STIMULATE ME!

I’ve been living in New York City for almost a year now and one of the things that I love every single day is how the city challenges you. With the noise from the street, constant interaction with people of all walks of life, navigating the subways, to mention a few, you can’t help but be stimulated. So, like too many things, this made me think about my television viewing over the last few years. I quickly realized that so much of what is on television isn’t stimulating me like I wish it would. By stimulating I mean, basically, making me think. Feel challenged. Stimulated.

Sure, there’s a lot of guilty pleasure viewing out there. I got caught up in the American Idol craze one season and got what all the fuss was about but, even with the phone and text voting, the show was only a guilty pleasure that I was watching. I regularly keep up with Grey’s Anatomy but never really feel the need to rehash the dramatic twists and turns of the young doctors on the show probably because at the end of the day it’s just a soap set in a hospital. And as much as I enjoy Heroes, I’m usually left with thoughts about what it would be like to be able to listen to the thoughts of others…or fly…all in a red cheerleader outfit…oh, wait…maybe that’s a topic for another blog.

Now, we all know that television, in general, is a passive experience. Our living rooms are situated around where our televisions are and, now that we’re watching more and more programming on the internet, we’re sitting at our desks or tables catching the reruns we forgot to Tivo or watch altogether. But, c’mon, when you think back to your favorite shows or storylines of shows, aren’t they often of moments that really challenged your viewing by taking you out of your own expectations as well as just making you think?? For example, like so many (as evident by the ratings dip this past season), LOST was challenging this past season but mostly because we weren’t seeking answers but seeking a reason to care at all. I hung in there until the end of the season in hopes that something would spark my desire to follow the show into the next season this fall. Well, the stories picked up in the last few episodes and, instead of concentrating on flashbacks, we moved into the future after (at least) Jack and Kate were living off the island. Suddenly, I felt that wonderful drive. That desire to know what was going to happen next. My mind was racing, along with my heart, and now the show has a new purpose as well as my viewing commitment for another season. All because it stepped outside of the predictability that inevitably happens with any series trying to stay on the air.

The writers and producers of most shows feel they know what makes the shows tick (and it’s not seeing Teri Hatcher suffer a physical pratfall in every episode of a certain show that I gave up after the first season) and they are then afraid to stray from it. Television history is filled with shows that strayed from the tried-and-true formula (Moonlighting comes to mind) and never recovered. There’s a fine line here that is tough to describe. How does a show like ER remain one of the most watched shows after more than a dozen seasons when Arrested Development struggled for 3 seasons before getting the axe?

The much-discussed finale of HBO’s The Sopranos, regardless of how you felt about the finale, it definitely stimulated by forcing viewers into an active role with it’s ambiguous finale. While the tension leading up to the finale left just about every viewer with a feeling that things were left hanging (or did it?), it did accomplish something that few shows have in a long time – it got everyone talking. What everyone seems to forget is that The Sopranos finale kept in step with the entire series, which never pandered to a clear Point A-to-Point B structure. For example, the last exchange between Melfi and Tony in the penultimate episode was not a lovefest of thanks for all the years of therapy but a tense, verbal sparing match with Melfi “firing” Tony as a patient. The lack of resolution was one of the bravest things Chase could’ve done and clearly personified something more along real life, where things often don’t end neatly but end with a greater feeling of mess than before. I remember watching one of the finales from the earlier seasons and with so many storylines at a boiling point, the final moments was a holiday gathering with everyone in attendance and, with all stories put on pause, the camera simply pulled back on this scene of…family. I contend that The Sopranos wasn’t so popular because of the window into a mobster’s life but, more so, because it was an intelligent show that challenged the viewer instead of being a self-contained serialized Godfather version of Grey’s Anatomy or CSI. It didn’t pander to the audience but, instead, made them have to sit up and pay attention and, ya know what? Audiences ate it up.

Now, I’m not saying that entertainment for pure entertainment is wrong. But I don’t think I’m alone in wanting just a little bit more. With so many options out there on television, there has to be something special to keep the short-attention-span viewer engaged. When something like Planet Earth comes along, it reminds me of how a well-filmed documentary can become more interesting than the latest installment of The Real World.

Finally, with all my touting about wanting to be stimulated, I’m not pinning RIGHT or WRONG on anything. I’m just as guilty of having my own Tivo Season passes for shows that are pure pleasure. I don’t miss Kathy Griffin:My Life on the D-List or Ugly Betty. But even those shows do something that is a tough task where I’m concerned—they make me laugh, which is its own brand of stimulation.

So, feel free to write me at Progressive Pulse and tell me the shows that stimulate you for whatever reason. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next month….

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under PROGRESSIVE TELEVISION by Jim Halterman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.