Growing With Art

Monday is my TV day, for whatever reason.

There's only one show I watch every week, NBC's Chuck. Occasionally, I'll follow that up with some CW action in the form of Gossip Girl.

Now, neither of these are astounding shows. The former is a somewhat convoluted, somewhat aimless mish mash of genres that relies on the immeasurable charisma of its actors. The latter is complete early-20s melodrama that people watch because it's a new-school soap opera, with prettier people and somewhat better actors.

So, I know these shows aren't the best, so why do I watch them?

Find out after the jump.

How Art Informs Our Worldview

I re-watched the Pilot for the TV show Gossip Girl again the other day. As trashy and angsty and soap opera-y that show was, I liked the first season of Gossip Girl for many of the same reasons I liked the first season of The O.C.: Well-rendered teenage characters who were both intelligent and stupid, both mature and childish, story lines that while melodramatic were for the most part believable and romantic entanglements that were more considered with the difficulties of keeping people together than the relative storytelling ease of tearing them apart. Both of these shows became much more dramatic and ridiculous over the course of their run times, but those first seasons were full of genuinely emotional moments, and they caused me to empathize with nearly every character presented.

The glaring omission to that category would be Gossip Girl's Chuck Bass.

America Hates Intelligence

I’m smart.

You can call that statement arrogant, if you want. You are also welcome to challenge it, if you’d like. What you’ve read on this blog should be enough to convince you either way if I am or not.

It’s not necessarily important in this context if I am smart or not. More important is that my peers have considered me smart. This comes with a variety of connotations, of course. I have been called the whole gamut of childish insults associated with being intelligent (nerd, geek, dweeb, dork, etc.).

All of them are true, of course. I love Harry Potter and Star Wars, for fuck’s sake.

Sonny Tzu's The Art of Television

Television is the basest form of entertainment. At its most crude, it satisfies our most instinctual urges - for sex and violence - in increasingly banal ways. The most perfectly distilled form of this sort of television is easily The Real World. Every subsequent season, the producers at MTV come up with more and more ways to convince people, in situations that are almost bizarrely mundane, to hate, love, fight, fuck and betray each other. Usually between the same two people.