The Doctor is Out: Ramblings of a Patient
Justin “Mr. M.” Maudslien is in Europe unearthing more arcane facts for his Alphabet… Allan “Doc” Dorison is studying the mystic and surgical arts with Stephen Strange on the astral plane… Luckily, Matt. Murray has emerged from a month’s long pharmaceutical coma to report from the front (of his television set).
As of my next birthday, I will be 33 years old. Being a hobbit, that places me somewhere in my early teens developmentally, but as I recently spent an inordinate amount of time stationed in front of my 25-inch GE tube, I’ve come to realize that in television years, I’m as ancient as my recently diagnosed sciatica makes me feel.
However, there is one certainty as far as age-appropriateness goes, and that is that I am still too young to be a fat man with a cane – so my immediate future definitely holds twice-a-week trips to the local Y until some weight drops or my back realigns itself… and then of course there will have to be some maintenance involved, at least until my hair falls out, then it will be time to bust out the walking stick, the white suit, the ascot and live out the rest of my days on the cosplay circuit as Wilson Fisk.
But, lo, this post wasn’t intended to be about my retirement plan to fill as many nerd’s scrapbooks as the Kingpin of Cons, but rather a lamentation about and an exploration of the state of TV today as told from the perspective of an aging hipster who has spent the past three weeks whacked out on prescription painkillers and Turkey Hill Limonade (because it reminds me of Hi-C Ecto Cooler.)
Strangely, for someone as media-obsessed as myself, I must admit that I have spent most of my adult life disconnected from the television, or at least television broadcasts. I’ve missed entire chunks of TV phenomena because I didn’t have cable, or a television set, or, if I had access to one or both I worked during regularly-scheduled programming blocks leaving my consumption to late-night infomercials and morning-long mini-marathons of ER and/or Law & Order playing in the background as I was either coming home or prepping for another day of the usual grind. I had a passing knowledge of The X-Files. I missed the whole Buffymania thing. And I didn’t see a single episode of the new Battlestar Galactica until last Spring when I caught one playing in a dead bar and completely dismissed it as I didn’t have any frame of reference. A few months later, after feeling at a loss while two friends gushed about the show in what seemed like code, I went out and bought the mini-series on DVD and then went on to buy every available season and download the ones that weren’t available for sale yet.
However, one trend that I was in at the ground floor of was Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Taking up some space in a landfill somewhere is my VHS copy of the original Space Ghost: Coast to Coast episodes, from back when tape was a (in fact THE ONLY) recordable form of consumer media. I was at the fandom forefront of that iconic first wave of original Sunday night programming which included Harvey Birdman, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and then SeaLab 2021, which is probably one of my favorite shows of all time.
Thanks to the ol’ back I had a chance to reconnect with Adult Swim, and what I found I didn’t entirely like – let alone understand.
First of all, what’s with all of the live action shows on the Cartoon Network? I understand that they’re in competition with Comedy Central which pioneered South Park – but I would expect Comedy Central to run animated programs if it wants to. They’re not called the Live Action Comedy Channel. Humor comes in all mediums. Cartoons, not so much, because they are a medium. There are different genres of cartoons (comedy, drama, sci-fi, what ever the hell Futurama is supposed to be) but there is no such thing as a live action cartoon. It just doesn’t work that way. While I actually like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (interesting considering that I despised Tom Goes to the Mayor) it really doesn’t belong on the Cartoon Network. Neither does that Garth Marenghi show, Look Around You or The Mighty Boosh. I’m not even sure that the last one belongs on American television. [Sidenote: This trend of something being considered funny because its English has to stop. Hipsters who pretend to laugh at regional British humor just to seem "Continental" are sickening. You're from NJ, have scarcely left the Tri-State area and couldn't possibly understand half of what goes on on Little Britain, so cut the shit already. Also Ricky Gervais - not funny at all. There, I said it.]
Next, Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis peaked with Aqua Teen. I think the network realized that and has decided to beat the dead horse for more new ATHF cartoons, but I would rather be forced to watch the millionth rerun of Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future than be expected to watch one second of Squidbillies. How is this show still on? It’s been running for three years! They don’t even bother showing those six episodes of Perfect Hair Forever any more, which was a fraction funnier than this piece of crap… and don’t get me started on 12 oz. Mouse. Seriously, don’t.
Finally, I’m all for the non sequitur, but could some one please explain Xavier: Renegade Angel to me? Anyone? I didn’t think so. It actually hurt to watch. About the third spoonerism in to the episode I was watching, I reached for my Tramadol to completely fuzz my brain out, and in that moment of pain I think I actually found clarity… I wasn’t stoned. I wasn’t hip. I didn’t “get it.”
While I am 32 and by all accounts more “adult” than I was at 18 or 23 I was no longer the pot-smoking scene setter that I was when I breached adulthood and first started watching Adult Swim. I’m no longer the demographic these shows are being made for. I might as well… well shrivel up and get sciatica… put childish things like Adult Swim away and embrace the glory that I’m told is House – which as far as I can tell is the Diagnosis Murder of my generation… sigh… tear… fade out.
Matt. Murray earned his BFA in film, television and radio production from NYU. He has curated exhibits focusing on the art and commerce of Saturday Morning cartoons and the adaptation of illustrated media into live actions films and animation. Murray is the country’s leading (if not only) Smurfologist. His personal blog, It’s Time for Some Action, can be found at http://actnmatt.blogspot.com/
I had the opportunity to watch many of these new (in the case of the British stuff, new-to-) Adult Swim shows a couple weeks ago. Part of the Adult Swim issue is that it’s now its own cable network outside of the US. It shares space on the Cartoon Network signal in the US, so it’s more like Cartoon Network switches to another network now (unlike back in the late ’90s when it was just a Cartoon Network block, and so was composed completely of animated programming). Think when Nick at Nite started.
This is precisely why it’s okay that live-action programming airs on it. I think Turner sidestepped the whole MTV/MTV2 problem by spinning off an entire network for the new stuff instead of pushing the old programming to the “new” label.
I’m just happy to see all the British programming on American signals (outside of BBC America). You know we love some of those shows enough to have imported DVDs before they hit Adult Swim. (And I knew that guy, and that band, WAY before they sold out! Yeah! (Shut up, Mike.)) If only we could get more shows from more locations….
That said, I’m not a fan of Squidbillies or Xavier, but I’m glad Xavier is there to push the envelope. Makes me feel like there could at some point be a Liquid Television-like show at some point again (even though it’s by the guys that did Wonder Showzen).
The fact that some of these are available online totally changes the landscape as well, but that’s for another argument-space, I guess.
Thankfully for the DVDs, I’m finally able to get rid of those pesky Space Ghost VHS I’ve been lugging around for 10 years… but first I must extract the precious ephemera of regional, time-specific commercials.
……… and Dick Van Dyke is no Hugh Laurie. Diagnosis: Murder, my ass… although the House story arcs aren’t always worth it, Laurie alone is worth sticking around.
Hey man, not to try to “out cred” you I was digging on Hugh Laurie back when Jeeves and Wooster filled the back of British video catalogs and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Look Back in Anger was fetching 99.99 for a VHS copy. I still don’t think Peter’s Friends (directed by Branagh featuring Laurie and school chums Emma Thompson and the awesome Stephen Fry) is funny though, because I didn’t go to Cambridge in the late 70s.
Come to think of it, that comment as impenetrable as it may be to some, I think sums up my whole “British import” argument…
Jeeves and Wooster I get, because it comes from a tradition of literary humor that transcends specific time and place, although at the time it seemed to be of it (both when the novels were released and decades later when the show was made.) I think historical perspective might be necessary when importing entertainment that captures or even lampoons the zeitgeist of a specific culture and its moment. I don’t think The Mighty Boosh works for American audiences right now, or at least me as an American audience member, because there’s no context for it. The regional forms of scenesters that they’re poking fun at under the guise of some post modern Sid and Marty Krofft adventure show are completely well, foreign, to me. For the most part I understand what’s going on, but just I don’t get it.
Perhaps later when the bubbles have burst and it’s clearer to global anthropologists who stood for what and how cultural politics dictated different personality types, I’ll have a better appreciation for that culture. Y’know, like the 1980s Japanese kids loving the America of the 1950s in Karate Kid II. Maybe by then I’ll also have parsed my way through contemporary (to the 00s) British slang.
Back to Laurie and House, though. I have never watched an episode of House, as I’m scared by the cultish devotion that people have to it. Much in the way that my grandfather had his cultish devotions to Diagnosis: Murder, Murder She Wrote and of course Matlock. I think that’s where that comparison comes from. Of course wanting to understand something like that is what led to me joining the frakkin’ cult of BSG… but then again that show had killer robots and spaceships. Does House have killer robots and spaceships? Seriously, I’ve never watched it. Does it? ‘Cause if it does, I’m totally going out to buy the DVDs tomorrow.
Hey Mike, I was so intrigued by your comment that I did a little research on the whole Adult Swim as its own network thing. I found out that one of the main reasons that it is its own “network” that buys late night bandwidth in other countries is because some international programmers didn’t want to air the content on kid-friendly animation channels. Seems to be less of a result of branching out into new creative territory, than it is a matter of getting a “brand” into new television territories.
The American bosses still dictate the content, although most other countries can go ala carte and choose what they’ll show when and where. Or sometimes, like in the case of the Boondocks – which was created for Cartoon Network but owned by Sony Pictures, the show’s studio based distributor can sell or release the show as it pleases in foreign markets.
As far as America is concerned, I still think that its all in an effort to go toe-to-toe with Comedy Central and some of the premiere cable outlets (like HBO who put up the god awful Life and Times of Tim) that branched out into animated comedy to grab the college stoner market and they’re willing to break their own mold to get at it. If they truly believed Adult Swim was a “network” worthy of its own bandwidth then why haven’t they popped it up like they did with Boomerang? There’s certainly enough space and enough niche channels that can provide a sensible business model. Basically I think its because they can’t sustain a channel that has to go under a complete renovation every two to four years to maintain its constantly rolling demographic.
If they’re looking to change their brand to allow for a wider share of the ratings, why don’t they just go whole hog the way Tech TV did when it became G4 or the way Sci-Fi is trying to go by calling itself Sy-Fy (DUMB!)? I just think that calling yourself the Cartoon Network should limit you to showing cartoons. Call me conservative or even crazy, but that’s the way I was brought up…
Fair enough, they could spin Adult Swim off on its own, but I understand the point of keeping a 24-hr schedule and splitting it down the middle with “kids’ programming” during the day and “adult programming” at night. How much money was The Disney Channel wasting airing old family movies and westerns at 3 AM in the early ’80s, just to keep the signal going every second? Nickelodeon couldn’t air Pinwheel at 2 AM, so when it wasn’t infomercials they threw together Nick at Nite. The cable channels are still thinking in this outmoded fashion, I guess. As on-demand video gets wider market share, this should hopefully start falling off.
The TechTV / G4 thing was tragic, though. That was more of G4 buying and merging with TechTV to get their good programming, then quickly destroying it all. SciFi/SyFy have no idea what they’re doing.
However, like you, I don’t actually watch TV myself any more, except for a la carte downloads……. so I don’t really care what they do, as long as the good programs get made.
I quite agree, my friend. And that, as they say, is one to grow on!