I love TV more than anything. I love movies, too, but there’s something about a serialized medium that just hits the sweet spot to feed my insatiable appetite for a good story. TV sitcoms and teen dramas get to be funny in ways that comedy movies never dare to venture toward; their commitment to fun is just as important as their commitment to being our most important cultural forum. My commitment to TV makes it especially painful to hear people dismiss it as “the stupid version of movies,” almost as painful as hearing film bros go on about “prestige television” as an exception to the rest of the art form’s alleged vapidity.
TV has always been a culturally devalued art form. This, in part, is a sentiment carried over from the inception of TV. When it was a newborn getting its first glimpse of the world, TV remained in the home where women had control over what was being watched. TV was for women and film was for men — the misogynistic undertones were blatant. It needed to be fun for the whole family, an activity to gather all the neighbors for a night of bonding and spew as many ads as possible to keep it going between episodes. Old sitcoms like “Leave it to Beaver” and “The Honeymooners” played into this static approach to storytelling with formulaic plot lines and cookie-cutter representations of nuclear families. Refusing to take risks on more compellingly relatable plot lines for anyone outside the conventional family unit, TV gained the reputation of being homebound, consumerist, brain-rotting garbage.
But, even among these flat storylines and decidedly flatter techniques, there was (and still is) great value to shows made during this prehistoric era of television. It’s worth looking back on to analyze the ideology of the time; what does the housewife character in every ’50s sitcom tell us about women’s roles at the time? How do their portrayals of the family unit compare with the reality of families watching at home? Why the hell did people think this was funny back then? These are all questions that we can and should ask about the old brain-rotting garbage on the “idiot box,” which honestly isn’t even that fun to watch.
But TV is so fucking fun to watch now. Thank God for the TV revolution, right?
Like I said, I love movies, and I’m grateful for the impact they’ve had on television. It was only through the incorporation of cinematic techniques that television was able to become more sophisticated in its approach to storytelling. TV became more individualized with cable channels aimed at different audiences rather than a holistic family-audience model. By the ’90s, we had MTV for the angsty teens, Nickelodeon for the bratty kids and, of course, the megastar that is HBO, for the refined, older audiences. TV ceased to only mirror one small part of the world and began to narrowcast with more style, more drama, more emotion and more nuance through the rise of “quality TV.”
Here’s where we get the good stuff, where we get the pretentious film bro goldmine of “The Sopranos.” I like “The Sopranos.” It brought mob stories from exclusively film to television, followed interesting, morally gray leads and challenged its audience to interpret its very carefully laid out themes. In the words of my Film, Television, and Media professor Daniel Herbert, there is pre-Sopranos TV and there is post-Sopranos TV, and I am so grateful to live in a post-Sopranos world. I appreciate the impact the show has had in shaping this art form that I love so much. But I’m not going to sit and listen to some patronizing, sexist speech from film bros about how it’s the be-all and end-all of television as if that’s the only gold nugget among the chump-change that is TV.
My problem with that idea is that it holds “The Sopranos” and its “prestige TV” siblings (i.e. “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” “Succession”) as the brilliant exception to television’s inherent inferiority in comparison to Film (capital F). People who still see TV as a lowbrow alternative to the highbrow medium of Film either don’t see the full picture, or they just don’t want to. The issue isn’t just with praising “prestige TV” above all other genres, it’s conflating “prestige” with “quality TV.” The latter refers to any show with the general characteristics of a post-TV revolution show: a large ensemble cast, cinematographic artistry, narrative complexity. “Prestige TV” is harder to pin down, but I’ve come to understand it as this: any show with quality characteristics that happens to be hyper-gritty and (usually) centering around a morally gray, cisgender, heterosexual, male anti-hero. All prestige shows are quality, but not all quality shows are prestige. So, when “prestige” shows get the praise that quality shows should also be receiving, I have to wonder: Are people not seeing the pattern here, or do they just not want to?
The quality TV revolution turned it into the long-form version of film in nearly every sense, from the narrative complexity to the artistic techniques. So why are we still pretending that one of these art forms is inherently better than the other? TV explores just as many diverse themes as film with just as much flair; sure, not all TV is good, but neither are all movies. It can’t even be called more consumerist than film anymore, either. Ad breaks in TV are no more glaring than movie previews, and blatant product placement takes a front seat in both mediums. Television isn’t just cheap, cookie-cutter, profit-hungry home entertainment anymore, or at least no more than film is. It has risen to the same standard as cinema, and it deserves to be treated that way in every genre, not just the Sopranos type, elitist, film bro-approved stuff.
Arts critic Emily Nussbaum tackles these perceptions in her book, “I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution.” In the first chapter, she talks at length about the critical acclaim “The Sopranos” received in comparison to the critical admonishment of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” as “disposable” in the way that all TV is seen as disposable, no more than a Dixie cup. “Buffy” packed a punch — literally — with its hour-long episodes, cheesy one-liners and dramatic cliffhangers aimed at a teen girl audience. It was popular with that audience and remains just as immortal as “The Sopranos,” so why does “The Sopranos” get to transcend the Dixie cup of television while “Buffy” gets thrown out like yesterday’s trash?
According to Nussbaum, it’s a question of power. “Buffy” embodied the feminine, in-your-face lightheartedness that plagued TV’s perceived mindlessness while “The Sopranos” aligned with the masculine drama so often associated with film. Each of these series’ central characters mirror their intended viewership demographics. “The Sopranos” is a dark, poetic, grandiose series aimed at an adult male audience. “Buffy” is a campy and girlish series aimed at a younger female audience. That’s not to say both these shows can’t be or haven’t been widely beloved by all audience demographics, but the tonal and critically receptive differences can’t be ignored in the context of their target audience. The issue couldn’t be clearer: Shows for teenage girls are dumb no matter how brilliantly they’re crafted, but those made for highbrow film bros are actually worthy of critical analysis.
It’s total bullshit.
TV, and especially fun TV, should not be looked down on just because it’s “lowbrow.” “Prestige TV” is not inherently better than sitcoms or kitschy dramas. “Sex and the City” straddles the fine line separating the two within our cultural context. It has a largely female demographic and handles big issues with a lighthearted reverence, cracking (often not so) tasteful sex jokes whenever it can. But it does so with sophistication and gritty drama as it follows possibly the most morally gray anti-hero imaginable: Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, “Hocus Pocus”). This quality TV show redefined television just as much as “The Sopranos” did with the same noir-inspired freshness, but I don’t see any film bros holding it up as the pinnacle of truly great television. Why’s that? Any guesses? Or do I need a big pink arrow pointing to the history of women controlling the home-bound cable box which helped give TV its lowbrow reputation in the first place?
If proper recognition for “Sex and the City” seems impossible, sitcoms have it even worse. They’re fun and they’re funny, so they’re automatically assumed to exist for hollow laughs with nothing beneath the surface. But comedy has always been the place for some of the rawest media critiques of long-standing systems. Sure, “The Office” pokes fun at its kooky characters, but it highlights the simple joys of an average nine-to-five employee that make life worth living. Yeah, “Arrested Development” turns the entire Bluth family into a laughingstock, but it also deeply criticizes the U.S. government and its involvement in the Iraq War. Of course, “Parks and Recreation” spends most of its runtime hyperbolizing civil government, but it does that to spotlight the importance of that grueling job.
Sitcoms similar to “Parks and Rec” deserve just as much critical engagement as dramas like “The Sopranos.” You should be critically engaging with every show and movie that you watch, even the wacky ones. It’s not all three-hour ruminations staring at an open field or dark noir films full of guys wearing fedoras and smoking cigars. Those have their value — yes, film bros, I know that — but, so do the laugh-until-you-cry sitcoms and the kick-some-vampire-ass teen dramas.
I love “The Sopranos” and “Succession,” but I love “Parks and Recreation” and “Sex and the City” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” a whole lot more. And while I talk shit about it, but I’ll probably be pressing play on the next season of “Selling Sunset” when it drops. It’s a guilty pleasure that I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about. It’s OK to prefer film to TV or vice versa, but neither of these mediums is inherently better than the other. Film’s superiority complex is no longer warranted, and it’s fucking insulting to have it linger this long. To belittle the entire art form of TV, to subjugate it into being film’s ugly stepsister, is to scoff at an entire world of uniquely rich visual storytelling.
I refuse to be ashamed or made to feel small for this love of TV by critics who turn their noses up at it as something inferior to film. I’m not highbrow, and I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be some elitist, pretentious critic who only gives the time of day to media that checks all the boxes for an arbitrary assignment of value. There are no Dixie cups, and it’s about time people realized that.
Senior Arts Editor Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.