Does Television Belong in Academia?

I remember in the weeks leading up to the Slayage conference, seeing several articles about the impending academic conference on Buffy. But one in particular stuck out -- not for the article itself, but for the comment that followed it. It was an AOL story talking about some of the papers and what the weekend would be about. And one reader posted below (in typical online grammatically incorrect fashion): "You have got to be kidding me. This is a bad joke and i fell for it, .............right? The state of academic affairs in in big trouble if this is for real."

Suddenly the joy I felt in reading about the conference was completely deflated, I was a little angry. Why would this guy, whose screenname is "lawnsouth," assume I'm not mature and sophisticated just because I'm interested in Buffy studies?

Stupid-ass buttmunch.

He's not alone, however. A follow-up comment agreed with him, joking that it was a bird course and maybe the justification is it was better than skipping class to go golfing. The organizer of this year's conference, Kevin Durand, a philosophy professor at Henderson State, was saying on his blog that he received a stern phone call from the PR peeps at the college asking if taxpayer dollars had been going to the conference, because some paper in Tennessee wanted to know. He explained not one cent went to it.

But why not? If it had been a conference on Chaucer, no one would have blinked an eye if taxpayer dollars had gone to it. Some taxpayers might have rolled their eyes at a conference on Ibsen, but they wouldn't argue about it. If their child was heading off to give a paper at a conference on Shakespeare, they would be crowing about it with pride. But a conference on South Park? They'd probably say he was going camping that weekend.

In his time, Shakespeare was regarded as popular culture. The masses of the great unwashed would tromp over to the Globe Theatre to watch the plays and then tromp back home. An afternoon watching King Lear was regarded as no different from now going to a matinee of Die Hard (though Die Hard probably has less gore). If someone had tried organizing an academic conference on Shakespeare in 1650, the scholar would have been laughed out of the academy. "How now, you uncouth man!" they would have cried. "Dost thou not know that literature is for women? Now step aside... I'm off to a medical conference where we shall discuss the best ways of drilling holes in skulls to alleviate headaches and the proper placement of leeches to cure the common cold."

Everyone hopes their child will grow up to be a doctor: no one wants their child to grow up to be a scholar of [ack!]... television. Television is the lowest form of art, is it not? To the point where I should be thinking twice about calling it art. Anyone can watch television. It's the sort of thing you can have blaring in the background while washing your dishes and only half pay attention to it, and that's enough. It's the boob tube. The idiot box. It's the thing that any decent mother would never turn on around her kids, for fear they'll all grow up to be drooling, ADD-ridden kids with hyperactive disorder on Ritalin. How many times have we heard some pompous snob say, "Oh, pooh pooh, I don't even OWN a television."

Wow, I think every time I hear that. You must be SO out of touch.

For everyone who thinks television is not a viable art form to be studied, or that it's not a form of art at all, or that it's something you should brag about not owning, I simply say: you are watching the wrong shows.

Television, unlike film these days, is only getting better. There have always been great television shows -- All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Roseanne, WKRP in Cincinnati -- but with the advent of HBO and networks taking bigger risks, television today has reached new levels of excellence. I remember reading a piece a few years ago by Toronto Star film (and now book) review editor Geoff Pevere, in which he boasted that as a film critic, he has chosen the superior visual art form, and doesn't own a television. He bragged about having only seen a couple of Seinfelds, no Friends, and had no interest in The Sopranos.

To which I respond, Really? So did you go and watch Blade and write a review about how the idea of a vampire slayer was unique and amazing and too bad they don't have anything like this on television? How do you review a mafia film without knowing if David Chase already covered the same territory on The Sopranos? Or how do you laugh at any pop culture joke in any comedy film, not knowing if The Simpsons had mined the same laughs three years earlier?

These sorts of comments drive me mad. Take a look at The Wire (please!) This incredible show lasted five seasons, and was a neat, tight, series that explored the various angles of the drug trade, how far-reaching it was, and how many different levels of society have their fingers in the pot. In 64 hours, they were able to tell a story that had fascinating characters that we truly cared about, stunning lines that even Shakespeare couldn't have written (sorry, Will), acting that outshone anything I've seen in a movie theatre lately, and told a truly remarkable story.

When's the last time you saw a movie that did all that? Or, for that matter, read a book that did that?

Don't get me wrong: the best vacation I ever had was about 6 years ago, when the office shut down for 2 weeks and I sat in a big comfy chair and read about 10 books. When I think of my dream day, it usually involves being flopped out on a couch and reading a book in total silence.

But what I'm saying is that television has come a long way. Television boasts writers like Joss Whedon, David Chase, Alan Ball, and Aaron Sorkin. It can do the big sweeping moments (Sorkin), it can pull us into a family and make us believe they are real (Ball), and it can raise writing on television to an art form that rivals anything in book form or in any screenplay (Whedon and Chase).

Take Lost. Lost is a show with so many layers it has fans rushing to their encyclopedias, bibles, wikipedia, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic textbooks. We've had to bone up on our literature, philosophy, physics (ugh), religion... you know what they say about how you might use 10% of what you learned in school? Lost forces you to come up with the other 90. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse pay attention to audience reaction, and occasionally (*cough* Nikki and Paulo *cough*) they listen to the viewers and adjust the storytelling accordingly. How is that any different from the way Dickens would release chapters of his books in serialized installments, and alter the plots according to the audience reactions? Dickens' stories were once in magazines, and if at the time you had told the Victorian audience reading them that someday someone would be studying his work at a university, they would STILL be laughing at you.

Epic storytelling, deep characters, rich plots . . . television is the new domain for all of it. Sitting at the Buffy academic conference and listening to people pulling out the themes of the show, dissecting specific episodes, or comparing Buffy as a text to other texts, it seemed like a perfectly normal thing.

Now... if there were an academic conference on According to Jim, I would take pause. I'm not saying ALL television should be the subject of scholarly attentions, but I wouldn't say the same about books or film, either. Should there be university courses on Virginia Woolf? Obviously. (I took one, and I loved it.) Vertigo? Of course. Buffy the Vampire Slayer? ABSOLUTELY! How about courses on Sidney Sheldon, National Lampoon's Road Trip, and the CW's Girlfriends? Uh...

It's time television be treated just like any other art form. There are those shows that deserve to be placed beside Dickens and Eliot and the Brontes as something worth studying. Why is it considered okay to read Mill on the Floss as a Shakespearean tragedy, or look at the use of symbolism in the films of Hitchcock, but the moment one does a paper on looking at the predominance of the Orpheus myth in Buffy, they're met with snickers and disdain from the rest of the academic establishment. It wasn't so long ago that film scholars were the subject of that same disdain (or, as Matthew Pateman pointed out in his keynote at the Buffy conference, that English scholars were the butt of the Greek scholars' jokes).

I wasn't one of the scholars delivering an academic paper at the Whedonverse conference, but I know the feeling. I've been writing companion guides to television shows for a decade now, and I've often been made to feel like what I do is no different than writing TV Guide synopses for the local newspaper. The amount of research that goes into one of my books is enormous -- I'm constantly looking up all sorts of references, be they Greek myths or literary or philosophical or Wiccan, depending on the series. I don't write plot summaries. I watch the episode, find a theme running throughout it, and then write an analytical guide to that episode that explores that theme and how the writers had examined it through the characters. My books require more accuracy than some textbooks, because if I get a single fact wrong, I will have many people emailing me to nitpick and complain. And yet, whenever anyone asks me what sort of books I write, there's always that millisecond in my head where I think, "Should I lie? Tell them I write novels?" Because it would seem if I said I wrote a novel that had sold 12 copies, I'd be viewed with far more esteem than if I wrote television companion guides that have collectively sold over 100,000 copies. It's a very rare moment where I tell someone what I do and they say, "WHAT?! Oh my GOD, that's AMAZING!" Very, very rare indeed. Usually it's, "What do you mean, television books? What exactly do you have to write about television?" And then we're back to that mindset that writing about television is about as scholarly as writing a news story about the results of the euchre game that happened this past Sunday at the local church gathering. Despite being proud of what I've done, I still have a few family members who ask me when I'll get around to writing a "real" book (and by "real," they mean fiction, no doubt).

So, I wasn't delivering a paper, but I've been in the classrooms, I've known the academics (many friends of mine went on to become professors, and most of them use television in the classroom quite successfully), and I know what it's like to have someone look at you strangely because you take your television FAR too seriously.

But that's okay. Some day it will change. "lawnsouth" can continue to complain that the academic community is going down the crapper while he stuffs his face with Cheetos and watches his football game. (Oh, I'm sorry, did I totally misidentify who he is? Hmm... well, now I guess he knows what it feels like.)

But for the rest of us who are watching The Wire, Buffy, Mad Men, Damages, Lost, Pushing Daisies, Heroes, Six Feet Under, Angel, Battlestar Galactica, Carnivale, The Office, Arrested Development, Firefly, 30 Rock, Chuck, Dexter, Flight of the Conchords, and, yes, Gossip Girl -- and writing about them -- we know that lawnsouth is the mental midget. Not us.

Long live television academia!