Fall 2006 TV Party

Ah, television. Is there any other pop culture medium that's more loved and yet more hated, more frequently engaged — a projected average of 256 minutes per day in 2006, as opposed to 31 minutes for the Internet, 29 for recorded music, and a paltry two minutes at the movie theater, according to American Demographics — and yet so utterly inconsequential? With each passing year, gallons of ink both physical and digital are spilled on the subject of television. The discourse comes from the cultural elite, who decry it as a mind-evaporating "boob tube" meant to capitalize on the masses' lowest common denominator, and from the masses themselves, who merely want to discuss who's going to win the next American Idol. And all for a medium which came of age not in the tradition of the cinema, a self-consciously "lowbrow" craft desperate to be perceived as "Art," but as a blatantly socio-commercial institution, one whose subtexts, meanings and credos — in theory, at least — are as plain as the boxy monitor frame before us. TV isn't anything as complex as Art — why, it's a mass-culture advertising machine, for Christ's sake!

And yet, year after year, though we know it's no use, we come crawling back to television. Because for all that the self-important intellectuals amongst us might turn up their noses at TV's "mass culture" raison d'etre, in a sense that is precisely what gives the medium its irrational staying power. One may not be able to imagine all of Middle America uniting to watch and appreciate the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman, but millions of viewers, from all walks of life, have settled around their own "electronic hearths" to share the somewhat less refined — but still valid — pleasures of shows like The Honeymooners, The Twilight Zone, and even Twin Peaks.

So even though the medium as we know it has seen better days, with its principles of popular choice via focus groups and its crippling dependency on advertisers and the FCC -- hell, even though nowadays you could feasibly just throw out your satellite dish and subsist on YouTube and complete season DVDs alone — we believe there's hope for TV yet. And in an effort to find a little bit of that hope for ourselves, we've taken the task of combing through this year's fall season — new shows, as well as a few notable returnees. It's not a definitive overview (for that, you'd need Entertainment Weekly), but it is a critical look at this season in television, that most "pop" of pop culture mediums.