Is there a place one can go to search for U of C alumni blogs? Where do you find all of these Paul?

So here's my 2 cents. Complicated shows can be fun to watch not just for the initial entertainment of seeing them but also the delayed enjoyment of discussing them with other fans. They also provide a fairly neutral and impersonal topic of conversation around the "office" as it were. People don't read books anymore, so you can't really talk about that. The news is fair game, but usually boring and depressing. Politics can be interesting but more often than not discussing them will just get you in trouble. But what's more fun than arguing over whether or not Buffy should have slept with Angel? I'm drawing a blank...

As an example, last year a friend of mine (you can probably guess) traveled for work and spent her few free hours in a hotel room. My life was hardly more exciting, living at home and spending my evenings staring at the ceiling for hours. Well, since discussing our lives tended to be rather depressing, she made me watch The Amazing Race so we could talk about something other than our dwindling wills to live. Now this is reality tv, but it could have easily been Desperate Housewives, in fact I think she was trying to get me to watch that too. And hey, it worked, we had something to look forward to every week and something light-hearted to discuss instead of ruminating on our quickly-passing youth. But this season sucked so that all went down the tube. Oh well.

What I want to know is when the hell Melrose Place is coming out on DVD.

I had just thought that McCracken was familiar with that quote, not that he had spent any time at the UC (though a quick poke around the site shows he in fact got his PhD there). But finding blogs is not too hard - you just read one, follow their link, then you're at another, you poke around there a little bit and follow another link. Keep this up for half an hour and you've found something interesting and have no clue how you found it.

Anyway, the question that McCracken was trying to ask is not so much what's great about these more complex shows, but why there are so many of them of a sudden. For instance, this NY Times article (found from a comment over at McCracken's...and as they said over there, the little graphics showing complexity of various shows are fun) gives examples of some earlier complicated shows, Hill Street Blues (the basis of a wonderful fake paper in Infinite Jest, predicting a rather different trend...) and one we've actually seen, ER. They were popular, but they something of a rarity. Now it seems like these things have exploded, so why?

Another aspect of the technology issue that's just resurfaced to me, and that I've certainly read about elsewhere but have no clue where, is how all of our gadgets and the internet get us used to thinking about several things at once. My dad would give my brother crap for watching TV, browsing the web, and talking on the phone all at once, while he thought nothing of it. So there's something, perhaps.

But there's an interesting limit to how far this goes, I think. To switch mediums, I've been reading Carpenter's Gothic. Gaddis has a reputation for being very difficult to read, and I've been at once understanding this and thinking it was overstated. The novel is almost entirely dialog, to the extent that its like a play where you can't see the actors, only hear them. There's no helpful narrator explaining what the characters are doing, and no stupid characters running around asking "what's that for?", and the dialog sounds like people would actually speak. Furthermore, the entire book is taking place inside the house, while a lot of the action is happening elsewhere, to people that you only ever read about. So it's not something you just plow through. But on the other hand, it's very rewarding - I always feel stupid for doing this, but I get a thrill from listening to one side of a phone conversation and figuring out what's going on, (and here's the part I feel stupid about) and then when they hang up and a third person asks "what was that about" I can't help but answer for the person on the phone.

Point of this long digression being - this complicated plot, make you think about it stuff has been around forever, but mostly gets a bad rap. So why is it popular on TV now? I think they fight strongly to get the right proportion of complication and stuff that grabs you - for Christmas I got the first season of Arrested Development, and while there are certainly lots of characters, multiple plots an episode, and a plot that builds over the season there are still lots of traditional laughs, nice conclusive end feelings to the episodes, etc.

That I've gone on this long and ineptly is clearly a sign I need to get some sleep.

I remember reading an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about a year ago, about how we're much smarter now, as a population. One piece of evidence he cites is our preference for much more complicated film and tv show plots, compared to previous generations. He also suggests that video games make kids smarter by forcing them to develop logical/strategical thinking. Like most of the other stuff by him that I've read, I found it interesting, but hard to take seriously (and potentially very misleading).

Okay, further evidence of how you find weird things just clicking links on blogs, and something for Victor, if he even reads through this comments about televions, I give you this sign

D'oh, Victor was reading this.

I've yet to read anything substantial by Gladwell, and I'm not particularly excited to - he does write about some cool things, and there definitely is something to a lot of them, but somehow I get the sense that, as a whole, it completely will mislead people. And I fixed the link in my last comment...

Heh. Mine was posted before I read Paul's. And Paul, the book you talk about, where you have to figure out what's going on from virtually nothing, really makes me think of Myst.

I remember this all being talked about a lot when Steven Johnson's book came out. And I remember wondering why we couldn't just say that TV is getting better, and we expect more from it. It's not like Alias or the Sopranos are hopelessly complex -- they're more Jane Austen than William Gaddis. There are a few different storylines to follow, and there are long story arcs, but then there are a lot of hours to fill. It does seem like there are more shows out there that expect more from viewers, but, yeah, it just seems to me like that's the result of both the creators and the viewers wanting more from TV.

Sorry if that was a rant. I've had kind of a shock this morning (um, I received an email from a business associate that was CLEARLY not intended for me), plus good TV is very important to me.

I wonder if we're overstating the complexity of these shows a little bit? Either the intrinsic complexity of the shows or the audience's need to interact with that complexity?

First of all, it's not too hard to plug in and out of these shows and still follow the plot of particular episodes. In the fourth season the show started providing a lot more exposition each week to keep people up to speed, and every episode tended to focus on a single overriding goal for the people at CTU. And _Alias_'s baroque complexity could be attributed as much to wanting to render backstory less important; for instance, Television Without Pity attributed the destruction of SD6, the first really massive change in the show's diegesis, in an effort to render familiarity with the background of SD6 irrelevant and draw in a wider audience (http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?show=75&story=4523&limit=all&sort=).

Secondly, if you're just home from study/work/wherever, you may not be in the mood to absorb an complicated, novelistic plot; you may just want to chill out and watch some exciting asskicking. If that's so, you can plug into _24_ and _Alias_ whenever you want, because you'll be confident of getting a kind of texture that you want (lots of torture and facistic, patriotic fervor; or lots of hot people wearing wigs and kicking people in the face). What is the ratio in these show's ratings of devoted fans to casual viewers?

I know a guy in the suburbs who noted that these shows are trying to combine two aesthetic approaches noted by Umberto Eco. He tells me Eco thought that traditional novelistic plotting (characters develop and change, etc.) was to be opposed to television plotting, based on repetition and getting the same thing each week. (BTW, _Seinfeld_ was what this guy suggested to me as the epitome of this television aesthetic.) Shows like these want to develop a story from week to week, but also have to keep the same tone and basic elements (characters, etc.) to satisfy the TV plotting aesthetic. This causes the plots to become more and more complicated, because the tricks needed to keep characters in basically the same positions while running them through detailed plots.

I think other shows might offer less of a potential for casual viewing, probably because there's less of a visually excessive/spectacular quality to the shows. _The Sopranos_ and _The Wire_ seem likely candidates. _Battlestar Galactica_ might fit in there, depending upon whether you think the space combat sequences are frequent enough to reach critical mass.

On the point that _24_ and _Alias_ predate the DVD revolution, why not bring up something that's kind of fallen off the table due to becoming a national joke in its closing seasons: _The X-Files_? The stand-alone/plot episode dichotomy (since made bizarrely formal by _Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex_) made it easier to jump in and see an isolated hour of suspense, but after eight seasons the story was easily as bizarrely complicated as, say, _Alias_ after two seasons.

Anyway. I agree with Ben that perhaps a need for complexity is a bit much. My favorite television program so far is still America's Next Top Model, although since the days when they stopped making the girls do the naked shoots, it's just not the same. And their foreign travels abroad, oh, just less and less interesting. Oh Janet Jackson. Sigh. And watching this has nothing whatsoever to do with a desire for complexity.

Likewise, Sex and the City. There is nothing complex about Sex and the City, AND the theme song is annoying. And the main character is annoying. Nonetheless. Hugely popular.

Finally, Liz, what a teaser! So, what did the e-mail not meant for you say? Blog is perhaps not the best forum, but e-mail me.

Definitely email. Even then I still feel bad. I'll wait until I'm not actually at work, at least.

Well, I for one think Julie is onto something here. Mind you, I'm speaking as someone who does not own a television (but has recently watched the entire series of Firefly on dvd). Nonetheless, it's my impression that television, and before it, radio, were once unifying in that people had no control over when they saw a new episode of a popular show. You'd wait for your show to come on, watch it at the predetermined time, and then chat with your friends about it afterwards. This was true whether or not the episodes were part of a continuous storyline. (In a book I'm reading, the same point is made about movies screened in theaters, although the form of unification is different.)

If this is/was a replacement for anything, of course, it would not be novels/print fiction (you can read that anytime, on your own schedule, and there are so many options that it's unlikely that your reading list matches up very well with others') but rather newspapers, that other episodic medium with a recurring cast (um, and repetitive plot lines).

Since the rise of Tivo, television on dvd, and downloading from the internet, of course, the power of television to unite people in specific blocks of time has deteriorated. I could hypothesize that a more continuity between episodes creates more possibilities of addiction to the narrative line, and so encourages people to see more episodes. In this vein of reasoning, two people who have only seen 1/2 of Buffy can still talk at length about it, even if they only have small overlap, because both will have accumulated a lot of knowledge about the complicated system of the Buffy universe, which as far as I can tell has back stories and peripheral histories that rival Tolkien (note: I have never actually seen a complete episode of Buffy). They can still speculate about whether Buffy should have slept with Angel, even without necessarily having seen the same relevant episode(s).

Just a quick post because I have to run out the door to work:

Japanese shows (live-action or otherwise) have been doing this "complexity" thing for a very long time. There are many shows like 24 in Japan, where the entire season is telling one story, and after that, it's over, and if there's a next season, it'll be like a sequel. Personally I think 24 and Alias (the originators of such television) were influenced by this, and I'm glad to see it, since I've thought American TV should be more like (SOME) Japanese TV for a while.

Glad to see both the X-files and Japanese shows come up - I agree with Stephen Japanese whos were probably an influence, and didn't wanted to bring up the X-files, because although from hearing people talk I had assumed there was a crazy continuous story, the few episodes I caught all seemed like standard self-contained shows (and I gather from Ben's comments that the episodes were split between standard ones, and ones feeding into the larger plot).

As far as overstating the complexity - yes, we have to be careful about this. They're not light years ahead of what they were, and it's not all shows, but it does seem that there are more of them than before, and they're perhaps more popular - it's a trend, not a complete revolution. For instance, I agree with Beni that Sex & the City is hardly Ulysses, but on the other hand, it seems vastly more complicated than an earlier show of similar genre, something like Three's Company.

I also like Liz's question of why can't television just be getting better? Certain Reality Shows limit the trend, but I think that there IS a larger audience out there willing to take television seriously, and wants quality shows. It seems like a new development that you would find U of C law professors praising the merits Buffy or Firefly online. It just seemed weird to me to think of television as getting better. For the most part, I don't think of painting or novels or movies as getting better, but just going through trends. This may be true for small stretches, but you do see major innovations (perspective, stream of consciousness, what have you), that leave their mark and bring changes to the whole thing.

Also, thanks Natalia for clarifying where the watercooler issue feeds into this, I agree a lot with that.

So now this is starting to seem like just another trend that may or may not last, like the spurt of natural disaster movies from not long ago.

I don't know what brought about this phenomenon, but I like it. I was never much of a TV watcher until I got a Netflix subscription sometime last year, and in the meantime I've been watching season after season. (This also correlates with living in Ithaca with not terribly much to do, I guess.) I wonder if Netflix and other DVD rental options, more than the ability to buy DVDs (which, as expensive as box sets are, are probably only bought by people who are already fans of a show), has helped bring about this change in people's TV preferences.

Is Alias really a good example? I haven't watched much of it, but from what I have watched I got the impression that the writers were making up plot twists just for the sake of making them up, and didn't really have any sense of an overall trajectory for the show. So it's complicated, sure, but it didn't seem to be complicated in any good way. But as I said, I haven't watched much of it, so maybe my impression is wrong.

I think the continuity issue is more of a complicated hierarchy than a simple dichotomy. Buffy has a lot of season-long plot arcs, but most of the episodes are still more or less stand-alone. It's only at the end of a season that one tends to get very tightly linked episodes. On the other hand, the first season of Veronica Mars introduced a couple of mysteries in the first episode and managed to involve them in some way, large or small, in most of the episodes. Even there, a lot of the episodes could be enjoyable watched on their own. On the other hand, on the few occasions so far when I've tried to watch an episode of Lost, I've been, well, lost. I don't know if that's just an artifact of the particular episodes and the fact that it didn't seem to me like very compelling TV, though.

It certainly seems like it would be a challenge to be a television writer wanting to tell a complex story while still providing something that is enjoyable to the viewer who tunes in for the first time. There's also the difficulty of keeping the story fresh and interesting without descending to soap opera levels of meaningless complexity and melodrama. Add in the demands of a network and the necessity to try to get good ratings to get the show renewed, and it seems incredible to me that anyone manages to write good TV. But maybe there's a large market now demanding intelligently written, complex shows?