The problem [is] a system that has made the center of national attention a market item, for sale at auction prices. The system has put the leadership of our society on the auction block. ~Erik Barnouw
The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.
The rockets that have made spaceflight possible are an advance that, more than any other technological victory of thetwentieth century, was grounded inscience fiction… . One thing that no science fiction writer visualized, however, as far as I know, was that thelandings on the Moon would be watched by people onEarth by way of television.
Isaac Asimov, inAsimov on Physics (1976), 35. Also inIsaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 307.
What themass media offers is notpopular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed likefood, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.
W. H. Auden, "The Poet & The City", p. 83.The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
The luminous screen in thehome carries fantastic authority. Viewers everywhere tend to accept it as a window on the world... It has tended to displace or overwhelm other influences such asnewspapers, school, church, grandpa, grandma. It has become the definer and transmitter of society's values.
Bread and circuses—to some observers, welfare and television seemed modern equivalents, pacifiers of empire, protectors of power and privilege. If television has assumed this role, it is not the result of a struggle between good guys and bad guys. If it were, it would be easy to solve, like problems in televisionland. ... The sponsor who thinks in terms of maximizing sales and profits is doing his duty. ... The advertising agency executive who recommends programs and time-slots in terms of audience size and demographic targets is likewise doing his job... The network sales executive who favors programs that advertising agencies will recommend to sponsors is performing his task. ... The problem—the folly—is not in any of these, but in a system that has made the center of national attention a market item, for sale at auction prices. The system has put the leadership of our society on the auction block.
Economic problems, notably lowproductivity and massiveunderemployment, meant that per capitaGNP was very low compared to the West. Combined with the high rate ofmilitaryexpenditure, these economic problems limited the funds available forsocial investment andconsumer spending. Unlike in the West,economic growth in theSoviet bloc did not lead to personal prosperity, and certainly not by the conspicuous standards of the West. This limitation increasingly compromised popular support for the system, especially because television made the public notably inEast Germany, thanks to the heavy exposure to West German television, aware of better times elsewhere. Furthermore, viewers in northernEstonia could watchFinnish television. Television ‘soaps’, soap-operas of family life, proved particularly seductive as they apparently showed how families lived in the West. This awareness of a better life elsewhere encouraged the attempt inEastern Europe not only to provide consumer goods but also to block Western television transmissions.
Jeremy Black,The Cold War: A Military History (2015)
Firstradio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society.
It is not so much the low quality of the fare provided that is troubling. It is much more the difficulty of imagining any order of taste, any way of life with pleasures and learning that naturally fit the lives of the family’s members, keeping itself distinct from the popular culture and resisting the visions of what is admirable and interesting with which they are bombarded.
We're aware of the scale of the planet, so we don't accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what's relayed to us by the TV.
John Brunner,Stand on Zanzibar (1968), continuity (17) "Timescales"
Studies show that it's best to acquire a language through both active and passive learning, and watching shows in a foreign language involves both. Trying to figure out a word that a character in atelenovela is saying would be an example of active learning, and admiring the character's outfit while hearing Spanish in the background would be an example of passive learning. ~ Elizabeth Cohen
Folks sit before television, watching the funny, goofy, unreal world where everybody plays at being sexy and naked, even when they’re not.
You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the poor man's nirvana.
Raymond Chandler on watching television, quoted in Tom Hiney,Raymond Chandler, Chatto & Windus, London, 1997, p. 191.
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. Youdo whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you eventhink like the tube! This ismass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, youpeople are the real thing,WE are the illusion!
Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in theboredom-killing business. So if you want the Truth, go toGod! Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth. But, man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh,Kojak always gets the killer and that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch. At the end of the hour, he's gonna win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man.None of it is true! Butyou people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. Youdo whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You eventhink like the tube. This ismass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, youpeople are the real thing.We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!
I’d park myself a few inches from the RCA color television set we had. I was so close, I could feel the static electricity of the screen tugging at the peach fuzz on my face and smell the wonderful aroma of electrically heated dust coming from the vents of that lustrous wooden console. No matter how many times my mother yelled, “Kevin! Move back before you go blind!” I’d still feel myself powerfully drawn into that world, and the worn-out seats of my Lee jeans bore witness to the pull I was powerless to resist.
Kevin Clash, puppeteer who plays Elmo onSesame Street, on his childhood. Published in 2006 as part ofMy Life as a Furry Red Monster.
My father ... watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.
Although excessivescreen time is often frowned upon,language experts say that watching shows in aforeign language -- if done with nearobsession -- can help someone learn that language. "These stories are hugely common," said Melissa Baese-Berk, associate professor of linguistics and director of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program at theUniversity of Oregon. She points to aNew York Times story about professionalbaseball players fromLatin America who learnedEnglish by watching "Friends" withSpanishsubtitles. But they didn't just watch "Friends"; they watched it over and over again.Philadelphia PhilliesshortstopFreddy Galvis told the Times that he had watched every episode of the 10-season show at least five times. Stephen Snyder, dean of language schools atMiddlebury College inVermont, said this story sounds familiar to him. "OurJapanese classes are full ofChinese students andAmerican students who grew up watchingJapaneseanime, and without having any formal training in Japanese, their comprehension is quite reasonable," he said. "It's a transnational phenomenon, and it makes sense." Baese-Berk says science supports what these young people have experienced. Studies show that it's best to acquire a language through both active and passive learning, and watching shows in a foreign language involves both. Trying to figure out a word that a character in a telenovela is saying would be an example of active learning, and admiring the character's outfit while hearing Spanish in the background would be an example of passive learning, she said.
His powers of thinking rust and freeze! He cannot think—he only sees! ~Roald Dahl
IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD! IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD! IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND! IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND! HISBRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT ASCHEESE! HIS POWERS OFTHINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK–HE ONLY SEES!
Roald Dahl,Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), p. 139
An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion.
Philip K. Dick, in "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)
Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images. ~Jacques Ellul
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation forhypnosis.
Umberto Eco, in "Can Television Teach?" inScreen Education 31 (1979), p. 12
It is a medium ofentertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination ofknowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I've now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad. The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind.Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us.
Harlan Ellison Interview in 1979, quoted in The Online Copywriter's Handbook (2002) by Robert W. Bly, p. 19
We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment ofEdgar Allen Poe's prophecy in which thepainter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, "did notwant to see that the colors he spread on his canvas weretaken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead." Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.
Jacques Ellul,The Humiliation of the Word (1981), J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208
The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary ... are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying "fascism," "progress," "science," or "justice" does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance.
Jacques Ellul,The Humiliation of the Word (1981), J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophiedeye condition that's turning them into a race ofmutants.
“Incredibly enough, reality TV has just gotten worse.” “Is that possible? I asked. “Wasn’tCelebrity Trainee Pathologist the pits?” I thought for a moment.“Actually, Whose Life Support Do We Switch Off? was worse. Or maybeSell Your Granny. Wow, the choice these days makes it also tricky to decide. Bowden laughed. “I’ll agree thatGranny lowered the bar for distasteful program makers everywhere, but RTA-TV, never one to shrink from a challenge, has devisedSamaritan Kidney Swap. Ten renal-failure patients take turns trying to convince a tissue-typed donor—and the voting viewers—which one should have his spare kidney.” I groaned. Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment—the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.
Television is just another appliance- It's just a toaster with pictures.
Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman, from an interview with Reason Magazine, May 1982[1]
Television, the drug of the Nation, Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation. Where imagination is sucked out of children by a cathode ray nipple. T.V. is the only wet nurse that would create a cripple
Michael Franti,Television drug of the nation, from Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury, by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 1991[2]
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
David Frost, as quoted inA Companion to Television, Wasko, Janet (2005) Blackwell Publishing. Page 9.
I know very well the sorts of pressures you're under in television. I don't work in television anymore myself, but I'm constantly hearing from colleagues who present scripts to networks and are told, "The script is too complex. You have to keep it simple because the audience is dumb. You can make more money for the advertisers that way."
Michael Haneke as interviewed by Richard Porton, "Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke,"Cineaste, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 50-51
Our perception of thetruth is determined by what appears on the screen. If an event is never broadcast, it somehow never happened. The electronic image is the word ofGod. The corporate state controls most of what is seen and heard on television, what ideas and events can be discussed in the mainstream media and what orthodoxies, includingneoliberalism and thewar industry, must never be questioned. We suffer an intellectual tyranny as pervasive as that imposed byfascism andcommunism.
In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.
News is not at all an easy thing to do on television. A good many of the main news items are not easily made visual — therefore we have the problem of giving news with the same standards that the corporation has built up in sound.
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's aconspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
Steve Jobs, Interview in WIRED magazine (February 1996)
On the big screen they showed us a sun But not as bright in life as the real one It's never quite the same as the real one.
Elton John "Grey Seal" from the albumGoodbye Yellow Brick Road
As I sat in my office last evening, waiting to speak, I thought of the many times each week when television bringsthe war into the Americanhome. No one can say exactly what effect those vivid scenes have on American opinion.Historians must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts on the future of this Nation during theKorean war, for example, at that time when our forces were pushed back there to Pusan orWorld War II, theBattle of the Bulge, or when our men were slugging it our in Europe or when most of ourAir Force was shot down that day in June 1942 offAustralia.
Lyndon Johnson, "Address to the National Association of Broadcasters", (April, 1 1968); as qtd. in Michael Mandelbaum,“Vietnam: The Television War”,Daedalus, Vol. 111, No. 4, Print Culture and Video Culture (Fall, 1982), p. 157.
Whenthe war finally started, we were ready. On January 16, 1991,CNN anchorBernard Shaw reported to the world, “The skies overBaghdad have been illuminated . . .” As predicted,Iraqi power and communications systems were destroyed by stealth fighter jets and cruise missiles. Every media company based in Baghdad—exceptCNN—lost power and transmission capabilities. Only CNN broadcast live to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. All channels turned to us for exclusive coverage; there was no place else. Back then CNN was the only global 24/7news channel. That live coverage of war—the first time it had been televised worldwide—transformed the media landscape. CNN became required viewing for informed citizens and heads of state, the one truly global news source. That has changed now, with multiplecable networks and news breaking onsocial media. But without the investment injournalism from visionary owners such asTurner, today’s networks focus more on commentary than newsgathering.
“Come on,” I said, feeling tired and angry. “You don’t really think that. Nobody thinks that any more, do they? How can the public image be so far off from the reality? Does everybody pay more attention to damn television than to real life?”
Kenn Kaufman,Kingbird Highway (1997), Chapter 10,To the Promised Landfill
This new request is for additional radio and television toLatin America andSoutheast Asia. These tools are particularly effective and essential in the cities and villages of those great continents as a means of reaching millions of uncertain peoples to tell them of our interest in their fight forfreedom. In Latin America, we are proposing to increase ourSpanish andPortuguese broadcasts to a total of 154 hours a week, compared to 42 hours today, none of which is in Portuguese, the language of about one-third of the people of South America. TheSoviets,Red Chinese and satellites already broadcast into Latin America more than 134 hours a week in Spanish and Portuguese.Communist China alone does more public information broadcasting in our own hemisphere than we do. Moreover, powerfulpropaganda broadcasts fromHavana now are heard throughout Latin America, encouraging newrevolutions in several countries. Similarly, inLaos,Vietnam,Cambodia, andThailand, we must communicate our determination and support to those upon whom our hopes for resisting the communist tide inthat continent ultimately depend. Our interest is in the truth.
“Tee Vee is a disease.” “No,” said Alice, laughing. “That’s ‘T.B.’ T.V. isn't adisease. It’s the most wonderful thing. It’s a great box which sits in the parlor at the center of attention; although it clashes with the rest of thefurniture anddecor. It shows beautiful colored pictures. People sit and look at it all day and night while it tells people what they should think. And what isbeautiful. And what isugly. It is such a wonderful thing that people watch it until they no longer remember how tocommunicate with each other, and they don’t know how to read anymore, and they lose all theirambition, and they growfat and all of their muscles stop working. “So you see, it’s not a disease at all. It’s just the most marvelous invention!”
Tobin Larson,Alice’s Adventures in the Underground Railroad inFantastic Alice (1995 trade paperback edition edited byMargaret Weis), p. 155
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.
The new values transmitters are the television producers, the movie moguls, the fashion advertisers, the gangsta rappers, and a host of other players within the electronic media-cultural complex. ... These trend-setters exert an extremely powerful hold on our culture and our children in particular, and they often have had little or no sense of responsibility for the harmful values they are purveying.
Joe Lieberman, In a lecture at the University of Notre Dame,Awake! magazine, April 8, 2000; "Are Morals Worse Than Before?"
Theculture is unchallenged as the standard setter, and the child’s sense ofright and wrong and his priorities in life are shaped primarily by what he learns from the television, the movie screen and the CD player.
Joe Lieberman, In a lecture at the University of Notre Dame,Awake! magazine, April 8, 2000; "Are Morals Worse Than Before?"
Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: Itself. It becomes everyone's intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power.
I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
Groucho Marx, as quoted inHalliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (1984) by Leslie Halliwell
Television is by nature the dominatordrug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (1992)
Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
Margaret Mead, as quoted by Robert P. Doyle (1993) Banned Books Week '93: celebrating the freedom to read. American Library Association. p. 62
Louis Menand,"The Horror",The New Yorker, (March 24, 2008)
I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
Newton N. Minow, FCC Chairman, May 9, 1961[3]; republished by Minow inEqual Time (1964), p. 52.
Hollywood, television andfilm is not my prime area of interest. Because I would never have anycontrol, working in those areas. It’s nice to get themoney from a Hollywood project, but whatever they do with it, it would be their piece of work, and not mine.
Interviewer: Frank Hunt asks: What were the most important lessons you took away (as a writer and producer) from your time working onStar Trek?
Moore: That it's all about the characters and that you really have to be willing to dig into the characters and make it about the people and understand them. That means sitting in rooms for hours on end and arguing about who these people really are. It's about trying to challenge the characters and challenge yourself. It's really the lifeblood of television. It's what it’s all about. People tune into these shows again and again not for the plot of the week and not because they want to be wowed by visual effects. They tune into the show because they fall in love with the characters. They fall in love withKirk andSpock andSisko andJaneway andPicard andData. They want to see those people again. So it's all about the characters, and that's the most important thing I learned at Trek.
My personal theory, which I’ve never bothered to research academically, is that television is what straightens out the narrative ofHollywoodfilms for thirty-odd years, and it’s whenVHS comes along that it starts to get freed up again. Because what happens in the television era is, TV is the big ancillary market, linear television becomes the way Hollywood films are paid for, and so they demand a narrative that you can follow even as the world’s distractions come upon you. So, the pizza deliveryman comes, you’re watching a film at home in 1975, you go and pay for thepizza, you sit back down. You don’t just pick up right where you left off, so you can’t have missed some fundamental thing, and the more linear the story, the better. Post-1982 or ’83-ish, you hit pause, you go pay for the pizza and you hit play again – you don’t miss anything. I thinkDisney were the first studio to realise that home video changed the nature of the films they were putting out. They weren’t doing it in a narrative sense, but they started layering the animation more and more, because they knew that kids would watch these films again and again. So, there’s also a visual density that comes in right about then – at the same time,Ridley Scott was makingBlade Runner and stuffing the frame with all these different things; there’s too much to take in on one viewing.
I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.
Chuck Palahniuk,San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 30, 2002
People's imagination has been changed a lot by television.
Grace Paley 1980 interview inConversations with Grace Paley (1997)
May'stournaments were one part sporting event, one part Roman spectacle, and, whatever else was true about him, his timing couldn't have been better, because the advent of television was suddenly changing thesocial landscape of American life.
There were a grand total of fifty-five licensed television sets whenNehru died in 1964, about a hundred thousand whenIndira Gandhi declaredemergency in 1975, a little over two million when theAsianGames came toDelhi in 1982, thirty-four million families owned a TV set whenManmohan Singh opened up theeconomy in 1991 and whenNarendra Modi was sworn in asPrime Minister in 2014, over 60 per cent of the 250 million homes inIndia had a television set.
Unless and until there is unmistakable proof to the contrary, the presumption must be that television is and will be a main factor in influencing the values and moral standards of our society.
Pilkington Report, Great Britain, Committee on Broadcasting (1960), Report (Command paper 1753) (1962), chapter 3, p. 15, 19.
Television does not, and cannot, merely reflect the moral standards of society. It must affect them, either by changing or by reinforcing them.
Pilkington Report, Great Britain, Committee on Broadcasting (1960), Report (Command paper 1753) (1962), chapter 3, p. 15, 19.
Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it.
Pilkington Report, quoting an unknown source. Great Britain, Committee on Broadcasting, 1960, Report (Command paper 1753) (1962), chapter 3, p. 17.
Fucking guys on TV, what do theyknow? Let me tell you something. If they putexecutions on TV it would be the fucking highest-rated show of all time. It'd beNeilsens through the roof. The othernetworks would startkillingpeople just tocompete. Pretty soon,Geraldo Rivera would be pulling that switch. ~ Robert Reneau and Walter Hill
Niles Talbot: Fucking guys on TV, what do theyknow? Let me tell you something. If they putexecutions on TV it would be the fucking highest-rated show of all time. It'd beNeilsens through the roof. The othernetworks would startkillingpeople just tocompete. Pretty soon,Geraldo Rivera would be pulling that switch.
To get a prime time show - network show - on the air and to keep it there, you must attract and hold a minimum of 18 million people every week. You have to do that in order to move people away fromGomer Pyle,Bonanza,Beverly Hill Billies and so on. And we tried to do this withentertainment,action,adventure,conflict and so on. But once we got on the air, and within the limits of those accident ratio limits, we did not accept the myth, that the television audience has an infantile mind. We had an idea, and we had a premise, and we still believe that. As a matter of fact we decided to risk the whole show on that premise. We believed that the often ridiculed massaudience issick of this world's pettynationalism and all its old ways and oldhatreds, and that people are not onlywilling butanxious to think beyond most pettybeliefs that have for so long kept mankind divided. So you see that the formula, themagic ingredient that many people keep seeking and many of them keep missing is really not inStar Trek. It is in the audience.There is an intelligent life form out on the other side of that television too.
Television’s greatestweakness is its reluctance to take positions. Historically, during times of greatest stress, during periods of greatest controversy, themass media are the first to be attacked, the first to be muzzled, and also unhappily-historically and traditionally-the first to fold up their tent and look the other way.
How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?
Rod Serling,Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval (October 1997), American Masters (PBS: Thirteen/WNET)
On theTwilight Zone I knew I could get away with havingMartians say things Republicans and Democrats couldn't.
Rod Serling,Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval (October 1997), American Masters
For the first time in television a writer will have the opportunity to let his imagination take him where ever he wants to. The sky is no longer the limit.
Rod Serling inRod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval (October 1997), American Masters
My favourite show isThe Sopranos. Movies would never have let [David Chase] do that ending. There would have been repercussions. They would have stopped promoting it a certain way and would have said ‘hmm, we tested it and it’s not doing so well, half the audience hates it’, that kind of stuff. But on TV everybody watched it. They might have hated it, but they all watched it and it was up to Chase to decide the ending. He had that freedom.
Watching violence in movies or in TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies.
Steven Spielberg, in an interview by the Brazilian magazineVeja (1993).
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to The Outer Limits.
I think TV is sometimes more creatively satisfying because, you know, every week, like say onSamurai Jack, we were able to do something new and different. We really challenged ourselves. Oh, this week, we're going to fightzombies, and so, we'll do a real scary one. The next week, we're going to do a rave, and so we'll do it not as scary and just do more focusing on the dancing and the music. So, that was really fun creatively, but then the speed makes you suffer, because we have to go so fast. We have limited budgets, and so, we just go as fast as we can. Everything that we do is really our first instinct.
Watching television is the favorite leisure activity or rather nonactivity for millions of people around the world. The average American, by the time he is sixty years old, will have spent fifteen years staring at the TV screen. In many other countries the figures are similar. Many people find watching TV “relaxing.” Observe yourself closely and you will find that the longer the screen remains the focus of your attention, the more your thought activity becomes suspended, and for long periods you are watching the talk show, game show, sitcom, or even commercials with almost no thought being generated by your mind. Not only do you not remember your problems anymore, but you become temporarily free of yourself – and what could be more relaxing than that? So does TV watching create inner space? Does it cause you to be present? Unfortunately, it does not. Although for long periods your mind may not be generating any thoughts, it has linked into the thought activity of the television show. It has linked up with the TV version of the collective mind, and is thinking its thoughts. Your mind is inactive only in the sense that it is not producing thoughts. It is, however, continuously absorbing thoughts and images that come through the TV screen. This induces a trancelike passive state of heightened susceptibility, not unlike hypnosis.
That is why it lends itself to manipulation of “public opinion,” as politicians and special interest groups as well as advertisers know and will pay millions of dollars to catch you in that state of receptive unawareness. They want their thoughts to become your thoughts, and usually they succeed. So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality. You reach for the remote control to switch off and instead find yourself going through all the channels. Half an hour or an hour later, you are still watching, still going through the channels. The off button is the only one your finger seems unable to press. You are still watching, usually not because anything of interest has caught your attention, but precisely because there is nothing of interest to watch. Once you are hooked, the more trivial, the more meaningless, it is, the more addictive it becomes. p. 139
Frequent and prolonged TV watching not only makes you unconscious, it also induces passivity and drains you of energy. Therefore, rather than watching at random, choose the programs you want to see. Whenever you remember to do so, feel the aliveness inside your body as you watch. Alternatively, be aware of your breathing from time to time. Look away from the screen at regular intervals so that it does not completely take possession of your visual sense. Don't turn up the volume any higher than necessary so that the TV doesn't overwhelm you on the auditory level. Use the mute button during commercials. Make sure you don't go to sleep immediately after switching off the set or, even worse, fall asleep with the set still on. p. 141
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either aliberal or aconservative. ~Kurt Vonnegut
The battle for the mind ofNorth America will be fought in the video arena — the videodrome. The television screen is the retina of themind's eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of thebrain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television isreality, and reality is less than television.
What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't wantPeter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.
I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. ~David Foster Wallace
And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.
Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
I kind of treat moviemaking and TV like the Army, and I kind of always have. Whoever is in charge, is in charge, and if they're going to march you up a hill and get you all killed, that's what you do. You march up that hill. You have to respect that, you have to respect that chain of command. I've done it under directors I believed in, I've done it under directors I didn't believe in. I've done it with executives and on projects.
I may be vile and pernicious But you can't look away I make you think I'm delicious With the stuff that I say I'm the best you can get Have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozin' out From your TV set.
