Television's World(s), Meet Ours Pt. 3

In this Sesame Street clip, Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker appears as herself, waiting for someone or something named “Big.”

For children watching, it becomes clear that Big is a person, and having watched the show before, they are conditioned to think of the obvious answer: Big Bird. It’s a small-scale triumph of television’s self-referentiality, which has even trained children to make connections within a show’s diegetic world. Yet for adults watching with their children, Big is a reference to the Sex and the City character named Big, the on-and-off-again love interest of Carrie, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character. Adults need only have a cursory familiarity with the HBO show to recognize that Sarah Jessica is appearing on Sesame Street as both herself and her fictional character, the latter implicitly through a form of “inter-program referentiality” (White 52). A short bit of the Sex and the City theme song plays at the end, offering an auditory clue as well. Knowing viewers may even expect Big to make an appearance, but out comes Big Bird instead, allowing the show to cater to its young audience while flattering its older, television-astute audience.

With this moment of inter-textuality we move from the realm of television’s diegetic worlds to the all-encompassing fictional world of television itself. Mimi White describes this as a shift from a “diegetic imaginary” (White 61) of individual fictional worlds towards a “referential imaginary encompassing the whole of television as self-defining and self-contained” (White 59). This is a shift from the meta-reflexivity of Deadwood—a show referring to itself—to television’s self-reflexivity—television referring to itself. What appeared to be the distinct diegetic worlds of Sesame Street and Sex and the City are in fact “brought together as parts of a larger, continuous imaginary world” (White 56). How is it that we understand that world? Television trains us to make connections and pounce on inter-textual references, conditioning us to watch more television in order to do so. The ideal viewer for this Sesame Street clip is one who is equally familiar with HBO’s programming. That is, only the seasoned adult viewer will recognize and appreciate the clip’s reference, as if it’s a role we television viewers naturally age into.

The world of television has become a closed circuit, folding in on itself while sealed from any exterior. David Foster Wallace writes, “Television used to point beyond itself…usually at versions of ‘real life’ made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what’s not needed” (DFW 160). Television no longer points to anything other than itself, as it provides all we need in order to comprehend its world. Television teaches us that its individual fictional universes, along with its all-encompassing hermetic universe, are comprehensible—we can know them if we watch enough television.

This cultivated knowledge is dangerous, though, because it encourages us to see reality—the world outside the television—as also insulated, sealed, knowable. Television propagates a false sense of understanding, urging us to equate knowing television with knowing the real world. Near the end of her essay “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction,” Margaret Morse considers the role of simulations in daily life, referring to the effect of “the big world shrunk down to the miniature size of a theme park or a mall” (Morse 212). But she could also be referring to television, which is itself a false miniature of reality. The miniature distills reality into a self-enclosed realm of infinite interconnectivity, leading to the impression that television is a proximate version of the real world, built to scale.

The nature of simulacra and simulations has made “the actual virtual and the virtual actual” (Morse 212); the fictional realm of television has started to replace reality as reality has become more fictional. Mimi White writes, “Television works to construct an all-encompassing ‘world’ containing everything—fact and fiction, information and entertainment, the real world and a simulacrum—the inclusivity of which is simultaneously nothing but an image of television itself” (White 57). Encouraged to see television as a closed world, we start to see reality as a closed world as well, creating a discrete fiction out of the vastness and incomprehensibility of reality in order to convince ourselves that we do in fact understand it. Television continues to engulf and encompass reality, to the extent that the virtual world of television becomes more real than reality itself.