So apparently the golden age of television is upon us. I really wish someone had told me and I would have tivo’d it. Was it on a monday night at 7:30 that the golden age of television happened? What about the silver age? or the bronze age? and can I just ask where we’re drawing these lines? The medium has certainly undergone structural changes over the past 10 years, no doubt, but does a different kind of entertainment necessarily mean a better one?

From the way the screening of Hollywood: The Rise of Television Series (cited in Morris 2013) discussed television in the new century, it implied that all of a sudden TV had become something more than what it had previously been capable of. It had begun telling stories that mere episodes weren’t capable of doing justice to as entire seasons had started to be far more cohesive.  As a result, people aren’t tuning into a show to watch episodes anymore, they’re tuning into the entire series. Personally, I didn’t realise that this shift had taken place until it was too late. My engagement with television was initially with reruns that were watched out of context. But this didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of shows like Moonlighting, Lois & Clark, and Friends without knowing what the series arc was. This is what television used to be capable of, mindless entertainment that you could take or leave without needing anything more to appreciate it. But when I started watching TV like Buffy the Vampire Slayer I could no longer simply tune into scheduled programming on a whim, I now had to schedule my life around my favourite shows. While Buffy might not be the best example of long-form narrative, (at the age of 11, The Sopranos was a little bit beyond me), even I could tell that I wasn’t coming back for just the next episode, I was just never leaving as there was no way I could simply turn the box off and forget about where these characters and stories were heading.

This it seems is where the newfound “golden age” can set itself apart. Television today is addictive, an episode can’t just be watched and forgotten about and DVD releases and online access mean that getting into series’ from the ground up is easier than ever. However, it also means that television is no longer meant to be experienced the way that it used to be. Stories are still defining what we tune into week in and week out but it’s no longer a question of “what crazy adventures will the gang get into this week?” but instead “how has the previous episodes events taken their toll on our troubled hero?”.  Now, is this really a better form of storytelling? Is it even television as television was defined in its inception?

As made evident in the screening, big names, big budgets, high energy and high patience for long-form narrative has meant a drastic overhaul in what people have come to expect from entertainment. But this is not a  story of one day everything changed and we entered a brave new world. No, this has been a long and stretched out evolution over the course of many shows that just kept raising the bar a little bit higher for what people could expect from their little black box.

In his book titled The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers that changed TV drama forever (2012), Alan Sepinwall singles out 12 series that are indicative of the supposed new age of television; The Sopranos. Oz. The Wire. Deadwood. The Shield. Lost. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 24. Battlestar Galactica. Friday Night Lights. Mad Men. Breaking Bad. What he does not do however is discuss them as if they are of an inherent better quality than those that came before it. In fact, he discusses this idea of the ‘golden age’ of television as something that we have perhaps already moved away from and forgotten about. The golden age was a time of episodic television that did not require anything of its audience, it was an easy and simple time. Now our shows demand attention and respect for the boundaries they push and the stories they tell, as they constantly go further than any that have come before. We are indeed in a new era, but to call it a golden age is, I think, to miss the point entirely.

References

Morris, B 2013, Week 1: Introduction to TV Cultures, PowerPoint Slides, RMIT University, Melbourne

Sepinwall, A 2012, The Revolution was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers that changed TV drama forever, Kindle Edition, Self-published, eBook