The stories we tell ourselves

This weekend I wanted to talk a little bit about what I think seems to be happening in American culture -- American culture, such that it is, I mean, at least as pertains to what is shown on our televisions, and the stories we tell ourselves.

It seems like there’s a murder every night, sometimes several. Murders or grisly deaths or robberies or some reason for us to not feel safe. Not to feel safe at all. The world is a scary, frightening place and what's more, we are the ones making it that way. Or, more to the point, other people. Other people are psycho killers out to attack us, to break into our homes, to steal our belongings and … heck, according to at least one commercial, we want them to take everything. If our computer isn’t new enough to steal that’s actually insulting somehow.

But yes, we need to be suspicious of everyone, because they’re all out to get us. Even our neighbors are plotting and scheming our doom. They’re out to sleep with our husbands, our wives, sneaking around behind our back. And when they do shove the knife in once and for all, who arrives on the scene but some jaded, snarky crime scene investigator to utter some one-liner that reduces our final repose to a punchline.

In these circumstances is it any wonder we are so suspicious of one another? We fear the unknown and we feel the unknown is all around us. We suspect everyone is out to get us, to grab our cash, our wallets, they’re encroaching on our neighborhoods and bringing with them pain, hardship, poverty and disease. You know what I mean, the census said so. That white people, for example, are a dwindling minority and other people, other races, they’re on the rise and they’re coming for what’s yours.

That was the phrasing I used deliberately there: They are on the rise. Not, "Hooray, the American population is strong, it’s vibrant, it’s younger, and our economic recovery is continuing apace." Oh no. That’s not the message we’re getting from our televisions. The message we’re getting from our televisions is aliens are invading and they’re going to destroy us. The differently "other" is out to take what’s good in our lives and despoil it. They’re criminals, they're thieves, and they’re out to murder us for the money in our wallets.

Let me point out that credit card companies will transfer more wealth through fees and interest payments from American consumers than any of us are likely to pay in taxes for social service programs. We will write our checks and authorize our transfers and maintain our good standing in this civilized ... arrangement. The prices for everything will continue to go up this year but no one is screaming “Down with corporations,” because after all they provide jobs and contribute to our communities.

See, according to television, unemployment is high because we're lazy, and taxes are high because teachers are overpaid. Young people are just lazy and foolish. And when we need to look for scapegoats for what’s wrong with the world, television tells us the problem is other poor people, illegal immigrants, gangland violence, alien invaders, scofflaws, neighbors who gamed the system and their foolishness now threatens your property values, and so on.

The problem is that while television identifies these fears and exploits them for ratings, it takes no responsibility for the devastation in their wake. They don’t care that our seniors go to bed more and more frightened of leaving their homes, or the suspicion with which we treat the homeless guy in need of assistance or unemployed people seeking a job, or even just our fellow citizens in the street.

Fellow citizens of one nation need to look out for one another. Television – both networks and 24-hour cable – makes a great deal of money dramatizing how we mustn’t dare. I think it’s leading to some real world anomie, violence and a weakening of the social fabric, and I think it’s time that we demand better.

The crimes addressed in procedural dramas need to show more humanity, dwell further on the human cost, which is why “The Killing” on AMC is standing out so well. The cameras have stayed on the victim’s family throughout this series and we’ve experienced their grief with them. Obviously there would be more going on for the Seattle Homicide Division than this one girl’s murder, but the political implications are part of why it’s so high profile. And at the center of the case, it’s not some self-aggrandizing cowboy who treats the crime scene like he’s a rock star. A greiving family has lost a daughter. That aspect of the crime is getting more attention in this show.

On the other end of the spectrum, FOX’s “Bones” keeps coming up with wackier and wackier ways for the deceased to have met their demise. Other procedurals feel they need to spice things up with bizarre serial killings and sexual drama, because the fact that a human being has lost his life isn’t nearly enough to hold our attention anymore. Crime scenes need to be dramatic, sexy and over the top, doctors and nurses in hospitals can’t keep their hands off one another, and all because the honest, simple pain of people as human beings just is not enough for the ratings beast.

The only suggestion I can make in the face of this is that we need to take more responsibility as viewers. We have been far too passive. Put yourself in the shoes of the people in the story. As people do when they are reading novels, imagine a world differently. If you were under pressure to track down a killer. If you were the mother who got the knock on her door, imagine her scene after the cameras leave. If you were the victim overhearing what was being said about you by the people charged with bringing your killer to justice.

If we engage with these stories differently, we might demand different things from them. Millions of people watch “CSI: Miami” each week, whereas oh, dozens of people read this blog. You already know where I stand on assembly-line programming and I’m probably preaching to the choir here but it is your right to demand better from television, and if it doesn’t come through, you have alternatives.

It being May, my top suggestion is to check out what’s going on outside. Find a park, reconnect, and it’s OK – despite what you’ve heard from CBS, very few people are actively out to get you.

Sitcoms

I for one am demanding better of “Breaking In.” This show has already ticked me off by leaving Trevor Moore out of the opening credits throughout. This past week where the team’s safe-cracker Melanie’s father got out of prison and betrayed her in front of her in favor of a ceiling tile masquerading as a priceless work of art, that’s the kind of standard situation comedy cheese I was really hoping this show would try to be better than, and I didn’t understand Trevor camouflaging himself as a brick wall for a no-second joke.

Meanwhile, “Happy Endings” continues to be OK, well, a little ridiculous but I’m enjoying the energy of this show. It’s not relying on everyone cutting everyone else down for the comedy. It’s generally focusing on personality quirks, although this past week did feature WAY too much Damon Wayans.

I want to highlight this past week’s production of “Parks and Recreation.” This show is flying way too far under the radar. Yes, it’s got the workplace comedy standard of the awkward, forbidden office romance between Leslie and Ben, but it’s also … well, this is what I was talking about – the television trope that young people are alternately lazy, impulsive and foolish.

We return to the home of April and Andy, two young people you wonder how they manage or why they bother to dress themselves in the morning (especially since Andy was living outside in a hole for the first season). They got surprise married a couple weeks ago and since then they’ve all but trashed their otherwise way-too-nice-for-them home, eating off of Frisbees with one plastic fork they share between them. They sign Ben on as a roommate and indentured servant and he forces them to become the barest-minimum adults, getting them set up with a checking account and furnishing their home, so they can stop living like homeless people but inside.

This past week a painting Jerry did of Leslie as a centaur brandishing a bow and arrow helped Leslie reclaim some of her power and stop schlubbing around like some sort of schlub. Of course the people of Pawnee demanded the painting be destroyed – everyone there still uses Altavista for chrissakes – but because Leslie is clever and with her newly refound empowerment she managed to keep her painting while pretending Jerry had simply painted over the objectionable portions (one on either side).

This followed a Very Special Episode of “The Office” saying goodbye to Steve Carell, and I keep saying this, to me as a viewer. But probably not really. I mean, I may tune in to see how bad it gets but this goodbye episode was Steve at the very top of his game and the other actors stepping up strong too, especially Zach Woods in his role as Gabe, Erin’s spurned love interest. I was happy that Andy Bernard snatched victory from the jaws of defeat after Will Ferrell worked so hard to lose one of Dunder-Mifflin’s most important accounts and Bernard turned it around by just being a good salesman. I don’t know what the point of an eighth season is for this show but so long as Will Ferrell is nowhere in evidence I may tune in to find out.

I’m not sure how I missed making mention of Jo Anne Worley when she did a guest cameo as a pet psychic on “Bones” a couple weeks back, but there she was looking gorgeous as ever. I’ve encountered her a couple times, now, since she was a regular on “Laugh-In.” She did a guest spot in a “Laugh-In”-themed dream sequence in a later episode of “Mad About You” which I saw when I was putting together my comments on the abruptly canceled “Paul Reiser Show,” and now she was a pet psychic on “Bones.” Too hilarious, and that woman is clearly a witch. She is 73 years old and she doesn’t look a day over FABULOUS. Nice work, babe.

What else? The fourth season of Mary McCormack’s “In Plain Sight” premieres this weekend, so that will probably encore a couple more times on USA this week and I’ll have more about that later.

The second half of the “Doctor Who” sixth season premiere aired Saturday on BBC America and I have to say that was a mind bender. It’s kind of amazing to imagine on the strength of a worldwide television broadcast coinciding with the moon landing that we obliterated a race of alien beings who’d fed on our psychic energies and who so entirely edited their existence from our psyches that we were entirely unaware of having done so. But we did, apparently, and the world was saved by a little girl – possibly Amy and Rory’s little girl, possibly returned from some future time, possibly with the ability to regenerate – kept alive in a space suit incorporating some 40 different kinds of alien technology. Show-runner Steven Moffat is indeed setting up a tantalizing set of challenges for himself as this season gets under way – not least of which an episode titled “The Doctor’s Wife.” This season seems indeed to be off to a great start.

Otherwise “Harry’s Law” seems to have vanished while “The Event” stumbles on bleary-eyed and directionless. I think “Chuck” is meant to find out who Agent X is this week, and there’s some great excitement building up as the season showdown is taking shape in “Supernatural” on the CW. Happy viewing!