Evolution of the Medium by Hal Rogers

The evolution of television is less often attributed to its content than its means of transmission and structure. Color TV and the transition to cable are cited as markers of different eras in its history. Lynne Spigel proposes (not inaccurately) that the historical event of 9/11 changed TV content. Instead, I argue that increasingly, content is the driving force behind defining movements in television. After all, we do not directly identify literary movements with the invention of the printing press or the typewriter. So why consider TV's evolution this way? Perhaps it is due to the difficulty in distinguishing between cultural shifts and the effects they have on TV programming, as opposed to change that is brought about internally by the aging of the medium itself. Or perhaps it is because others would consider the face of television unchanged in all but the most superficial ways. Regardless, of increasing visibility and popularity in the last decade is a special kind of program: the “show about shows”. These programs focus on and often critique the medium of television itself through analysis or parody (and parody is a sort of analysis), almost always as a source of comedy. Ultimately, through self-reference, these types of shows defy some of the assumed conventions of television such as Mary Ann Doane’s assertion that, “Information does not [last]. It is expended, exhausted, in the moment of its utterance.” While she is right in the sense that TV is a sequence of instantaneously transient images, shows such as these loop back to their subjects of reference, thus allowing them to live again with new purpose and meaning.



This first clip is one of the (soon-to-be-resurrected) ‘90s staple, Beavis and Butt-head. Mike Judge, the American satirist responsible for the future critical success of Fox’s King of the Hill got his real start with this show. In the clip the title characters, our idiotic, snickering, adolescent commentators assume their regular viewing position on the couch, watching TV. On their TV a music video for the band Pavement is playing (presumably on their version of MTV). We then begin watching the music video itself with voice over of Beavis and Butt-head snickering and insulting their way through the clip. The real hilarity is in the unexpectedly sensical and substantive nature of their critique of Pavement despite their idiotic presentation and discourse. “They need to try harder,” Butt-head groans. Eventually Beavis arrives at the frighteningly substantive conclusion through a reference to Jesus Lizard that it’s better to “kick-ass,” even if the music “sucks”.

As a vanguard of the Indie movement to come in the following decade, charges of laziness and lack of passion aimed at Pavement more or less apply to an entire genre, which has only grown in popularity since the days of the show. Furthermore, fans of Pavement can recognize the accuracy of their assessment; part of Pavement's (and Indie's) stylistic appeal is its careless instrumentation and laid back ideology. Had Pavement not gone on to be cited as one of the most influential bands of the ‘90s, this clip would not be as interesting as it is. Subtextually, there is also a criticism of MTV for playing such a clip (and many of the other clips played on the show are worse).

But the real genius in this clip is in what has to say about us. By placing Beavis and Butt-head in front of a TV, and then forcing us to watch what they watch, the show is comparing us to them. The basic premise of Beavis and Butt-head is showing two insensitive amoral imbeciles and being able to laugh at them for their idiocy, but much like King of the Hill there is a deeper mechanism at work. MTV’s demographic has always been made up primarily of those in their twenties and late teens, so in reality, the people watching the show in its original run (hey, I’m a nineteen-year-old male too!) were pretty close in age to the title characters. By placing them parallel to us as viewers, it forces us to ask ourselves if we are so immature as to descend into poop jokes or if our vocabulary is as crippled as theirs. Above all, the show is a critique of its audience.



In this clip of pop-dissection show, The Soup, Joel McHale lampoons Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers. It is apparent immediately through the “Miley Cyrus News” headline, even for those who do not watch the show regularly, that this is a recurring segment. The soundbite only reinforces this instant familiarity. The clip serves as a critique of the seemingly addictive nature of celebrity gossip. The character McHale cultivates on the show is cynical and immune to typical celebrity-show-host pitfalls, but the comedy here is that even he is slowly consumed by the desire to gossip. While he’s being sucked in to “one of those Cyrus-Jonas-Gomez spirals,” he slowly raises a gun in an effort to stop himself. The comment here is that such hollow commentary is as loathsome to his character as the subjects themselves. The aim seems to be at other shows like Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight, shows with little of the cynicism and commentary which The Soup provides. And at the end of the clip, as is normal for the show, McHale delivers a piece of faux-news. Even though this news is presented as real and juxtaposed so closely with the report of the “real” Miley Cyrus news, viewers know it is not. The sensation which makes The Soup work is that we, the viewers, are in on it. The portrayed and perceived obliviousness of the celebrities and other celebrity-gossip shows suggests that those shows and their viewers are not.

As White suggests, "television's dense textual network" does favor promotion and cohesion. White argues that intertextuality favors homogeneity and "self-totalization," and while that can be the case, here it is used to separate rather than unify, in respect to the audience. The celebrities, celebrity news shows, and people who value the knowledge they give, are the them and McHale, his studio audience and the viewers are the us. Unlike Beavis and Butt-head the viewer isn't really the butt of any jokes (no pun intended).

In considering explicit televisual self-commentary, it would be a mistake to ignore the established meta-sitcom, Community. Unlike other shows which examine or parody television like the now-canonized Arrested Development, or production-perspective 30 Rock, Community is a show constantly self-aware and perpetually communicating that awareness to the viewer. The show criticizes classic television tropes like unfulfilled sexual tension as a means of maintaining interest and simple episodic wrap-up on a regular basis, dispensing allusions and pop-culture references at a staggering rate. Occasionally it devotes entire episodes to tackling genres with the post-apocalyptic parody “Modern Warfare” or crime parody “Contemporary American Poultry”.



But not only does the show dissect tropes external to Community it also examines them within the show, as the program has few reservations about using these clichés. In this clip we get a deconstruction of the show's primary character, Jeff (also played by McHale) through its usual speaker for self-consciousness, the televisually all-knowing Abed. Abed does an impression here of Jeff and after the study group asks how he did it, he distills Jeff’s character into different percents of pre-established acting types. Jeff’s response of incredulity and deep emotional anguish at “Forty percent Zach Braff from Scrubs,” is both hilarious and telling. Having seen countless reviews and web-comments comparing the show to Scrubs, Community’s writers are clearly conscious of this similarity and resent it, here using Jeff as a speaker for their distaste at this comparison.

Abed himself is the subject of the rest of the clip. After continuing his Jeff impersonation to attract a girl (whom the study group thinks has a crush on Abed), he meets his own double, and is just as unnerved as Jeff was at Abed's ability to impersonate him, if a little less furious. This brilliant juxtaposition of doubles reveals that as unique as any TV character may appear to be, there is always an easy analogue, in this case an entirely believable "white Abed," who apparently possesses none of Abed's quirk but still has a girlfriend.

In Descartes extremely self-aware, "Meditation Four," there are some very distinct similarities between his own efforts to tackle the questions of God and awareness, and the self-analysis found in Community. A statement almost unnerving in how applicable it is, at one point Descartes states, "when I turn the mind's eye toward myself, I understand not only that I am something incomplete and dependent upon another, something aspiring indefinitely for greater and greater or better things, but also that the being on whom I depend has all those greater things. . ." Descartes is looking inward at his own incompleteness as self-improvement just as Community must look inward at its own use of clichés and tropes in order to better itself as a show. Furthermore, in order for Descartes to recognize his own incompleteness he is dependent on the awareness of the wholeness of God, or in Community's case, the show is dependent on the TV megatext for its allusions and throwbacks. In order to recognize a show's own shortcomings and repetitions of hackneyed subjects, it must be able to see the original sources of those repetitions in TV history. In this way, Community is a show about memory, about awareness.

These shows all explicitly comment on television and in many ways are illustrative of TV's need to remember. Doane is wrong in her supposition that "television operates much more [than film] as an absence of memory, the recorded material it uses–including the material recorded on film–instituted as actual in the production of the television image." She does not consider the importance of memory within the medium's content; a show making reference to an earlier show or film indirectly preserves that show, if only for another instant. Merely being isn't enough for television anymore, as the trend towards self-analysis in TV shows. White does cite a number of shows as early as the 60s which include self-reference, but few of them were as explicit or in-depth as the ones today. And it is not just a trend. As with any medium, the comparatively primitive analysis in Beavis and Butt-head has evolved into the multi-layered, unceasing discussion of television that takes place in Community and signifies the evolution of the medium as a whole. Just as there have been different movements in film or literature, television is in the middle of a movement. This type of self-discourse and critique still lacks a true name, but undoubtedly it will get one once the movement is more clearly defined, more mature.