When it comes to what my friends think about TV and popular culture, I’m a tolerant man. I once listened to an argument about the Three Stooges between a traditionalist who held that Curly was “a true comic genius” and a cutting-edge subversive troublemaker who insisted that, all sentimentality aside, the episodes with Curly’s replacement Shemp were “objectively funnier.” At least five minutes went by before I began screaming. But everybody has a limit, and I have discovered mine. A couple of days ago, a friend asked me what my favorite TV shows were. I don’t remember what I answered–Babylon 5, The Jenny Jones Show, the Ronco food dehydrator infomercial (I can’t get over how many people in the audience call homemade beef jerky the answer to their prayers)–but at some point I mentioned The Simpsons. My friend then said the following:
TV isn’t about authorship. You shouldn’t try to figure out who’s responsible for it. Nobody is: it just sort of happens. Who was the auteur behind the year’s most brilliant, intellectually complex and resonant TV viewing experience–O.J. Simpson’s farewell tour of the LA freeways? There wasn’t one. It was free improvisation, wholly generated out of TV technology. Could Matt Groening or David Lynch or even Paul Henning have been so experimental? Three hours of a slowly cruising Ford Bronco as seen from a helicopter–minimalist video at its most punishingly abstract–and it drew a bigger audience than the moon landing. So much for those snobs who think Americans don’t like avant-garde art. The symbolism grew so thick you couldn’t breathe. It magically expanded from a teaser for Inside Edition into a Greek myth: the fallen hero riding inexorably to his doom, with cheering crowds lining the streets through the last dark miles of his journey.
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I can’t imagine any creative artist able to compete with the forces of collective myth. So instead I’ve decided to stick with shows that–if only by accident–make the most eccentric and unpredictable use of TV’s ever-narrowing set of acceptable mythic archetypes. In other words, I keep switching over to see what’s up on Baywatch.
This episode has been the high point of Baywatch so far, if only because it so perfectly summed up the show’s unique blend of the mythically crazed and the listless. The ex-wife/custody-of-the-son premise used to be churned out as a three-scene subplot on CHiPs or T.J. Hooker–but here it was blown up into an epic two-part cliff-hanger. It was almost designed as a rebuke to those stuffy intellectuals who keep talking about the decaying attention span of America’s youth: you needed the patience of a tortoise to wait out each sluggish twitch of the plot.
