TV defies the most obvious fact about its customers -- their prodigal and efflorescent diversity. people perform scores of thousands of different jobs; pursue multifarious hobbies; read hundreds of thousands of different publications. TV ignores the reality that people are not inherently couch potatoes; given a chance, they talk back and interact. People have little in common except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse every year....The top-down television system is an alien and corrosive force in democratic capitalism. Contrary to the rich and variegated promise of new technology proliferating options on every hand, TV squeezes the consciousness of an entire nation through a few score channels.
... Television acts as a severe bottleneck to creative expression, driving thousands of American writers and creators into formulaic banality or near-pornographic pandering.
The current system dictates that thousands of writers and directors labor to supply a few channels and distributors and that few of America's best TV and motion picture artists regularly have their work produced. Rather than creating original works, most TV writers merely fill in the blanks of formatted shows, contriving shocks and sensations to satisfY a mass audience. The entertainment industry pays them well, not to create innovative programming, but to endlessly work and rework a few proven themes.
...The very nature of broadcasting, however, means that television cannot cater to the special interests of audiences dispersed across the country. Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar, it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns. All of world industry is moving increasingly toward more segmented markets. But in a broadcast medium, such a move would be a commercial disaster. In a broadcast medium, artists and writers cannot appeal to the highest aspirations and sensibilities of individuals. Instead, manipulative masters rule over huge masses of people.
...In the world of the teleputer, broadcasters, educators, investors, and filmmakers, who thought they could never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, are going to discover they were wrong.
That’s not only poorly written, but just flat out wrong.
Once he says that people are not inherently couch potatoes he lost the argument. One of the constants of history is that people like to sit on their butts and relax, that’s why there’s been some sort of entertainment industry for as long as there’s been recorded human history. Whether it’s sitting around a fire while the village elder spins tales, or sitting in a hut while somebody plays music, or sitting in an amphitheater for a Greek play, sitting and letting someone entertain you is an old human tradition. We are inherently couch potatoes.
TV writers merely fill in the blanks of formatted shows, contriving shocks and sensations to satisfY a mass audience. The entertainment industry pays them well, not to create innovative programming, but to endlessly work and rework a few proven themes.
And suffice it to say that those "proven themes" do not appeal to the higher intellectual centers of the consuming public, but to an area below the navel and above the knees.