Why 'Mad Men' Beats 'Dancing With the Stars'
Bonnie Goldstein
Woman Up Editor
Posted:
09/21/09
While switching from the 61st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards Sunday night to catch the latest episode of "Mad Men" (more on that elsewhere in WomanUp), I finally conceded reluctantly that the new kid on the block -- the entertainment concept Americans have referred to as "reality TV," which we stole nine years ago from the Swedes -- is on our not-so-small-screen to stay.
I grew up with television and track my own chronology from Saturday-morning cartoons and "Our Miss Brooks" reruns. When television and I started our relationship, there were only three networks and a scant few dozen hours of primetime programming to fill. My Grandma Sarah's one hour a week for Lawrence Welk seemed like a waste of a very limited resource. Though the telephone party line Lassie's family shared with other town folk seemed a little old fashioned to my sophisticated 6-year-old eye, my memories of much of the first 10 years in my life are in un-ironic black and white.
Obviously, as I write this on one of the seven computers in our household, the ubiquity of electronics has splintered Americans' attention. Our flat-screen TVs offer hundreds of cable and network choices at any moment, night or day, for each of the 168 hours in a week. The On Demand feature of our Comcast subscription offers additional choices when the DVR has failed to store something we may have missed.
Along with so many relics from those pleasantly mannered times, I miss the demise of scripted television and rue the rise of the unreliably real. Twenty-five percent of the three-hour Emmy awards broadcast honored excellence in reality TV, with no script nor actor in sight. Here at WU, we are split on whether we favor this trend, but scripted TV still gets my vote. To me, intelligently written dialogue beats sequins.
The concepts I favor needn't be original. "Thirty Rock" is hilarious, and Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey are my favorite non-couple since Rebecca and Sam, but a meta-comedy concept about writers of comedy (who doesn't remember "The Dick Van Dyke Show"?) is an even older trope than the non-romantic couple. Half-hour comedies have endured thanks to an endlessly replenishing supply of fresh writing teams to find new twists for timeworn premises.
Though afternoon soap operas are now being carted to the cemetery of cancelled narratives, hour-long dramas, helped by the monetization model of premium cable, still harken back to "General Electric Theater" and "The Alcoa Hour" (while the BBC and public television bravely struggle to provide a few expensively produced offerings a year).
My day's reality programming consisted of ordinary people in silly get-ups trading for Samsonite luggage or Sealy mattresses on "Let's make a Deal." "Beat the Clock" contestants ran obstacle courses and on "Queen for a Day," they told sob stories. The prizes, along with the 24-hour tiara, were usually a refrigerator and an improbable mink coat. The fiction that the events or challenges that modern stars perform is "reality" requires as much suspension of disbelief as a John Deere tractor destroying the golf game of a promising advertising guy named Guy.
As the fall season launches its Monday night premiers, my usual dilemma will be whether to watch "House" and record "How I Met Your Mother," or to do the reverse for more real-time flexibility. Normally, the new season of "Dancing With the Stars" would not have a shot in my line-up. But thinking it over, even I may tune in to see the twinkling cha cha of Tom Delay.