TV is Crap. Or is it?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this recently, but TV is really crap. I mean really crap. I mean, I suppose I always knew this somewhere deep down inside, sort of the way you know when a guy doesn’t really like you, but like when you know a guy doesn’t really like you, sometimes you just don’t have enough self-respect to say NO and turn away. It’s like that with TV sometimes. Sometimes you just need to tell your TV that it’s not you, it’s him.

Photo by autowitch, on Flickr

Because – and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this recently either – TV is really bad for writing. In two ways. First is the aforesaid reason, i.e. that TV is crap. If TV is crap, that means that the story lines on TV have little to offer the writer in terms of material. There’s no point stealing from a rubbish dump when you can steal from a castle. Go to your bookshelf.

Second, as I mentioned in one of my first entries to this blog, writing is only easy some of the time, and the rest of the time it’s hard. During the rest of the time, the last thing you need is an easy way out. TV is just such a way out. Bah to TV for reason number two.

The third reason that TV is bad (I said there were two reasons, I know, but now I’m on a roll) is that it very occasionally tricks you into thinking it’s good. It does this by squishing one quality program in between hundreds of tons of bile. A six-part adaptation of Pride and Prejudice gets jammed in a schedule which also boasts Come Dine With Me and Project Runway and you can almost hear Colin Firth recoiling from his proximity by proxy to anyone having anything to do with the latter two. But, we say to ourselves, it is Pride and Prejudice (and when it comes to it, it is Colin Firth), and so we watch. We’ve already missed episode 1, because earlier this week we’d concluded that TV was evil, and had therefore decided to stop watching (suddenly this whole thing has shifted point of view, quite unexpectedly, to the inclusive first-person plural. Yet another reason why writing is so much more exciting than TV: you never know what’s gonna happen). But it’s only episode 2, so we haven’t missed that much, and having read the book a gazillion times, we know what happens anyway, and so we watch. And we watch, and we watch some more. And we begin to think that we should just have a peek in the TV Guide more often, so we don’t miss out on the initial episodes of quality offerings like this in the future. And the whole process of writerly self-discipline begins again, anew.