Two new TV shows will run on Wednesday nights this fall.  Back to You airs on Fox at 8:00. It stars Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton.  Life airs at 10 on NBC and stars the lesser known Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi. 

Life has life.  It is a cop show procedural with a difference.  Many differences.  Actually, it renovates the genre almost completely.  Life does to cop show what House did to the medical drama, breaks most of the rules to good effect.  There is a putative reason why Life is genre busting, it’s that the principal character has been rendered more or less insane by 12 years of false and very dangerous incarceration, a cop imprisoned with criminals.  The less obvious reason is that writers and producers have taken up the new freedoms that cable brought to the networks, and mainstream culture. 

Back to You doesn’t…have life, that is.   This is comedy as if ripped from the pages of the genre handbook.  Not even actors as talented as Grammer and Heaton can get it airborn.  It’s like watching a game of ping pong under water.  You can see the jokes coming  long way off.  Vaudeville comedy in an era of improv. 

The good thing is we like Grammer and Heaton.  We care about the show because we liked these actors in Cheers, Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond.   And this affection will force us to watch as the show slowly loses altitude.  The first program got over 9 million viewers.  We will watch this number erode steadily.

The secret of TV in our new culture is that it must skillfully defy expectation.  It must work with what we know and take us somewhere we haven’t been before.  Life does this nicely.  Not least because Lewis is a great actor, and the latest proof that in the our new culture, talent counts more than good looks.  (And if this isn’t a measure of how much our culture has changed, I don’t know what is.)

Below, is my "TV table."  (Or you may think of it as one of those fiberglass trays that held TV dinners while Americans watched TV in the 1950s.)  Left to right, the dimension is whether we care about the characters in a new show.  Top to bottom, the dimension is whether we can tell what is going to happen in any given episode to any given character.  Back to You falls in quadrant 1 because we do care about the characters and we can tell exactly what is going to happen to them.   And so on.  (I would offer more exposition, but I really have to get going.  Plus, I respect my reader’s ability to work it our for themselves.  Blogging is part of the new culture too.)

Here’s what I found at the train station in my little town in Connecticut today.  It’s an ad for the Donald Trump line of clothing at Macy’s which has been, um, reworked by a passer by. 

Actually, I think what we are looking at is an almost surgical intervention.  The passer by has ever so carefully torn away the face of D. Trump on this advertisement, and on the surface beneath the original, they have drawn this effective Dorian Gray rendering of M. Trump. 

Sure we can say that this is a rough rendering but I couldn’t help feeling that I had never seen the man so truly portrayed.  The man himself, the man in full, the man unmasked that we might see him porcine in every nook and cranny

Here’s a closer look.  We have seen ad interventions of this kind for some time.  I believe Adbusters was advocating something like this, and kids were responding with enthusiasm.  In Toronto in the 1990s, it was customary to pass jumbo, Jeff Wall sized ads that had been reworked with speech bubbles.  Razer thin models would have bubbles that read, "Feed me."  Happy parents were made to say, "Don’t make me buy anything more.  Please."

Amateur stuff, really, and certain proof that brand hijack so completely misunderstood the powers of the "enemy," that finally there could be no contest.  The bus shelter told the story: Capitalism 1.  Adbusters 0. 

But this work takes it to the enemy with skill and viserality, if that’s a word, and my spell checker tells me it is not.  You know what I mean.  What we are looking at here is an amazingly successful intervention, one that truly does hijack the ad and uses it most ferociously against the man. 

Everything depends upon the skill of the intervention.  badly done, it’s a prank.  Done this well, it gives one’s pause, and M. Trump hooves.

We can imagine what Trump did to deserve this re-celebration.  He has been annoying people since the 1980s and his days as a short fingered vulgarian in Spy Magazine.  But I wonder if this is not the punishment that awaits the bully who dares speak ill of Rosie O’Donnell.  Rosie has her fans.  Her fans have their weapons.  The war is on.   

Entertainment Weekly was not kind to the new TV show from FOX called K-ville but I thought I would have a look.  After all, not even EW can be right all the time.

I arrived a little late.  I was upstairs hammered away on my book proposal.  I declare, never has a document been more completely or frequently renovated. 

Actually, I was about 12 minutes late getting to the TV.  K-ville had left without me.  And low and behold, I loved it.  Well, lest EW takes me off the subscriber list, I liked it.  Anthony Anderson, Cole Houser, and John Carroll Lynch have all found a property they can make their own.  (Anderson gets better with every role, but this may have been Lynch’s last chance.)

Tuesday, the next day, I tuned in for the opening 12 minutes of the "encore performance."  Just to see how they had got things started.  Oh, bad idea.  I began to like the show less.  The problem is, of course, setup.  It’s not that those opening minutes are bad.  It’s just that they seemed to remove the K-ville from K-ville, the wonderful indeterminacy that certain cities seem to have, as if the city were proceeding on many registers all at once. 

This is the problem with introductions.  They are the enemy of indeterminacy.  And this is why every film and most novels are better when we arrive late.  We are spared that laborious exposition.  And this leaves us something to make up, to guess after most of all, to work with.  And we like having something to work with.

Call it semiotic roughage.  When we arrive late to a program, there is grist for the mill.

Call it cocreation.  When we miss the exposition, we are obliged to make the rest up.  Obliged?  Thanks to the work of Henry Jenkins, we know that that’s much of the point of contemporary culture.  We are eager to make the rest up. 

But I’m not sure this is the whole of it.  I just like not knowing stuff. I like it when the "back story" is missing, when certain (especially heroic) motives are left out.  It makes the plot airier somehow…and more K-ville.   

Certainly, it’s more realistic.  As Pam is sometimes obliged to point out, there are a great many things I do not know, whole portions of the world that are opaque to me.  I am happy when what is true of my world is true of my television.  I am not confused or resentful.  I most certainly do not what producers to scream at writers, "Keep It Simple, Stupid."  I do not want is a plot that has been tidied up and made accessible.  In all things but one’s desk top, messy is good. 

I am sure that the world distributes on this point as it does on others.  Not all of us wish to be spared the exposition.  And not all of us want to to be spared exposition to the same degree.  Some want a little, others want a lot.  There is a nice mechanical here for the asking.  We could each of us decide to turn on new programs at the moment that works for us.  For some this would be minute 2.  For other, minute 6.  For still others, and in this case, the moment was minute 12.  We are effectively editing out stuff we don’t need. 

This is not so much cocreation, as it is "coediting."  And there are several possibilities.  We could come late.  This often happens at the movies in any case.  We could exercise selective inattention, zoning out at regular or irregular intervals in the course of the show.  This too happens a great deal, especially now that we are multiprocessing so much of the time.  (I only really pay attention during the car chases.)  And finally we could leave early and make up a conclusion of our own. 

Right.  Done.  Now where were you?

I had a long conversation with Sam Ford, a friend and colleague at C3 at MIT yesterday.  We were talking about what makes websites attractive, compelling, and engaging. 

Inevitably we were talking about bad practice, companies that treat their websites as afterthoughts or, as Sam put it, as mere "guided tours for the brand."

I was struck by what happened to my half of the conversation.  I began to roll out the scorn.  When talking about bad website design, I would relish how really bad it was.  I would hold the brand up for "how stupid can someone be" excoriation. 

Now, the linguists can tell us what is happening here.  This kind of talk has a meta-pragmatic function.  It builds solidarity between the speakers.  (The mechanics: scorn presumes that we both understand a topic is risible.  This presumption claims a commonality.  This commonality builds a solidarity.  Or something likes this, more or less, give or take.)

Solidarity is a good thing especially with one’s colleagues, but in this case it didn’t sit right.  In fact, I found myself recoiling from scorn even as I manufactured it. 

The problem is that this scorn must, I think, interfere with the dispassion with which we are, I believe, obliged to talk about contemporary commerce and culture.  It really gets in the way.  At the very least, we have confused the issue.  More specifically, we are using our talk to build solidarity when we ought to be using it to think about the world.   

But set the solidarity issue aside.  If we go into the mechanics of the meta-pragmatics of scorn, we see a deeper problem.  Scorn depends upon a presupposition, and this presupposition has the effect of making us assume the very things we are supposed to be surfacing for study.  More exactly, when we are congratulating one another for "getting" why a website is risible, we are assuming, not demonstrating, why it’s risible.  Worse, we have submerged the very problem solving that is supposed to happen not sub rosa but "under glass."

Much of this discourse of the postmodernist camp is presuppositional in just this way.  In moving from the Harvard Business School to McGill, differences in discourse became extra clear.  At HBS it had been considered perfectly ok to ask for clarification.  Routinely, faculty meetings would stop while the speaker repeated himself.  And sometimes the listener would actually vocalize his or her understanding of the point at issue, to show/see if they had got it right.  There was no shame in these requests. Very smart people were expected  to interrupt other very smart people, when they did not understand.

But in the cultural studies world at McGill, questions of this kind seemed to happen.  No one ever asked for terms to be defined or arguments to be clarified.  There was a prevailing feeling that "we all get this" and that a request for clarification was therefore unnecessary, even gauche, perhaps even a declaration of intellectual deficiency. 

What made this difference odd is the fact that at HBS, people speak in a plain style (a remainder of the Protestant roots of the institution, perhaps).  In fact, several meetings would go by before I heard anyone use a metaphor!  That’s how plain speech was.  (This is an interesting conundrum for Deidre McCloskey who insists that economics is rhetoric before its economics.)  At McGill people spoke in the abstract language of a high altitude postmodernism, complete with rhetorical stunt flying that never seemed to inscribe anything legible in the heavens above.  Even if McGill students wanted to, it’s hard to know how they would ask for clarification.  I mean, where would you start?  (This reminds me of a wonderful moment in which Ernest Becker having listened to a long, convoluted comment, paused for a Vaudevillian beat, and said, "Huh?") 

But there I go getting all scornful again.  And that’s wrong.  I think it’s fair to say I am not harboring a 19th century scientist’s regard for objectivity.  On the qualitative side of things, we want to be subjective, we want to use every bit of our "selfhood" to solve problems.  And I believe I am not attacking scorn as a rhetoric device.  Christopher Hitchins’ new book, God is Not Great shows us what it can accomplish in the right hands.

It’s this presuppositional thing that gets me.  Scorn submerges what we are supposed to expose to view.  But this is the very moment in which many intellectual bets are off.  Capitalism is changing at light speed. Commerce is changing, it seems, every quarter.   And of course our culture is now something like a blur.  This is not the moment to be congratulating ourselves on the things we "get," the things we "share," the things that are "obvious" and "ludicrous."  This is perhaps a time we want to be a little less Mr. Smarty pants, and a little more Martian.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Barb Henry on Flickr for the image of the Siamese kitten.  Why did I use it?  No idea.