Does anyone know when it rose to such prominence?
Does anyone know why this phrase (and not some other) is so popular at the moment?
I did a very quick search and came up with this:
Jonathan Quayle Higgins from the TV show “Magnum P.I.” apparently said it a lot.
It also featured in the movie Clueless.
Any other thoughts?
I just presented some of my work in Washington. I can’t talk about this and it’s just killing me. This anthropologist has never presented in circumstances so exalted. I hope I will some day be free to give you the details. Stay tuned
The work for Netflix continues. And it’s absorbing. And really interesting. On Thursday I’m going to Austin for the ATX conference. I’ll be hosting a panel. Please drop by and day “hi.”
I am also working on the Culture Camp for London. That’s Friday June 13th.
First, a note of apology. For reasons that are now lost in the mists of time, I chose to describe the camp as something designed for “cultural creatives” and to some English readers this suggested that this course was designed for creatives who make advertising.
My mistake. This course is for students of culture, planners, strategists, innovators and ethnographers. And yes, in the second half we will talk about how we can use your knowledge of culture to make culture.
The First Half: Mapping Culture
The first half of the Camp will review of the big trends reshaping our lives, markets, and culture. We will look at the transformation of house, home, and family, the artisanal revolution in the world of food, what happened to “status” and “cool” as drivers of our culture (specifically, how they got extinguished and what replaces them), the revolution in the way we define women, the rise and role of old media and new.
You know those programs on PBS that shows us the coast line of Scotland from a low flying plane. That’s what the first half is going to be like, American and Western culture as if from a Piper Cub aircraft traveling at 12,000 feet. The whole thing (more or less) laid out before you. We will talk about how you can build your own “radar” to track changes in this culture.
The Second Half: Making Culture
The second half of the Camp is going to be really hands on. It is one thing to know about our culture. It’s another to begin making culture, in the form of design, advertising, innovation, story telling.
As far as I know, there is no handbook that shows what we do when we act as “meaning makers.” And this is a pity, because what the ad person has learned about creating culture in the form of an ad can serve the designer who is creating culture in the form of a brand.
We will talk about cultural arbitrage, and here we will talk about a recent video by Ingrid Michaelson, the comedy by Amy Schumer, the TV of Beau Willimon, the design work of Warby Parker, and the advertising by Carmichael Lynch for Subaru.
We will be talking about the meaning making, the meme making of Old Spice, Pharrell, Volvo, Apple, Oreo, Microsoft and others.
And we will be talking about the new rules of storytelling. TV is effectively become a laboratory for the reinvention of story telling. This gives me a chance to draw on my Netflix work to show how story telling is changing and what the new rules are.
This is a “vista” opportunity, a chance to see the what and the how of culture in a new, more systematic way.
So, please do come join us. Here’s the link.
I’ve been reading about “show runners” lately, and I thought, “hey, why not “brand runners?””
I’m not saying “let’s invent a new position.” I’m saying, let’s ask marketing people to think about themselves in a new way.
So what is a show runner?
Scott Collins of the LA Times offers this definition. He calls showrunners “hypenates:”
a curious hybrid of starry-eyed artists and tough-as-nails operational managers. They’re not just writers; they’re not just producers. They hire and fire writers and crew members, develop story lines, write scripts, cast actors, mind budgets and run interference with studio and network bosses. It’s one of the most unusual and demanding, right-brain/left-brain job descriptions in the entertainment world….[S]how runners make – and often create – the shows, and now more than ever, shows are the only things that matter.
Also, see this illuminating clip from a documentary called Showrunners here.
I think a “brand runner” might look something like this. Managing a brand is a task of fearsome complexity, keeping track of all the traditional brand meanings, auditioning all the new ones, speaking to many segments not just a couple, identifying and tracking all the coming trends (both the blue oceans and the black swans), making the brand bold and clear even as it becomes in places delicate and obscure, reaching out to a variety of meaning-makers and organizing and articulating their work, changing the brand architecture strategically, tuning the brand message in real time. Brand running could a lot like show running.
Most of all, the brand runner metaphor suggests that we would work with the brand in a constant but highly variable process. Lots of big thinking. Lots of fine tuning. “Running a brand” seems somehow closer to the present truth than “managing” it. The metaphor assumes that creativity is the first order of business. Out goes the “business as usual” notion that brand management suggests. Brand running would be less about business and more about creativity, and a constant, collaborative creativity at that.
At the Brand and Brand Relationship conference this week, we ended with a panel discussion lead by Susan Fournier and including Aaron Ahuvia, Eric Arnould, Anders Bengtsson, Markus Giesler, and Jonathan Schroeder and yours truly. It’s wrong of me to speak for them….so I will. I believe you could feel a certain pressure of speech or ideation in the room. There were ideas waxing, threatening to overtake our trusted orthodoxies. Or maybe not. I love that moment when you can feel things “melting into air.” And I think they were.
In any case, (new job description or no) perhaps we could think about the brand as something being constantly pitched, green lit, put into production, crafted as an idea and a reality, with scenes, episodes and seasons, hammered out with producers, writers and actors with whom it is being thought and rethought, as it keeps melting into air and precipitating back into the life of the consumer.
For more metaphoric materials, see the Wikipedia entry for showrunners here.
I did a talk today for Susan Fournier’s Boston University conference called Brands and Brand Relationships.
It was illuminating, forcing me to see things I didn’t know I thought.
I will try to get the slides up for tomorrow. (If anyone knows the most elegant way of getting a Keynote (or Powerpoint) deck onto WordPress, please let me know. Converting them to a YouTube video just feels laborious. Because it is.)
Here’s an ad from Cadillac called Poolside.
I think Poolside is a nice piece of work and I said so here. I particularly like how provocative it is.
And, my goodness, was it provocative. Writing for the Atlantic, Rebecca Rosen recounts several reactions:
Elizabeth Weiss, writing in the New Yorker, said the character seemed “vaguely sociopathic.” In The Washington Post, Brigid Schulte condemned his celebration of a work culture that, she argued, is driving us to be “sick,” “stressed,” and “stupid.” Adam Gopnik, also in the New Yorker, called it, “the single most obnoxious television ad ever made.”
It looks for a moment that Rosen might withhold from this piling on. But no, in the event, she declares Cadillac man a “crass materialist.”
Is it just the anthropologist in me that find these criticisms distressing? No, I think it’s the liberal.
As I was laboring to say yesterday, liberals are obliged to tolerate even people they don’t much like. Shrug with asperity, if they must, but they are obliged to show even disagreeable parties a certain respect. Or at the very least forgo the scorn
“Vaguely sociopathic”?
A work culture that makes us “sick,” “stressed,” and “stupid”?
“The single most obnoxious television ad ever made”?
We may not like Cadillac man. But if we are liberals, this has nothing to do with it. As J.S. Mill points out, the idea is not that we should like other people. This is, he says, entirely unlikely in any case. The idea is that we respect their right to define themselves as they chose to define themselves. We must tolerate even those we find obnoxious.
Otherwise, mark you, you are not a liberal.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Eric Nehrlich for spotting Rosen’s essay.
This is the outcome of a variety of historical and cultural influences. In the present day, the most effective players perhaps are Hollywood and the elementary-school system. These institutions took on entrenched hostility, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia. And, mostly, they prevailed. A task of no small difficulty. An accomplishment of some real significance.
But there is, I think, a flaw in the Hollywood-School approach. And it’s the inclination to treat tolerance as an act of generosity, as something that fills the world with the light of human goodness. This approach is designed to show how deeply satisfying is the act of tolerance and in most cases to make us reach for our hankies. Tolerance…is…just…so…beautiful. (Snuffle, snuffle, honk.) We are not only doing the right thing, we are generously compensated for our good behavior.
But consider this second approach to tolerance:
Dutch tolerance was never “nice”. It was, as Shorto remarks, built not on admiration or even celebrating difference, but precisely on indifference, on letting others live their lives regardless of what one might think of their practices and beliefs, as long as they did not interfere with the business of society and of business itself. It was a shoulder-shrugging tolerance.
(This is Philipp Blom in his Times Literary Supplement (April 30) review of a new book by Russell Shorto called Amsterdam: A history of the world’s most liberal city. Little, Brown)
Shoulder-shrugging tolerance may be the more powerful, durable, dependable form of tolerance. And it is one promoted by J.S.Mill. (Though I’ll be damned if I can find the passage in question.) The idea, Mill says, is not that we are supposed to like the people of whom we are tolerant. The liberal idea is that we are supposed to endure even those we find dubious, difficult or repellent.
Forget the self congratulation. Stow the hankies. We are obliged to be tolerant all the time, and not just when it feels good or makes us look good. Real tolerance is not always “nice.”
Now, this might be merely a point of principle were it not for the eruption of a certain illiberality in American culture. Politics have turned into a shouting match. There are no limits to things we are prepared to call one another. Character assignation is the order of the day. And this comes from people who would insist that they are the very souls of liberal toleration.
I will use one example from my own experience. When even well educated, tender-hearted Canadians discover that my wife is American, they let fly with extended rants that drip with a bitter tongued indignation. It doesn’t seem to matter that my wife and I are standing right there. A small but apparently invisible point of courtesy. But what is also missing, and I mean utterly invisible, is the Millean idea that we are obliged to respect even those we dislike. Do these liberals understand liberalism?
And here’s perhaps the oddest twist. Even Millennials, our best and brightest accomplishment in the liberal ascendancy, can be discovered trashing the opposition…even as they insist that they are liberal to the very core. Apparently, Hollywood and the school system missed the “Dutch” part of the story.
We can guess at what happened here. Hollywood of the old fashioned kind sometimes struggled to tell a story unless it had a swelling orchestra in the background. Big emotions, yes. Shrugging, not so much. So “hanky” liberalism was bound to get on the studio “docket” while Dutch liberalism was not.
The same might be true for elementary school. Hanky liberalism is a great story to tell. It makes the teller look so very noble. The “told,” too. Hanky liberalism carries a rhetorical pay load. It says, “embrace this idea and we’ll adorn you in nobility.”
Shrugging liberalism, that’s a less pretty story. But to the extent that it delivers the more durable form of liberalism, it’s the more urgent one.
Acknowledgements
To Wodek Szemberg with whom I was talking about tolerance just a couple of weeks ago in Toronto.
The photo. showing a magnificently elaborate shrug, is an outtake from the Pharrell Williams’ Happy video here.
selbst fotografiert
Buzzfeed has leaked an internal report from the New York Times.
I was struck by this passage:
“The very first step … should be a deliberate push to abandon our current metaphors of choice — ‘The Wall’ and ‘Church and State’ — which project an enduring need for division. Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence,” the report says. […]
“It’s the old world where the publisher and the editor work together,” senior editor Sam Sifton, who worked on the cooking project, told the report’s authors. “It’s not lions lying down with lambs. It’s a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship.”
I just finished working a project for Netflix and Wired, and I got to see collaboration up close.
Certainly, this project represents a repudiation of the old “church and state” distinction. The “state” called Netflix paid for content that appeared in the “church” called Wired. (And I wrote the “copy.”)
Some people will accept this as the kind of break-through that Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed has been arguing for for some time. Others will decry it as the invasion of capital into journalism. Still others (AdAge’s Michael Sebastian, to be exact) suggested that this story might give us a glimpse of the future in some of the ways that NYT’s Snowfall did.
But there is an anthropological observation to make, and that is none of us (and by “us,” I mean Netflix, Conde Nast and me) appeared to be looking to make this content shill for the sponsor. More to the point, we were not conflating church and state. If anything we were being at least as fastidious as the old order.
None of us was looking to amp up the pitch. No one said, “Grant, can you dial up the emphasis on Netflix, please.” In fact, the only editorial intervention was the removal of the names of shows that I had used to illustrate the power of the new TV, and this was occasioned by the fact that non-Netflix properties did not want to have their shows appear in a piece sponsored by Netflix.
Why were we being so fastidious? I think there is a simple marketing answer here. Any marketing exercise that shills now actually diminishes the power of the communication. Consumers just dial that stuff out.
We have entered a new era in which viewers, consumers take intelligence and imagination as the necessary condition for their attention. Shilling is clumsy and overbearing. It disqualifies itself.
This is what happens when popular culture, driven by commerce, becomes culture plain and simple. It has to stop acting like a shilling exercise, or suffer the consequences…and these are immediately exclusion from readerly interest.
“Oh, it’s only an ad. Next!”
The new rule of marketing says you can’t buy your way into people’s lives. If you make marketing with scant regard for the way this marketing draws on and contributes to culture, you provoke an instantaneous push back from the consumer.
This must qualify as good news. Even as the “grey lady” (aka NYT) wonders whether she can risk the conflation of church and state, the world of marketing is finding that it is obliged to be fastidious. Whew.
Acknowledgements
Thanks Rick Liebling for the head’s up.
Please come have a look at my essay for Netflix in Wired HERE.
“We have a strategy, and we will accelerate that strategy. It calls for strengthening our digital operations to reach 50% of our revenue [from 40% currently], and investing in big data and accelerating the capabilities we have in integration.”
Levy knows much more about the industry and about Publicis than I ever will and I defer to his greater knowledge. But I have to say these remarks sent a chill through me.
There’s no question that the digital revolution continues and that it will change everything we know about marketing, advertising and communications.
It is also true, as I have been laboring to show the last couple of days, that there is a revolution taking place in old media as well. TV is changing at light speed. (See posts here, here, and here.)
It looks as if Levy is concentrating more on the digital revolution than the TV revolution. To be sure, this is a bias that has swept through the advertising business. A new generation came up, insisting that it was now going to be all digital advertising all the time, that the 30 second spot was done for, and that TV was now just another victim of the technological revolution. New media fundamentalists scorn old media and especially TV.
(Just to be clear, I am no old media apologist. My book Culturematic assumes new media. No culturematic is possible without new media as a means and an end.)
The trouble with new media fundamentalism is that it misses what is perhaps the single biggest story concerning popular culture in the last 10 years. Against the odds, and in the teeth of the hostility of the chattering classes, TV got better.
And this revolution means several things. That consumers as viewers are getting steadily smarter. That they are now accustomed to and expectant of a new order of story telling. I think it’s far to say that old media is still better at telling stories than new media. This is another way of saying that old media (both TV and advertising) may have been trailing new media…but that they suddenly caught up.
I know some readers are going to take this as the voice of reaction, an attempt to return the old order to former glory. So just to be clear. I’m NOT saying that old media is better than new media. What I am saying is that those who now diminish old media because of the rise and great success of new media are missing something. And just to be really clear: as cultural creatives, as content creators, whether they like it or not, new media fundamentalists can’t afford to make this error. They are after all in the business of NOT MISSING THINGS, ESPECIALLY THINGS AS BIG AS THIS. Sorry for shouting, but there is a new media orthodoxy in place and shouting is sometimes called for.
And no, this is not an argument that says advertising was perfect just the way it was. There is work to be done in the world of old media, lots of work. Remember when the ads on a show were often better than the show? These days have mostly passed. Now the ad surrounded a show looks shouty, simple minded and a little clueless. Like it doesn’t know what is going on around it. Like a revolution took place and the brand and the advertiser didn’t notice. Oh, if there is something that is NOT ALLOWED in the branding and advertising business, it’s not noticing.
So it’s not as if anyone wants us to go back to old media circa Mad Men and the 1950s. Old media must now evolute as ferociously as new media. To catch up. To keep up. That revolution on TV tells us that our culture is changing in ways no one anticipated at speeds no one thought possible. And anyone in the communications game (using old media or new media) is going to have evolve in something like real time.
Our culture is becoming a hot house. Those who want to contribute will have to flourish to do so. It makes me think of that Wieden and Kennedy moment after a recent SuperBowl. W+K had floated that Old Spice ad and as they looked at the tidal wave of online content they have provoked, they thought, “Damn. Better get on this.”
A group of them retired to a building somewhere and just started turning stuff out. Call and response. Call and response. Real time marketing.
This may be where we are headed. There are so many things in play, and they are moving at such speed, concatenating in ways we can’t anticipated, this is perhaps not the time to up your digital bet, Mr. Levy. In this very dynamic world, we want to use all our media all the time.
Yesterday, I suggested we’re getting better at watching TV.
This lead me to wonder: how much TV do you have to watch to get good at watching TV? And this lead to: how much TV have we watched?
If my figures are correct, we have watched around 30,000 hours by the end of our 20s. And 50,000 hours by the end of our 30s. And nearly 70,000 hours by the end of our 40s. By life’s end (assuming that’s around 80), you’ve watched over 100,000 hours. (I am discounting generational differences.)
Malcolm Gladwell says we need 10,000 hours to get good at something. We pass that figure in childhood.
But of course there is no simple relationship between watching and expertise. “Garbage in, garbage out”, as we used to say. Bad TV is as likely to “dumb us down” as it was to confer more sophisticated taste.
But I think there is some relationship. Unless we were truly brain dead, we couldn’t help noticing how bad TV often was, how wooden the characters, how much screen-time was being devoted to that paean to stupidity, the car chase. In this case, “stupid in” gave us, in some cases, “clever out.”
How many hours did this revelation (the one that said that TV was a little thin) take? Probably more than 10,000. (And of course it would in any case. Gladwell’s figure applies to the pursuit of mastery. Lying in front of a TV does not qualify.) That would be mean we come out of childhood as witless viewers, grateful for pretty much anything that’s on.
It begins with a simple act of noticing. “God, that was a long car chase” would qualify. Or, in the language of family vacation now applied to car chases, “how much longer!” And this is the first act of active viewing. Scrutinizing something we see on the screen. Seeing that something as a choice, a choice made by someone. Seeing the choice as something we might make differently, that we could make better.
This begins as a tiny current of consciousness, a small voice in the back of one’s mind. But eventually there is a kind of acceleration and the viewer shifts more and more from passive to active. We watch enough (and this “enough” might be 10,000 hours, which would make Gladwell’s condition the beginning, not the end of mastery) and at some point, we go “really, that’s it?” And now gradually, we begin to use our cognitive surplus, as Clay Shirky would use the term, to do other things. Now we always see the tedium of the car chase and we begin to use this “interlude” for other acts of noticing and contemplation. “Why do we only see her left profile?” “What is the deal with the way he says ‘immediately’?”
The necessary condition for better TV is in place. Viewers are paying attention. But the sufficient condition is better writers and producers. And this is another story. I think of these people as ham radio operators, desperately pouring a signal into TV land, hoping that someone somewhere will get this subtle bit of dialog. And eventually a signal returns.
Eventually, viewers and these writers find one another and a virtuous cycle is set in motion. A number of shows emerge: Hill Street Blues (1981), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), The Wire (2002), Arrested Development (2003). TV gets better and by the turn of the century, writers and viewers have found one another. And now the entire system changes. With better, richer TV in place, someone has probably logged the hours they need for mastery quite early on. But the end of your teens certainly.
Thoughts and comments, please.
Game of Thrones
Luther, Homeland
The Good Wife
House of Cards
Nashville, Scandal
Arrow, Teen wolf
Rest in peace:
Ned Stark (Sean Bean) on Game of Thrones
DS Riply (Warren Brown) on Luther
Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) on Homeland
Will (Josh Charles) on The Good Wife
Zoe (Kate Mara) on House of Cards
Peggy (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) and Lamar (Powers Boothe) on Nashville
James (Dan Bucatinsky) on Scandal
Moira (Susanna Thompson) on Arrow
Allison (Crystal Reed) on Teen Wolf
The characters of TV are falling. No one is safe. Zoe on House of Cards appeared to be a character so dear to our hearts, so embedded in the HoC narrative, she was safe from harm. This made her death on a subway platform in the first episode of the new season especially shocking.
The old convention was clear. TV was bound by a contract. Once the audience had connected to a character, once we had identified with that character, the character got a pass. Nothing bad could ever happen to them. They were safe from harm. Especially on a subway platform. Well, everywhere really.
But now that so many of these TV characters are dying, something is clearly up. Melissa Maerz of Entertainment Weekly sees dark motives. She believes that shows use these deaths as a way to goose ratings and build buzz. These deaths, she suggests, may be “gimmicks.”
Maybe. We could look at this another way. In the old TV, characters represented an investment and an achievement. In spite of its creaky, often predictable mechanics and talent shortages, TV managed to make a creature we found credible. Life was created. (Even if it did resemble the work of Dr. Frankenstein.)
In fact, writers weren’t all the good at creating new characters. And we, as viewers, weren’t all that good at grasping these characters. This was, after all, an era of creative scarcity. In this world, characters got a pass not for humane reasons, but because they were triumphs against the odds. Once we writers and viewers had conspired to cocreate a character, whew, job done, and let’s not put this miracle at risk.
But these days, show runners and writers are less like Dickensian accountants, and more like drunken lords of endless liberality. “You don’t like that character, well and good. How about this one? Want another? I’ll work something up over lunch.” The new creative potentiality on tap in TV is virtually depthless.
Why? Better writers have come to TV. All writers have more creative freedom. Every show runner is eager to take new risks. They recruit the writers who can help them do so. Actors are demanding new and juicier roles. The industry is a little less an industry and now a creative community, where the depths of talent are so extraordinary something fundamental has changed. This world (and our culture) has gone from one of scarcity to one of plenty.
And we viewers are helping. We got better too. We are smarter, more alert, better at complexity, unfazed by novelty, and apparently, so possessed of new cognitive gifts that you can throw just about anything at us and we will rise to the occasion.
We viewers may once have struggled to master the complexities of a show, and resented anyone who taxed us with new characters. Now that’s part of the fun. Throw stuff at us. We can handle it. Indeed, increasingly, we demand it. Viewers are happy to meet new characters and see what they bring to existing and emerging narratives.
Perhaps killing off characters is not a gimmick after all. This might be a way TV manages to keep itself fresh and engage the new cognitive gifts of their viewers.
This is one of the things we can expect to happen as popular culture becomes culture. TV was once the idiot brother of literature, of theater, of cinema, of the Arts. No self-respecting writer wanted to go there.
Then, quite suddenly, they did. (I think of David Milch as Writer Zero, the first man of astonishing talent to buck the trend and make the transition.) And in the 35 years since Milch made the move, many have followed. These days just about everyone is banging on the door. Even people who thought they wanted to write for Hollywood. And this takes us from that “make-do” model that prevailed on both sides of the camera. (TV did the best with what it had, and viewers made do with the best they could find.) Over 35 years, we have seen the death of good-enough TV.
As the migration of talent continues, everything changes. Creative scarcity gives way to creative abundance. Pity the shows that have yet to get the memo. And watch, ultimate spoiler alert, for more of your favorite characters to die. With our new creative surpluses, there are more where they came from. Plenty more.
It was issued yesterday as the head of Omnicom discussed the failure of the proposed merger with Publicis.
Apparently, the causes went beyond tax and regulatory challenges.
“We knew there would be differences in corporate cultures of Omnicom and Publicis. I know now that we underestimated the depths of these cultural differences. I want to emphasize these were differences of corporate not national culture.”
Very smart lawyers were working on the tax and regulatory issues. If only they had had an anthropologist working on the cultural ones.
Source for quote: Laurel Wentz in Ad Age, see the full coverage here.
Lots of people comment on advertising only to condemn it. The Frankfurt School lives on like Frankenstein.
But I’m not one of those people. Generally, I like ads. They’re little production houses. They use some part of their culture. And they create some part of their culture. This makes them anthropologically fascinating. (Here’s a post on advertising I recently did with Bob Scarpelli.)
But today I’m pointing an accusing finger at this ad from DirecTV.
“Are my wires ugly.”
“No, buddy, no! Your wires are what make you you, little man.”
Advertising is often an act of metaphor. We find a meaning in one part of our culture and place it somewhere else. Meanings are released. Humor, sometimes, is occasioned.
Call it cultural arbitrage, as I did a couple of days ago.
So where do you think this meaning comes from? It comes from the world of disability and the conversation where the father seeks to reassure his challenged son.
You think I’m being too sensitive? Try asking a father who has had to have this conversation. Try asking a son who has suffered this anxiety.
And while you’re at it, try exercising a little cultural sophistication. It is, actually, what you do for a living.
This ad isn’t funny. It’s an act of marketing thuggery. It assigns very bad meanings to the brand. DirecTV as a brand that finds humor in disability? DirecTV as a brand that would play upon the insecurities of a child and a father haunted by both? DirecTV as a brand that ridicules a family that must confront ridicule as a matter of course?
Wow. Hats off to these marketers for this tone-perfect mastery of contemporary culture, for their virtuoso ability to find meanings and make meanings for the brand. This is marketing malpractice of the first order. This is marketing thuggery.
Acknowledgements
Normally, I would name the agency and the creatives responsible for a great ad. In this case, I will say merely that I think the offending agency is Deutsch.
Big puzzles are important. They represent anomalies so large and powerful that everyone is forced to pay attention. In this superbly fragmented intellectual moment, they give us a problem in common. Everyone should have a The Big Bang Theory (TBBT) theory (TBBTT).
TBBTT can serve as a sorting device. Searching for a question to ask a grad school candidate? This is perfect. “Tell me why The Big Bang Theory is a success.” Either you have a good, interesting, original, powerful and nuanced answer. Or you don’t.
In a recent Entertainment Weekly, Amanda Dobbins canvassed a number of experts to construct an answer to the The Big Bang Theory puzzle. She captures several explanations.
1. Casting: great, veteran actors (Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper)
2. Prized Time Slot: Thursday night
3. CBS Factor: Les Moonves is a genius
4. Demographic reach of the show: loved by young and old
5. Catchphrase: “Bazinga” allows TBBT to live outside the show
6. Setting: the “French farce” advantages of the apartment house
7. Setting: extraordinary efficacy of that couch as a comic platform
8. Multi-camera format: and the intimacy it makes possible
9. Pacing: Goldilocks’ perfection: not too brisk, not too slow
(this is a partial list)
I would have liked to have seen more on Chuck Lorre. There can’t be any question that he’s a comic genius. His gifts were on full display in Two and a Half Men but that show was loathed by some for the unapologetic low-brow, frat-boy, bro-ness of its humor.
And it’s almost as if Lorre was saying, “What, you think my humor depends on pandering to the lowest common denominator of male humor? I can make anyone funny, even egg-head, anti-bros. Just watch me.” The Big Bang Theory may have been his “proof of genius” exercise. Mission accomplished.
And I wanted more on the Sheldon Cooper character. He is a deeply obnoxious human being. And Dobbins notes how effective “monsters” can be for comedic purposes. I wonder if the Parsons character doesn’t have Archie Bunker range. We laugh at him. We laugh with him. We laugh at him and with him.
This would give the character his demographic breadth. But it would also allow him to go to the heart of some of the issues, some of the contradictions, of our moment, and make them active, thinkable, graspable…not because Parson/Cooper resolves them as contradictions but because he lives them as contradictions…or we live them as viewers. This is a moment when we have seen the cultural center of gravity move from heroic males to brainy ones, from creatures of mastery to creatures who are effective and influential in spite of (and some times because of) their social disabilities and eccentricities. Sheldon Cooper may speak to some of the puzzles in our midst.
Finally, for me, and for all its virtues, the Dobbins’ treatment helps heighten the mystery. All these factors seem right, but they don’t explain the success of this show. Let’s be clear. TBBT is a semiotic, political, cultural, entertainment miracle. Mass media in the twilight of mass media. A big show with extraordinary reach in an era where virtually every other show is smaller and more narrow in its appeal. TBBT has bucked every trend, defied every tendency. Explain this and other mysteries are perhaps revealed!
What is your TBBTT?
Bibliography
Find Dobbins’ essay here.
