I'm a Writer and, Yes, I Watch TV; Or, A Defense of the "Boob Tube"

When I was in graduate school, one of the things that often bothered me in workshop was when we would be having a discussion of a story, and the members of the workshop would use television or film, exclusively, to talk about the story at hand. “Oh, it’s sort of like a cross between Fargo and Northern Exposure,” someone might say. “You know, this character really reminds me the dad on Frasier,” another student might add. And yet no one would mention literature (how that same story might remind us of Flannery O’Connor’s southern gothic voice; how the character might be acting as a Sancho Panzo or an Abraham Adams figure). The problem, as I saw it (and still see it) is that too many young writers are under-read—they have large holes in their literary canon and (perhaps even more importantly), they don’t read contemporary work written in their own time, and so they turn to other popular artforms exclusively for their metaphors and their education. If we’re writers, it stands to reason that we should mostly reference writing, yes?

That being said, I disagree with the popular notion among many established authors that television and film offers little or no artistic value to a writer.

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(Author’s note: Sometime, within the past year, I read an inspired article arguing this less-common perspective brilliantly—far more brilliantly than I can. It was in Poets & Writers, or The Writer’s Chronicle, or Arts & Letters. Sadly, I thought I’d bookmarked it, but I can’t find it now. If anyone comes across it, please let me know in the comments below. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to write my own.)

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Recently, I was at a dinner party where the discussion of television came up. As you can imagine, when there are writers in the room, the topic of TV can be a little like discussing politics or religion or your mother's girth. Unsurprisingly, a few of  those common writerly exasperations came up: TV is crap, valueless, mindless. It rots the brain! I never watch it. I don’t even own a television. And so forth.

In all honesty, it’s a position that has always baffled me. Of course, there are plenty of television programs that offer us very little value (aside from the opportunity to “veg out,” if that is, indeed, an offering). And yes, the health risks associated with spending hours and hours glued to the “boob tube” have been well documented, as have the developmental risks of sitting kids down in front of the TV, rather than having them read or go outside and use their imaginations to invent games. No one is arguing that we should immerse ourselves in television or turn to it as our only form of culture. But, in the case of television addiction, that seems to be a larger personal problem, not a writing issue. The real question here is whether or not television has anything to offer, and the part I take exception to is this idea that: [A] there’s nothing good on TV, [B] watching TV somehow makes you a worse writer, and (most of all) [C] that finding any inspiration in television is (gasp!) blasphemy. There’s something spurious about those positions that just doesn’t pass my smell test.  The reality is that some of the best writing that’s happening right now (especially in comedy) is featured on the glowing screen, not on the white page. And some of the most unique and fully developed characters in our culture come from film and television.

And why shouldn’t they? Many of the men and women writing for these mediums are talented, hard-working writers with sharp eyes and ears honed toward depicting and understanding the human condition. That they write for a medium with specific visual demands and time constraints doesn’t make them worse at what they do. (In fact, it’s long been argued that limitations kick start creativity.) Nor does it make them, in the most basic sense, different from any other writer.

I won't blindly endorse television as a universal source of knowledge or inspiration for us as writers. As I said, there are many shows that probably don’t help us as writers at all (and, furthermore, if you are spending all of your free time watching TV, you obviously aren’t using any of that time to write, which can be a problem). But that’s true of writing, as well. There are lots of books (mainstream and literary alike) that aren’t very good and therefore don’t help us become better writers either. (Yes, I believe that as a writer you absolutely must read, a lot—I hope that’s a point I established strongly in my opening here. That said, I don’t, for one minute, believe that platitude that reading junky writing is better than doing no reading at all. It’s true enough for non-writers and, especially, young students who otherwise wouldn't read at all, but not, I would argue, true for working writers. You’d be better off putting the book down--listen to Pandora, stare at art, or, for that matter, try to find a decent show or movie to watch. You might get more out of it.) Regardless of whether I am right or wrong about that, the fact remains that we seem to, in our professional snobbery, apply one set of rules to writing and another to television. No one, for example, would argue that writing is garbage or that it rots the mind, simply because Fifty Shades of Grey was a bestseller. No one takes pride in saying, "I don’t own a bookshelf." That’s because we are able to understand that choosing good literature (insofar as we can be objective about it) means picking through a lot of junk. (And I’m not just talking mainstream writing either; there’s a lot of crappy literary work out there, too.)

So why don’t we apply that same level of critical thinking to our understanding of television? The easy answer is that it’s fashionable—the writerly thing to do or say, an easy way to earn “writer street cred” in mixed company. The other easy answer is that it stems from jealousy—we, as writers, don’t like the fact that our chosen artform is not appreciated the way it should be, and so it’s easy to resent television with its Neilsen ratings and its gross celebrity culture. But to dismiss it entirely is to close ourselves off to one potential source of education and inspiration. There are things you can learn about writing from television—chief among them plot, dialogue (especially slang), voice, cultural mannerism, and timing. The best dialogue I come across is, consistently, found either on the big screen or the little screen. And I know that I need to credit my ability to write smart dialogue (one of those craft points I am consistently praised for) to a certain amount of television watching—at least, partly.

The structure of my current novel has also been lifted from the television show My Name is Earl. (I won’t say much about this here because I intend to write and try and publish a craft essay about this in the future. But suffice it to say, I believe that the brilliant device that kept that show running lends itself well to long-form fiction plot.) And when I look back at the book I am currently shopping, it is clear to me that serialized police dramas, as well as low-brow cop movies—like Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon—not only informed my work but became the foundation for what I was “trying to do” in writing that book. As I wrote in the critical preface to my MFA thesis, “Mills, Lobsters, and the Novel of Work”:

[In Hungry Town] I tried to work against certain aesthetic traditions as I wrote and revised—specifically the tradition of hardboiled crime fiction and the tradition of polemic. In the first case, I imagined character types commonly found in crime fiction—the gritty Irish cop of The Untouchables or Dirty Harry who operates on instinct and breaks rules as they fit his style of law enforcement, the plucky female sidekick who acts as a balancing force by privileging her intellect—and tried to invert them as much as possible without it becoming parody. Rieux became the tough senior cop with the drinking problem. Mulqueen became an avid reader with a penchant for esoteric references and a secret flame for Rieux. As I revised, I tweaked the characters, making Mulqueen tougher and Rieux more compassionate, until I found a balance that didn’t feel cartoonish.

In the case of Rieux and Mulqueen, I wanted to avoid romanticizing their work as police officers. My novel, I felt, wasn’t supposed to be a book about how heroic law enforcement agents are. Conversely, I didn’t want it to become a book about how the stresses of the job can damage the human psyche—an illustration of the statistics on how many police officers end up divorced, alcoholic, abusive parents, and so forth. Yet, avoiding those realities entirely seemed inauthentic. My solution was to compartmentalize those concerns—Rieux is a very functional alcoholic, and, in fact, it is Mulqueen (the sober one) who cannot come to grips with the stresses of the job.

That’s not to say that television and film formed my only influence or even my biggest influence. There are a lot of things that television and film can’t teach you, and for that I had an enormous stack of books—including one of my favorite classics: As I Lay Dying, some great contemporary novels: Plainsong (Kent Haruf), American Rust (Philipp Meyer), Last Night at the Lobster (Stewart O’Nan), and an excellent story collection: Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (Laurie Lynn Drummond), to name a few. The point, again, is not that we must choose one source of inspiration over another (or that writers should watch more television or film, for that matter) but that we should embrace all sources, be open to finding inspiration wherever we happen to encounter it, and in doing so avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (Note: If I jotted down every place I found inspiration for any piece of my writing, there’d be a lot of crazy, crazy sources you’d never guess at in a million years. Life abounds with them.)

Furthermore, when it comes to television we should be savvy enough as writers to know how not to imitate pop culture tropes, but to learn from them, to adapt them, and to turn them on their heads when necessary. This means avoiding fashionable condescension towards other writers who may be trying to do the same. After all, just because someone admits to modeling a character off Joey from Friends or Snookie from Jersey Shore or Sipowicz from NYPD Blue, doesn’t mean that the final character will necessarily end up being that character. Nor does it mean that the end result must be trite, a pale imitation of a TV stereotype, or that the writer in question is a hack. In fact, this ability to synthesize content across two different mediums might be a sign that this writer is one who possesses certain higher order skills that would be worth developing as part of your own growth as a writer. 

If the moving picture happens to be birthplace of that, who are we to complain? After all, there’s no doubt that better writing is happening in the scripting of shows like Mad Men or Breaking Bad than in many of the books on our shelves, including some of those written by celebrated literary greats. (I, of course, won’t be naming any names, but you should probably come up with a few of your own and keep them handy--especially for when you get into workshop where it would be nice if we could all love TV but reference literature once in a while, yes?)