OMFG TV! The Response

It appears my last post stirred some people up. In particular, a friend of mine (Lets call him MJ) and I had a long discussion about it over MSN. He agreed with some of my points but had several opinions that differed from my own! To be honest I missed out a lot of points in the last post. First of all he said:

there's more good films than there are good shows, you're not really considering the amount of other crap that also comes on TV that also DO follow the conventional "White man" story etc.

I responded that I personally believed that when film is good, its very very good. But when TV is good it's better. On his point about the focus on white men in both mediums I agree, but this divide is far more pronounced in cinema then TV (see ensemble casts in my previous post as a way writers get around producers on this point) For better or worse it is TV, not cinema that tends to define a generation, especially from the 90's onwards with the onset of shows like Friends. Film did use to have more power in depicting and shaping the zeitgeist in the 80's and earlier with films like Thelma & Louise, Grease, Saturday Night Fever and Taxi Driver. We don't have those anymore. He then said:

I think there have been a lot of very important films in the past decade, but in terms of defining a generation, you've gotta take into account the fact that TV is easily accessible thus more people end up viewing what's right in front of them and we all know how apathetic a lot of people are to go and see "important" films.

Accessibility was half my point, if you want to reach the maximum amount of people, television is a much more suitable medium for your work.

You've got an interesting point, it's just when I look at TV as a whole, I see more crap than good.

I seldom see really good shows like The Wire, Shameless, Six feet under etc. It's congested with a lot of other crap too, that I think is slipping your mind because you don't watch them lol.

This is true, television is as full of as much crap as film is for the most part, this is true of all mediums to be honest. But you cannot deny that mainstream television has so many more gems then mainstream cinema.

His final point that I don't watch the other stuff got me to thinking however. It is true that now a lot of my generation (Generation Y/Millennium babies) are a lot more technologically savvy, for example me and most of my friends for the most part download TV shows to watch when we want, thereby avoiding a lot of the rubbish stuff and selectively watching what we want.

My point about accessibility still stands but in a wholly different way, the changes in television were made by the previous generation, what my generation does once we become the primary media creators, will be interesting.

In other news, Pushing Daisies got cancelled! Which is a bit shit.