Thoughts on TV
So I was surfing around the Internet and I found www.tvtropes.org
It's a site that lists on out the various TV tropes and how they're used. Tropes, in case you're not a lit or film major, is when a genre or author or age of writing establishes a common figure of speech for its artform. For example, twin humor was a Shakespearean (and Elizabethean) trope. So was small dog humor, although Shakespeare didn't indulge in any of it. I suppose he thought it was too base (although piss and fart jokes weren't).
Anyway, I was impressed by the sheer magnitude of tropes that were already associated with television. Despite being one of the most overexposed art forms/forums, TV is still one of the newest. It's only been around for fifty some odd years (definitely less that 100), while painting and writing and films have been around for generations now. I suppose it's so wildly used because of its accessibility (how many people watch TV?) but it's still one of the least accessible mediums of art expression (how many people produce TV shows?). I was especially impressed with how many of these tropes were adapted from some of my favorite shows (Good Troi Episode, The Firefly Effect, Spikeification, etc.).
So it got me thinking: is our technology developing fast enough for our artistic notions? I mean, we've developed the tv art form, not to its impetus, but surely to some sort of plateau. I think it's a continuing art forms but the true artists are limited in a consumer driven medium like TV. I mean, Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin, 2 of the best TV writers in the business as far as I'm concerned, can have shows that are at once brilliant and yet cancelled at the drop of a hat (Firefly and Sports Night, respectively). Are we running out of canvases to paint on?
Of course, the left side of my brain piped up at that point and chastised my right brain. We've always pushed technology to its breaking point through artistic expression. Music went so far without electronics that it turned into itself again, RE: Contemporary Piano, before it found more outlets in heavy metal grunge. The born artists of any time were not simply hampered by the artistic mediums available but were forced to express creativity through the given mediums, causing art forms to grow. Can you imagine what Mozart could've done with electronic guitars? Or Leonardo DaVinci with CGI technology? But because they didn't have access to it, the expanded the art forms that were available to them. So that's what I'm waiting for in TV. Despite the fact that we've already doubled back on TV (RE: self-referential satires, such as Soap) we're still waiting for artists to push the envelope.
Anyway, that's what was on my mind.
It's a site that lists on out the various TV tropes and how they're used. Tropes, in case you're not a lit or film major, is when a genre or author or age of writing establishes a common figure of speech for its artform. For example, twin humor was a Shakespearean (and Elizabethean) trope. So was small dog humor, although Shakespeare didn't indulge in any of it. I suppose he thought it was too base (although piss and fart jokes weren't).
Anyway, I was impressed by the sheer magnitude of tropes that were already associated with television. Despite being one of the most overexposed art forms/forums, TV is still one of the newest. It's only been around for fifty some odd years (definitely less that 100), while painting and writing and films have been around for generations now. I suppose it's so wildly used because of its accessibility (how many people watch TV?) but it's still one of the least accessible mediums of art expression (how many people produce TV shows?). I was especially impressed with how many of these tropes were adapted from some of my favorite shows (Good Troi Episode, The Firefly Effect, Spikeification, etc.).
So it got me thinking: is our technology developing fast enough for our artistic notions? I mean, we've developed the tv art form, not to its impetus, but surely to some sort of plateau. I think it's a continuing art forms but the true artists are limited in a consumer driven medium like TV. I mean, Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin, 2 of the best TV writers in the business as far as I'm concerned, can have shows that are at once brilliant and yet cancelled at the drop of a hat (Firefly and Sports Night, respectively). Are we running out of canvases to paint on?
Of course, the left side of my brain piped up at that point and chastised my right brain. We've always pushed technology to its breaking point through artistic expression. Music went so far without electronics that it turned into itself again, RE: Contemporary Piano, before it found more outlets in heavy metal grunge. The born artists of any time were not simply hampered by the artistic mediums available but were forced to express creativity through the given mediums, causing art forms to grow. Can you imagine what Mozart could've done with electronic guitars? Or Leonardo DaVinci with CGI technology? But because they didn't have access to it, the expanded the art forms that were available to them. So that's what I'm waiting for in TV. Despite the fact that we've already doubled back on TV (RE: self-referential satires, such as Soap) we're still waiting for artists to push the envelope.
Anyway, that's what was on my mind.
posted by Chris "Krang" Yang | 9:53 AM
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