As you probably know, I write quite regularly for Death Ray magazine. SF Diplomat has posted a review of issue eight (the current issue) over on his blog – he’s previously reviewed issues one and two as well.As you’ll see from the reviews, SF Diplomat’s opinion of the magazine has diminished somewhat. I actually think SF Diplomat is rather unfair in surmising the magazine’s decline based entirely on a single issue, but that’s not really the subject of this blog. What interested me in particular was SF Diplomat’s criticism of the amount of coverage the magazine gives to television, and the nature of that coverage, too – ‘the usual toothless fluff’ as SF Diplomat calls it. I don’t entirely disagree with this statement, as it happens, but I don’t think it’s Death Ray’s fault, I think it’s something in the nature of television.
There’s a tendency for TV series to get an easier ride than either books or films, and thus to appear to be more favoured and subject to less critical scrutiny. With television, if you get a bad episode here and there, people write it off – there’s another episode along in a week or so, and short of a really protracted bad run, nobody really notices. Films and books are single, largely self-contained works and hence any weakness throughout reflect on the whole thing. Overlooking individual flaws in a TV series is easy; to do so with books or film is much harder, with such flaws being seen as much more of a blemish.
There’s also the difference in viewing habits. In many cases, people watch TV when they’re doing nothing else. It’s time they know they would otherwise have wasted, they’re just slobbing around in their living room and so they don’t care as passionately about the quality of what they watch. The effort required to read a book is vastly more – it takes enthusiasm, and that can transform into harsh criticism of a disappointing read. The same applies to films, to an extent. The length of most films and the cost involved in seeing them at the cinema means that watching a film represents a significant outlay in both time and money, an expenditure again sufficient to arouse strong feelings and passionate opinions. Television rarely arouses anything like this strength of feeling.
For most people, books and films are also much more occasional experiences than TV – many people will watch television numerous times in a week, following a great many regular series, but the number of books they read or films they see will be much smaller – perhaps just a few in a month or even a year.
Some might assume that these more numerous television offerings would actually result in audiences being even more selective, but in truth it seems to simply create a sort of aggregating effect – unless a TV show is the very worst of the worst (or the very best of the best), it will probably meet that rather meek standard of approval best described as ‘okay’, ‘not bad’, ‘pretty good’ or something equally harmless.
With a medium that arouses such moderate opinions, it’s perhaps inevitable that the good is lauded more than the poor is condemned, and when reviewers follow this course it gives the impression that television is being fawned over – but it just isn’t the case. If television escapes the kind of zealous and minute scrutiny that books and films are commonly subjected to, it isn’t because Death Ray, or any other magazine for that matter, has shown it preferential treatment – it’s because television just really isn’t worth it.
December 2, 2007 at 9:22 am
Hi Matt
To be honest, my problem wasn’t so much that TV in general gets an easy ride in the SF mags, it’s more that the “features” in between the news and the reviews all amount to little more than fluff pieces. It’s universal across the sector and it’s something I find difficult. For example, I’d personally find it difficult to interview Chris Chibnall without wanting to take the piss or ask him why he thought that rapists made for sympathetic characters.
The reviewer did touch on the issue but Chibnall kept going “haha, yes, we took for granted that people would like the characters” which is a pretty fucking huge mistake to make and I would have liked that issue followed up on… but then I think I want something different from those interviews to the average genre fan who just want fuel for their process of getting excited about the new series of Torchwood.
I’m also not sure about your model of watching TV. I think traditionally you’d be right. I remember once Jack Dee pointed out that the difference between his skill at comedy and Jonathan Ross’ was that while Jonathan Ross’ jokes were good enough for something that was on TV for free, Dee’s had to be good enough to get a paying audience to come out and see him.
However, to the extent that people are moving away from traditional TV and towards downloading and buying DVDs (as demographics suggest they are) then I think that peple are effectively choosing to engage with a series. I remember when I still had an aerial I’d happily watch rubbish and think it was “okay” and good enough to pass the time but now a series needs to be properly good to a) get my attention and b) keep it. I suspect that that’s true for a lot of people and that puts TV in the same critical sphere as books and film.
Besides, the best TV critics (Clive James, Charlie Brooker, Victor Lewis Smith before he got lazy) have ALWAYS treated TV like a serious artform worthy of being treated as seriously as any other. It tends to be a sign that someone wishes they were a theatre critic when they write about TV with the idea that “meh, the plebs’ll enjoy it while they’re eating their gruel”
December 3, 2007 at 12:54 am
I don’t think viewing habits have changed that much. To take Heroes as an example, it drew in over 4 million viewers on BBC Two – DVD sales will be a fraction of that. Even to the extent that habits are changing, TV remains a passive experience (as is film, of course, which is why I distinguished it from books in my original post) and other elements of the typical TV experience are still in effect, even in the age of DVD boxed sets – people are likely to plough through several episodes at once if viewing in that way, so the aggregating effect still applies.
Yes, some critics apply the same scrutiny to television as they would to other media, but such critics usually have the luxury of being able to choose worthy subjects from across the television spectrum. Death Ray chooses its subjects differently – on the basis of whether they are sci-fi or not, and that obviously means they’ll be looking at a different cross section, some of which will inevitably be ‘utterly witless craven shite’. Where television does justifiably reach into the same ‘critical sphere’ as the best books and films, Death Ray treats it as such. Guy Haley’s blog on Battlestar Galactica is a good example of this, and if you pick up the magazine regularly, you’ll see that such examples are numerous.
December 3, 2007 at 8:48 am
Meh… in my experience the difference between a good TV critic and the likes of say Sam Wollaston in the Guardian is that great TV critics don’t need worth subject matter. They can find interesting things to write even about the lowliest of game shows or day time TV programmes.