The End of Genre in Television

THE END OF GENRE IN TELEVISION / Mark Crispin Miller THE SPECTACLE OF TELEVISION TODAY is, more than ever, always advertising its own extreme and vivid urban realism. TV would have us see it as a window, not merely on "the world," but on the world's tawdriest precincts, its nastiest relationships, its most unwholesome practices. Like the news, which proffers us repeated glimpses of only the most violent events, prime time purports to show us only the darkest regions of American society—which is, TV implies, all one dark region. This, we are promised night after night, is life viewed strictly for adults—the life of whores and pimps, hit-men and street gangs, drug-dealers, psychotic killers, crooked lawyers, incompetent police captains and, in the midst of all this crime and chaos, a few good cops. Here is a world of fronts—of police informers, of well-built female detectives going undercover as strippers or street-walkers, of well-tailored businessmen secretly conducting criminal enterprises, and so on. Here no-one can be trusted, nor is there any place immune to what is seen as the city's influence; for whenever the good cops go into a high school or suburban mansion or small town, the familiar evil of the world, it is revealed, has long since spread also into that apparent haven. Everybody everywhere, in one way or another, has already succumbed to the allure of money, violence, sex and/or—particularly— drugs, i.e., cocaine, that notorious elixir of "the streets," now working its cold magic even in the farmlands, even on the playgrounds. Clearly, this is no place for the innocent or idealistic. Indeed, in prime time's cop shows and "serious" telefilms, ideals and innocence are represented only as liabilities, or as the tragically appealing evidence of a doomed immaturity: the runaway at once becomes a whore and junkie, the too-loving wife discovers that her husband is a homicidal lunatic, the good cop, thwarted by "the system," flies into an indignant rage while his/her partner looks on soberly—and then the two of them go back to work. Anyone who clings to some too-fond or over-hopeful notions ends up either hardened or in very big trouble; and the viewer is included in this repetitious process of enlightenment, as the witness who already knows the score. "You've been around," TV assures its audience, thereby appealing to an easy spectatorial cynicism as if it were a form of worldliness. 138 · THE MISSOURI REVIEW TV's very naturalism, however, is an oblique celebration of TV. Despite TV's formulaic anti-urbanism, the sleazy revelations of New York/L.A./Miami, what makes the TV world so hard and cold is the influence not of the city, but of TV itself, whose many knowing viewers are reflected in its many knowing characters: in the high school and the suburbs, in the mansions and small towns, as well as in the slums and condominiums, all watch and recognize, deplore and yet are fascinated by the same grim "realities" of violence, sex and drugs. And it is TV, not the city, whose values are reflected in the viciousness that TV obsessively dramatizes. The sleek and sullen whores, the crooked cops, the heartless executives and casual assassins, all using one another, "wasting" one another, selling one another out, are the mere inventory of a market world where everyone's for sale—the same world that the advertisers want for us, and which they also image forth in the commercials. Even if there are still some ads that strive for pastoral or sentimental effects, most now project the same post-modernistic chill that also defines the style of the cop shows; and all the ads, whatever tone they may affect, promote, just like the shows, a world-view that reduces all of life to a violent sequence of commodities, either human or inanimate. And this endless show of one thing overshadowed or supplanted by another, of one man/woman "blown away" by some other, repeats symbolically the real and endless superannuation of the global work-force that produces all these commodities and images. In reality too, everyone's...