everything bad is good for you

You know, there isn't much that pisses me off more than when intellectually superior types give me this look, like I've just told them I've been diagnosed with leprosy, and say "I just don't know how you can watch so much television!" Implication: I weep for your past, I weep for your present, and, most of all, I weep for your future, you sad, brainless, and possibly deformed excuse for a human being.

Don't get me wrong: I won't deny that there's a lot of crap out there. But you know what? There's a lot of crap everywhere. Crap literature. Crap opera. Crap nineteenth-century poetry. Pick any medium of expression, any area of study, and you'll find a nice long list of things that will annoy and disappoint you. If you want to dismiss television as intellectually irrelevant just because some of it sucks, well, then you're also going to have to dismiss all of that other inaccessible bullshit that you like to name-check at parties just to remind people of what a unique, beautiful little snowflake you are.

(And if you're shocked at my low opinion of Wordsworth, well, now you understand my reaction when people tell me that they don't like The Amazing Race.)

Obviously, I don't spend all of my time concocting sophisticated theories about the relationship between, say, improvements in modern fertility treatments and the cancellation of Punky Brewster. Although if I do, rest assured that I'll post it here. But that doesn't mean that watching television is any sort of passive, mindless act. One of television's great pleasures is pulling apart its tangles of allusion, in-joke, and industry connection. When I watch a show, I imdb the living fuck out of it, chasing down the lead actors, the guest stars, the executive producers, the competition in its time slot. I read related criticism and commentary. I sign up for TWoP recap notification.

Is this substantially different from the work of a great reader or art appreciator? They read the text or walk the galleries, mentally cataloguing exactly the same things: reference and context and influence. And yet those with arcane knowledge of literature or the visual arts get to be called "intellectuals." But those of us with encyclopedic knowledge of modern media? Geeks. Nerds. Game-show novelties. If you're really lucky and happen to be a particularly telegenic geek, well, you might score a gig as a VH1 commentator. That's right: the best we can fucking hope is to have the respectability of Hal Sparks.

The compulsion among trend-setters, taste-makers, and pseudo-intellectuals to vilify the commercial or commonly enjoyed is like a Saturday-afternoon trip to IKEA: intensely frustrating and a little bit retarded. Chuck Klosterman, in one of his characteristic (and characteristically passing) fits of awesome, wrote the following: "Commercial success does not legitimize musical consequence, but it does legitimize cultural consequence." The fact that he was writing about Guns 'N Roses at the time should not detract from how fucking obvious this should be, not just for music, but for all forms of entertainment. According to recent studies, the average American watches 30 hours of television a week. 30 hours a week. Don't tell me that TV is inconsequential, a technological trifle. Even if you don't deem television worthwhile enough to wrest your fine eyes away from Talk of the Town, it is impossible to deny that television is culturally significant, and maybe - just maybe - an interest in television might have some academic or even - dare I say it - intellectual merit.

I'm not saying that television will provide the answers to all of our grand sociological questions. I'm not saying that the West Wing clarifies Locke or that the subtext of Smallville provides necessary and illuminating insight into the later works of Foucault. I'm not even saying that the Democrats really should have bothered to think a bit more critically about media in Middle America instead of trading insults with Fox News, all "whatever, dude, we've got Tim Robbins and Janeane Garofolo." Well, okay, maybe I am. But my point is this: we should all get off our elitist, highly educated high horses and stop equating "low brow" with low quality and low worth.

Be a connoisseur, be an authority, be a geek. But don't be a snob, asshole. It just makes you look stupid.