into it

"there is no fucking way that anything that airs on tv - except on local access community channels maybe - is folk anything"

america's folkiest home videos!

"there is no fucking way that anything that airs on tv - except on local access community channels maybe - is folk anything"

so would this make tim and eric awesome show folk-art or at least some simulacrum of folk-art?!?

(jesus, this is like i'm back in a 1990s-era 400-level english/comp lit criticism class)

i think tim + eric's stuff is obv very influenced by folk art, but i don't think it is folk art itself

tom goes to the mayor was folk art, at least when it was a crappy web thing by two dorks, though that doesn't violate the "not-on-tv" rule.

once you are a product being sold by a major international corporation to consumers throughout the world, i think you are no longer folk art. if you were folk art before that happened, you have likely being co-opted

been*

i am kinda o_O at a definition of "folk art" that would include Youtube videos like "I Don't Want My Pizza Burning" and anything by wendyvainity (though it makes sense).

It's totally folk art. Whether one's prescriptive and unevolving view of folk art allows them to accept it as such is a whole other issue.

total derail but anybody who likes folk art should go to the Smithsonian American Art Museum to look at the folk art collection especially

http://americanart.si.edu/images/1970/1970.353.1_1b.jpg

^^ mostly cardboard and tinfoil

Nine times out of ten, I prefer folk art to Fine Art.

so much coruscating schizo-religious weirdness

Nine times out of ten, I prefer folk art to Fine Art.

otm so much

yeah me too

can we talk abt decoupage next?

Ugh, I could never take decoupage seriously, what with all of these obnoxious decoupage fans commenting on decoupage websites and dressing up like decoupage to go to their decoupage conventions. This has nothing to do with anxiety induced by a perceived threat to the rickety scaffolding of my precisely-curated Cool Guy identity. Because I can assure you that it will take more than the mere acknowledgement and passive acceptance of that which lies outside of my Sphere of Snobbery to send my sense of self collapsing into the void. I assure you.

I was about to get all huffy bc I did some decoupage in high school, lol

we could make this the clusterfuck of the century

we could make this the clusterfuck of the century

what, are we inviting chaki back to the board for this thread?

I WAS JOKING

too late it's already happening

oh great. thanks vegemitegrrl. :/

fffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

anyway you helped Mordy so don't blame this all on me. YOU'RE ALL PART OF THIS.

http://www.drunktiki.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/release-the-kraken.jpg

hahah

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wdUUzdxMlqk/TT-MtXmq7PI/AAAAAAAAAQg/YMH5WkIpYpU/s1600/tumblr_l65hrhz5NP1qzdgx0o1_500.jpg

I can't decide which kraken is cuter

I'll take them both

Huh, I was confusing "decoupage" with "decolletage."

irl lols

dying over here

xp - the latter is relevant to some people's appreciation of Mad Men. The former is a derail.

It would make for the first derail in this thread, afaict.........

Huh, I was confusing "decoupage" with "decolletage."

VegGrrl has used both words in the last two days! No joke: Yesterday I saw her post about "decolletage" on the Mad Men thread and asked my wife what it meant. When I found out, I said, "Huh. Why did I think it had to do with interior decoration?" Then, this afternoon, I saw her post upthread and was like "Oh, that's why!"

I like french words starting with "de" I guess

or boobs + collage

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admit it, you're excited

jeepers i love all these shows. impossible choice!!!

Can't believe it's taken someone this long to admit it.

thinking omar little should vote for the show that gave him his dn

yeah i loved little omar van zandt on the sopranos

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

good results

I think I'm the only person on the planet that couldn't get into The Wire.

like...The Wire is exactly twice as good as Breaking Bad, 2.4 times as good as The Sopranos and 6 times better than Mad Men? yeah, that sounds right.

does The Wire improve significantly after season 1?

It gets better but if you don't dig season 1 I don't think it's for you. Kinda weird results, i guess the Sopranos' stock has fallen as The Wire's has risen. It certainly doesn't deserve to be behind Breaking Bad, much as i love that show

the wire is the best of the lot. but breaking bad is not better than the sopranos, end of story.

100 votes exactly. Nice.

when come back bring pie chart

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/breaking-bad-legacy-does-stand-639177

I believe that The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad are all first-ballot hall of fame entrants. And all four are in my top five.

Jaymc's film-critic friend, who is also a TV critic, tweeted after Breaking Bad ended, "Beautiful. Only two shows in the conversation for Best Drama ever. One ended tonight. (The other ended a bit more controversially.)"

Let's let this one marinate a bit.

I guess your friend really was let down by the ending of Lost, huh

xp The other is Baretta.

It's interesting how there's so much canonical conversation about TV shows at the same time that talking about novels or films that way has mostly gone away.

Smaller dataset worth considering that movies or novels.

Novels and films have been around too long to be grist for generational self-congratulation.