Television is good: from "Gran Hermano" to "The Wire"

Vicente Verdú calls boob to those who call "boob tube" to television. A medium he asserts that it doesn't only join the world on setting it closer to home, but it also joins families together around it. Defending television in these times when Telecinco is triumphing may look kind of rash, but he's not the only one doing it. The informational scientist Steven Johnson goes even farther and, in his book Everything bad is good for you, he says that pop culture in general, and TV in particular, far from stupefying us, make us more intelligent. And it isn't about the hackneyed "every time someone turns the TV on I go to another room to read" from the greatest famous quotes' hoarder together with Churchill and Woody Allen. No, sirs, he's serious and he's based on two facts for it: one, that in the developed world the average IQ is increasing 3 points per decade. It is known in the range of psychology as Flynn effect. And two, that audiovisual products (TV, cinema, video games) have been becoming more and more complex during the last decades, demanding a bigger and bigger attention and intellectual effort for a spectator's part. This man says that the second would have influenced the first, but there can be so many alternative reasons (improvements in education, feeding...) to explain this growing output in intelligence tests that we'd better not get ourselves in such a corner. So we'd better focus on the second point, since it's a remark that it's unlikely to cast doubts on.

Classic cinema is touching, yes, it has real big moments, unforgettable actors and actresses... but in many cases, let's admit it, they're stories with such ingenuousness and Manicheism that they'd be inconceivable in a current premiere. Even contemporary movies dedicated to children such as Shrek or Megamind have much more chiaroscuros, with stories where the bad guy is the good guy and the good guy is the bad guy, overflowing with ironic metanarrative signs. And what about contemporary thrillers, where there need be an ending with three turnarounds and two compliments where it's discovered that the serial killer is the police officer investigating his own crimes without knowing and that he's actually just the imaginary friends of the first victim, who was in truth the one that killed the second one, the fantasized policeman's wife, but due to his schizoid diabolical personality he never got to realize that she was dead and it's why he gives away her attacker by sending one chess piece which is the key of everything to said lady's address. Or something like that.

Junk TV is better too

Even junk TV has improved and has become more sophisticated, being Gran Hermano its exemplar. Although according to the one who's writing this, said program lost all interest since "Carloh el Yoyas"'s expulsion, the judgment of the one who keeps finding it funny is very respectable. As we know, it's about a program that shows ten contestants competing for three months and, according to the rules of the combinatorial analysis, among ten contestants there exist forty-five different relationships between one contestant and another. So A begins a symbiotic relationship with B that, in turn, wants C, who threatens to smack the crap out of A... as we see, an easy approach ends up giving room to a tangle of complex, multicultural social relationships. At least during the five or six hours a day contestants manage to be awake.

Variations of these realities, where the aim is to survive in an island, become super-friends with Paris Hilton or hook up with a millionaire who finally turns out to be a builder suppose a similar brain challenge. As Verdú properly says, what we people like the most are other people. We're social animals and this sort of programs (in opposition to what may initially seem) are a stimulus to our minds, developed in an environment of continuous personal interaction.

Series, forums, DVDs...

But if there's a phenomenon that has made people talk in the last years is without a doubt television series'. Saying that we're living a golden age in this genre is an affirmation that at this point can only be gotten with yawns of pure "duh". Like so many others, for the last years I dedicated an appreciable part of my time to watching series and to being amazed with their subtleness, their talent, their humor whenever real black... I must clarify they were downloaded into my computer always due to a computer error. Nothing farther from our intention once approved the Sinde Law which promotes damaging conducts towards this and that, so we appeal to the reader's conscience.

Already legendary productions such as Hill Street Blues or Northern Exposure seem to be the clearest precedent of this creativity explosion: choral series with more than a dozen of characters and several plots per episode whose storyline spectrum could spread throughout a whole season. We followers of the second one in Spain enjoyed the added brain challenge to see how its chapters were broadcast in a random way, with no respect to the storyline spectrum or the season. The fact that there were characters who suddenly appeared, later didn't show any signs of life and, finally, in another chapter, were introduced to the audience, could mistakenly lead some to think that a drugged chimpanzee had been put in charge in La 2's control room. Nothing farther. Art history teaches us that experimentation often takes time to be understood and appreciated.

Said show's producer, David Chase, was precisely who gave the world another contemporary classic years later: The Sopranos, which also influences the features pointed out previously. As so do Lost, 24, The Wire... and not to talk about the characters: from Ben Linus, going through Bobby Baccalieri until getting to Omar: they're twisted, ambiguous, with lots of nuances, they can hardly be type-cast without any reflection. And so, why this golden age in these television products? The Wire, for example, is a masterpiece that was defined as a modern Greek tragedy where men are crushed by nameless gods in the shape of State, bureaucracy, Church, school or criminal gangs. It's considered by many no less than as the best series in history and it achieved the regard of such illustrious minds as the writer Félix de Azúa or the editor of this publication. Well, right, David Simon, its creator, doesn't hesitate in attribute the merit to cable television's existence. A television that didn't need to please a little to many any longer, but that it could afford to please a lot to a few, on replacing incomes of advertising by monthly dues, time when the screenwriters can afford to say, in Simon's exact words "look, I don't care if I get some spectators confused. If they can't follow it, fuck off".

There's no doubt it's a factor, but it can't be the only one since meanwhile general television and cinema have become more sophisticated too, as we said. So we have to point out other elements that have also influenced to a greater or a lesser extent. Such as the appearance of DVD, whose collections may be very lucrative if previously managed to make them into a cult product, just like various merchandising (the products of the white line of Dharma as science-fiction Hacendado, Bada-Bing logo T-shirts, even for some the long panties of Al Swearengen...). A complex plot with several spectra and characters full of aspects makes watching each season more than once and even looking the same chapter over if one's still got the feeling of having missed fundamental information. And therefore a good motive to treat oneself to acquiring the complete collection on DVD.

Last, but not least, there's the birth of internet. A media where quality series can enjoy a large wake, overflowing with debate forums where free advertising reigns on recommendations of some internet users to others, where they can talk about rumors about possible endings, as well as make a thorough exegesis of each episode with an angry picking a side. Since just like in soccer the most polemical plays are the least clear, a linear Manichean tale would leave its followers without any excuses to join forums to debate the storyline turns and in the meantime allude to the opposing party's sexual condition, genealogy and brain moderation. By using other words, of course.