You probably haven’t noticed, but for the last month TV has been showing you its best stuff. TV stations use their ratings in May (the “May sweeps”) as the baseline for setting their commercial rates, so they have traditionally loaded these few crucial, arbitrarily chosen weeks with their most glamorous product. In past years, this has meant an orgy of sleazy exploitation–night after night of psycho killers, kinky sex, true-life crime sprees, lurid diseases, wacky terrorist attacks, and that perennial favorite, ordinary citizens fighting back. TV at its finest, in other words. But this May, things are unnervingly quiet. No kinky sex–no sex at all, outside of the routine silicone fests on cable. No excessive violence–just the few curse words permitted on NYPD Blue. No fun of any kind. Evidently the pagan days of the Reagan and Bush years are gone. And in their place . . . well, I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I believe we are beginning to see the effects of Clinton’s cultural agenda for America, and I’m worried.
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It’s also typical. NBC’s Tonya and Nancy: The Inside Story was, on the face of it, even duller than The Stand. It wasn’t gossipy; it wasn’t lurid; it was almost stylish. Its general approach was borrowed not from the standard sleazebag “inspired by the true story” movies NBC used to show, but from HBO’s classy award-winning satire (or whatever it was) The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom. In fact the imitation was way too close because, just like its source, it was omnidirectionally mocking without actually being funny. It took a few swipes at Tonya, a couple more at Jeff, and even (being fearlessly satirical and all) one or two at Nancy. But you could tell its heart wasn’t in it. Its real need, it gradually revealed, was to look inward and explore its own troubled soul.
The “inside story” we were promised turned out not to be the inside story of the skating scandal, of which there evidently was no inside, but of the making of the movie. The narrator wasn’t one of the characters we’d grown to know and love from the tabloid shows but a fictional version of the writer hired to turn the whole mess into a screenplay. He shared with us his concerns and doubts. He wondered what it all meant about our country today. He confessed, in a moment of high drama, that he couldn’t make up his mind about the key question–did Tonya know?–thus setting himself apart from everybody else in America (he would have been the one perfect juror if the case had ever come to trial). Then he took us behind the scenes at NBC, carefully identified, as they debated how to make the movie as quickly and luridly as possible. Here the movie reached an ecstatic climax of brutal satire by showing up the corrupt, exploitative motives of everybody involved in making the movie we were watching.
During the last presidential campaign, a couple of Republican congressmen spent a lot of time on C-SPAN insinuating that there was something odd, even sinister, about Bill Clinton’s student days in Europe. You may recall that George Bush dropped similarly ominous hints one night on Larry King, shortly before the end. Their idea, evidently put forward quite seriously (except for Bush, who was never serious about anything), was that Clinton might be some kind of KGB mole, brainwashed a la The Manchurian Candidate, sent back programmed to get elected President and then destroy the country.
Put it this way: Suppose Clinton had been kidnapped by the Russians. What shows would he like? Obviously, Baywatch and Crossfire. Or what if it had been a flying saucer? The X-Files, of course, and Chicagoland Television News (I am morally certain that everyone on that channel is an alien). But Late Night and The Commish–if Jacques Derrida were snowbound in a Holiday Inn somewhere, watching TV for a month, those are precisely the shows he’d zero in on as saying the most about this evil, charming, mysterious land, America.
Nor is she the only one: just think, for as long as you can bear to, about Roseanne. Consider that you know everything about her tattoos, her liposuction, and her failed marriage–even if you have never watched her show, and even though she issues press releases asking that everyone leave her alone. Clearly she is engaged in the great work of deconstructing the concept of fame. I can give you a sense of how dangerous her project is, and how far she’s gotten with it: at this very moment we are intruding on her privacy. We are causing her pain simply by knowing how famous she is.
