Little Boxes: 12 Writers on Television ed. by Caroline Casey (review)

What Little Boxes: 12 Writers on Television, edited by Caroline Casey, does so well is to explore all the ways the television shows we grow up watching shape our identities and our view of the world around us. Sometimes the shows do a good job, often they do not, but the ways they influence and mold young watchers—both by what they include and what they leave out—is undeniable.

Some of the essays in this collection approach the subject with the critical eyes of the educated adult, and some recollect what it was like to watch as a kid, before the concept of "bad TV" was learned. A few straddle the line between nostalgia and intellectual criticism, and these are the essays I enjoyed most.

The first essay, "Naïve Melody" by Elena Passarello, perfectly captures the disorientation and distortion of memory that comes from change, not of the show, but of the watcher. Passarello discusses the ways music adds meaning to episodes of Northern Exposure, and how that meaning changed when the DVD boxset came out with different music, and "it felt like a character had been deleted out." Her changing perception of the show mirrors perfectly the shift from child to adult, innocence to experience, as everything "shifted just enough to place an uncanny tension in the back of my mind."

Edan Lepucki's experience watching Twin Peaks as a child and struggling with the adult themes is masterfully used to explore her confusion over her parents' divorce, and moving from innocence to experience is a relief rather than a loss. It takes time and an "adult gaze" to deal with the divorce and the show.

The way TV can influence personal identity and worldview can be both positive and positively alarming. Rumaan Alam's essay about "very special episodes" reminds us that "the more you know," the more "our fellow Americans are not to be trusted." Shows and after-school specials with clear cut morals—designed to teach kids to be savvy—were just as likely to introduce kids to what they were warning against (drinking, drunk driving, molestation and rape, etc). "My childhood, utterly boring, utterly without incident, had car crashes and lurking predators, deaths by fire and brushes with addiction."

Several other authors showed ways TV shows failed to provide guidance, often through omission and lack of diversity. Nina McConigley (Punky Brewster) and Danielle Evans (Daria) lament the lack of main characters of color, and reflect on how growing up with sidekicks as role models affected their identities and self-esteem. T Clutch Fleischmann (Emmanuelle) recounts the evolution of their sexuality in response and contrast to "a fractured identification" with early 90s erotica.

Several writers wrestle with one question: does TV create or distract from genuine human connection? No writer creates such effortless clarity as Jenny Hendrix, who grew up in a home with mixed signals about the "mediated version of experience" that television provides. Hendrix's essay about the function of television as a "code for interpreting the actual stuff of life" and way to "identify us as part of a certain…group" is the high point of the whole book. Alternately personal and removed, intellectual and nostalgic, Hendrix gives the impression that this question has been at the center of much of her life experience.

Hendrix is able to perfectly sum up the binge-watching feeling of being "bored and entertained at once" and the notion of "masking for a while that dread of meaninglessness which was man's fate'" which Joan Didion first expressed. The individual watching Game of Thrones knows that "the impressions we form divide us," and yet "communion" is within our reach because the shared experience of Dwight Macdonald's "'impersonal, abstract, crystalizing factor'" can provide "easy connections to those with whom you might have nothing else in common."

The valuation of watching as a communal act over an individual one is also emphasized by Ryan Van Meter, who watched Days of Our Lives with his mother...