This scheme results in Johnson’s elevating a ludicrously overplotted program like 24 to Shakespearean proportions, while giving no acknowledgment of the kinds of complexity that are defined by depth rather than breadth. Soap operas, which get drive-by mention here as important original texts in this regard, have been replaced by “smarter” programs with more narrative threads, more characters, and more plot.
#Textsoap abc order serial#
Quantity over quality is important here - the more plot threads, the more info, the more characters, the more intensely serial - the more complex and therefore better the text.
#Textsoap abc order tv#
Johnson’s biases – ones shared by many tv critics, viewers and, I’ll warrant, more than a few scholars – are most obvious in his definitions of “complexity and “intelligence,” as well as the kinds of “strategies” and “pleasures” he argues TV teaches and the value judgments he attaches to his results.Ĭomplexity and Intelligence: A television text is complex, according to Johnson, based on how many narrative threads it has operating at any one time, its degree of seriality, how much information it conveys, and the number of characters in motion. Instead, we find ourselves with yet another argument as to why The Sopranos is the best show in television history (and do we really need another one?) Far from breaking new ground with his analysis, Johnson’s argument replicates and reinforces existing social hierarchies in television discourse by providing yet another method with which to validate an elitist, masculinist, capitalist view of what is valuable about the box and its audience. After all, if we’re going to utilize an approach that removes the industrial, generic, historical and political context of television programs to focus on formal elements, shouldn’t that make possible a new kind of textual adultery that would question or at least expose our assumptions about television quality? In such a study, soap operas and Court TV could be considered as the structural equals of prime time dramas and children’s programming could be evaluated against the ABC Evening News (I suspect Blue’s Clues would fare very well).
This approach certainly has its shortcomings as a method (its almost exclusively textual focus and ahistorical nature), but it could valuably be employed to shake up the current television canon. Unlike television critics who want to endorse certain programs as art or as ethically or morally superior, Johnson’s approach offers a cognitive blueprint for television studies that evaluates programs based on their structural complexity and their promotion of strategy skills. Johnson’s defense of popular media is, not surprisingly, a welcome relief for liberals weary of most media effects studies, which serve both high cultural elitists and conservatives by emphasizing television’s infantilizing properties and/or its promotion of violence and indecency.īut what interests me about the public embrace of Johnson’s work and why I think it is important to examine, are the terms of his defense of television and what they reveal about the place of television studies in the public sphere. Since the Times piece, the book has become the media darling of many in the liberal media establishment, which has run feature stories and positive reviews of Johnson’s “provocative” and even “brilliant” thesis: that television is valuable because of the “cognitive workout” its formal complexities offer the viewer. The April 24 th edition of The New York Times Magazine carried an intriguingly titled article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” As is common to the Times, the article was an excerpt from a new book by cultural critic Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. By: Allison McCracken / DePaul University
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