My friend Ryan Shinkel edits a fine online culture magazine, Athwart, & he recently published a very fine essay by Joseph Joyce on TV’s decline, especially comedy, but the form more broadly, as its become mere content for digital technology. Joyce laments the collapse of a form of art, of the craft involved, & the situation we’re in, where there’s little beauty left to praise at a time when everyone seems to be constantly staring at images on their screens. But he does so as an insider & he does a good job of explaining the terms of art in directing; the effect is, if you’re new to it, you will think more carefully about sitcoms & TV in general, movies, too, & perhaps appreciate more the artistry—but if you’re not new to it, you get a different perspective, you can connect the craft to the technological changes & glimpse social changes, changes of taste, by noticing the differences when it comes to popularity & prestige over the last generation. I should add, he also writes with some knowledge of McLuhan’s theory of media & Neil Postman, a welcome sign of seriousness for us PoMoCons!
Decline of TV makes for very pleasant weekend reading—I’ll leave you to it with some inducements from the two parts, first talking about the hit sit-com Frasier:
Frasier is another one of my favorite shows, personally discovered only long after it ceased airing. Streaming, for all its faults, was a godsend to recovering, long-neglected sitcoms. Frasier, a tonal & aesthetical throwback, was considered so even thirty years ago. Arguably better than any sitcom of its era, or ours as well, the show understood that the multi-camera setup was intrinsically theatrical & viewed everything through that prism.
So many other multi-camera sitcoms were embarrassed by their restraints. Seinfeld, in particular, had a tendency to add in single-camera footage, with their dipped toe becoming the industry’s full submergence of the 2000s. To inject more realism into the show, Jerry Seinfeld & Larry David would instead break the fragile suspension of disbelief most sitcoms rely on. One soon starts to wonder why we never see the far wall of Jerry’s apartment. Frasier, on the other hand, embraced the format’s theatrical roots. Because the show fosters in us the instinctive dismissal of the stage, the audience never wonders where Frasier Crane’s far wall is. We are the fourth wall. It avoided the uncanny valley by deliberately flaunting its unreality, then & now.
Frasier is the master of farce. Many episodes consist of characters slamming bedroom doors or mistaking one another for being gay. Being stuck in a single location, as the cornerstone to all farces, is used to hysterical effect. Characters rush in & off “stage,” with the locations turning into one giant frame. Major plot points & even entire characters exist offscreen, without the threat of a camera cutting to them & diminishing the joke. Much as the Hays code, for all its faults, forced writers & directors to become more clever with their filmmaking, the multi-camera setup’s structural limits led to some inspired creativity within those three-to-four shots.
Joyce is a sensitive writer on the comedies that delighted his generation of Americans, but he’s also thoughtful when it comes to the overall problem, that nothing’s memorable anymore. This is from part two:
Imagine television as the victim of some deadly insidious plague. Thus far my diagnosis has covered the external ailments of decline, most notably manifested in the degeneration of scene direction. But what of television’s internal symptoms, namely in writing & production? Whilst a visual medium, the bones of television’s success come from its scripts along with how page & film are put together in tandem. The skin is beautiful, but without structure it amounts to a squishy rug. Since an effective cure assumes a sufficient diagnosis, it is time to snap on a latex glove & dig a tad deeper.
As television series grew ever more prestigious, their distinctions became ever more blurred, both from movies & among themselves. Right after Game of Thrones (2011–2019) showed its white walkers besiege Winterfell on the same April weekend when Avengers: Endgame (2019) premiered, one critic dubbed it “the decisive defeat of cinema by content.” His description was incomplete: Content had overthrown television as well. As the result of creative effects from business decisions, beneficial as well as malignant, this winter had been long coming.
Joyce is also a film critic for Angelus—I especially recommend his introduction to the witty French director Eric Rohmer—& he deserves a much wider audience.
I’ve been hoping someone would write on this topic!
Titus . . I'm blown away. I just got to your very fine, very engaging review of Joyce's "The Decline of TV." My husband Keith and I . . are watching Frasier even as I type. (Keith is switching back and forth to the Utah/USC game. :) We've always enjoyed Frasier. We are very mach in agreement with this essays theme. Very sad and troubling.