Art Is Not A Camel: The Perils of Creation By Committee

I've posted before about my man-love for Aaron Sorkin, the author of some of the best film and television work in the past 15 years. I was recently at a party talking about his recent show, Studio 60, when a fellow student seemed surprised that I liked the show. "It gets such bad ratings." I simply shot back "That just means a lot of people don't watch it, not that it isn't good." It seems so simple, but people forget it--television ratings and box office receipts are poor prisms by which to judge the quality of film and television art. I've never understood this metric, and Sorkin seems to agree. In an interview he gave to Charlie Rose in 2003, after quitting his show "The West Wing", he noted that the ratings of shows and box office figures of movies are regularly printed in the arts sections of newspapers. This is a oddity, because the ratings of a show are not really the purview of the arts section, which should be telling readers what the show is about and offering a commentary on the writing, direction, and story. The ratings, while supremely important to the multi-billion dollar companies that air the shows, are of no logical consequence to viewers. In fact, Sorkin asks if it is even more insidious that than--mentioning the ratings is in fact a corrosive factor. The implication of praising a show for having high ratings is that a program should be watched because other people watch it, and that you should avoid programs that nobody else is tuning in to see. This acts a powerful and dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy, as positive press coverage for a ratings success fosters more of it, and lambasting a show for its low ratings is the rough equivalent of beheading a prisoner already on his knees. I understand that there is fun to be had in a show being part of a larger public consciousness, but as a journalistic practice for newspapers it encourages a bizarre herd-mentality. The quality of a show, its story telling and acting, are not diminished by low ratings. And even more frightening, an obsessive tracking of it in the press discourages the networks who pay to produce these shows from creating bold and original programming. They instead spiral into efforts to endlessly replicate previous hit shows, in so doing homogenizing all television, and greatness rarely springs from monotony.

Today, I saw the movie "The TV Set", a savage and wicked satire of network television by Jake Kasdan, one of the writers of NBC's critically acclaimed but criminally unpopular "Freaks and Geeks." I think everyone who watches, and often laments, American television should see this film if only to see how the ceaseless quest for ratings leads to a paralyzing fear of interesting and thoughtful art. Sigourney Weaver plays the ass-kicking network president who says things "Originality scares me, you don't want to be too original" and "We've done the research, and suicide is depressing to, like, 82% of everybody." Her mindset is sadly typical in the landscape of television. The film is also brilliant in its depiction of how good drama or comedy has its edges blunted and its wit dulled by a series of small compromises instead of tectonic shifts--all in an effort make the final product a little more palatable to the under-35 demo, a little more appealing to suburban women in Missouri. If you make enough changes to please enough people, the resulting watered down soup pleases nobody--the ultimate moral of this film. David Duchovny plays the writer of a pilot being produced--a black comedy about the return of the prodigal son to his hometown after his brother's suicide. A desire to finally see his show made coupled with financial pressures lead Duchovny to acquiesce to his project's death by a thousand cuts. The final product is a barely recognizable whithered husk of its former self. This movie should be seen by as many people as possible as a look at how bad television is extracted from good television, and as an inspiration against the forces of compromise, mediocrity, and resignation. It is a good movie, regardless of its box office numbers.

(I suggest you watch the Sorkin interview on google video, you can find it by searching "aaron sorkin charlie rose" and click the link for Sorkin and Anthony Zuiker)