Gimlé

I love Film.

I hate TV.

Now before you go for my jugular and remind me that TV produces good, quality storytelling as well—

Yeah, I know that.

That’s cool.

TV does produce good, solid storytelling and characterisation.

But it’s not the individual programs that annoys me, it’s the principles of TV I dislike.

Hours and hours of programming a day. Low margins which push the production values down into Inferno’s inner circles. The true industrialisation and componentisation of our entertainment culture. The values of mass production.

These are the principal values of television. Film and music and novels don’t have that role to the same degree. The role of mass-producing hours and hours of entertainment.

Somebody working on a film is working towards one story, two hours of entertainment, often a production of three or more years leading up to just those two hours.

Compare that to a group of workers, often a smaller team, working on producing thirty or fifty hours a year, ninety to a hundred and fifty hours in the same period of time a film team will make two hours.

What I hate about TV is not its output. If that was the case I’d hate Film and Music with a passion.

It’s the fact that the fundamental principles—ideals—of TV go counter to the basic principles of good storytelling.

Good stuff comes out of the idiot-box in spite of TV, rather than because of it.

There are only two things media mass-production can accomplish, things we’ll henceforth call the “Two Dissappointments.”

The first one is a consequence of the mass production principle I so dislike in entertainment. That principle should push production costs down far enough to make experimentation dirt cheap. TV should be able to match every single hour of experimental Film with a hundred hours of experimental TV.

Trust me, it doesn’t.

The second Dissappointment isn’t as total as the first:

Training.

TV should be prime training grounds for content producers. The BBC used to be. TV, unfortunately, has delegated that responsibility to the advertising and music video industries.

Look at where most of the new Film Directors in the last five years came from.

Decent industries that generally do what they are supposed to do.

Too bad they don’t tell stories.

So content producers today are not trained to tell stories but to sell products.

Filth—plastic crap—as a result permeats every single particle of our culture.

Television’s legacy.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.