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Communal Experiences
Apr. 24th, 2009 08:40 pmI've been using my Netflix account to watch the Dr. Who reboot and have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the first season. I enjoyed the show in my youth until Colin Baker became the Doctor, and being borderline disgusted with the 1996 TV Movie I stayed away from the reboot until just recently.
In doing a little Whovian research I came across this bit on Wikipedia "It has been said that watching Doctor Who from a position of safety "behind the sofa" (as the Doctor Who exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in London was titled) and peering cautiously out to see if the frightening part was over is one of the great shared experiences of British childhood." It got me thinking about the nature of communal entertainment experiences, and how I really wish my daughter's generation will have one. I just don't know what it might be.
More specifically, I wish that by the time she is nineish there is a TV show or book series that is reasonable intelligent, well made and by turns funny, tense and scary. Violence can be lethal but not bloody. Romance is present but sex isn't. And the characters are lovable because of their flaws. and something that everyone watches. In other words, something like Dr. Who, or the original Star Trek (though in my youth we all caught it in mid-afternoon re-runs), or Harry Potter.
I don't know that this will happen, because as it stands all of the early evening time slots have been ceded to shows about sex (the current sitcom staple, and very little of what's on right now rises above insipid in my arrogant opinion), and the later shows are about death (murder and forensics), and even those things that aren't precisely those are still way more sex and death than I'd like for the age I'm thinking of. And the books are all about magical teenage vampires in co-ed gothic boarding schools, mixing sex and death and Harry Potter all at once. But in six years, who knows. (Don't think I have a problem with sex and death, but I don't think, say, How I Met Your Mother or Criminal Minds are really appropraite for a 9 year old). Sure, I'll be introducing my daugther to Dr. Who and Star trek and Harry Potter, but those connections won't be shared with her peers.
It's easy for an iconoclasitic pseudo-intellectual like me to pooh-pooh the power of communal experiences, but I do have to admit that there is a power to them. The truly mass consciousness ones make sure that you're part of the society, while the smaller, subtler ones help you pick like minded people out of the crowd (many of my friends read the same books purchased from the same Scholastic book fairs, so that years later we can reference things that none of our friends at the time enjoyed with the other people of our age who also found themon our own). Both are useful, and powerful things. But I'd like my daughter's to be built on a foundation of quality rather than drek.
In doing a little Whovian research I came across this bit on Wikipedia "It has been said that watching Doctor Who from a position of safety "behind the sofa" (as the Doctor Who exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in London was titled) and peering cautiously out to see if the frightening part was over is one of the great shared experiences of British childhood." It got me thinking about the nature of communal entertainment experiences, and how I really wish my daughter's generation will have one. I just don't know what it might be.
More specifically, I wish that by the time she is nineish there is a TV show or book series that is reasonable intelligent, well made and by turns funny, tense and scary. Violence can be lethal but not bloody. Romance is present but sex isn't. And the characters are lovable because of their flaws. and something that everyone watches. In other words, something like Dr. Who, or the original Star Trek (though in my youth we all caught it in mid-afternoon re-runs), or Harry Potter.
I don't know that this will happen, because as it stands all of the early evening time slots have been ceded to shows about sex (the current sitcom staple, and very little of what's on right now rises above insipid in my arrogant opinion), and the later shows are about death (murder and forensics), and even those things that aren't precisely those are still way more sex and death than I'd like for the age I'm thinking of. And the books are all about magical teenage vampires in co-ed gothic boarding schools, mixing sex and death and Harry Potter all at once. But in six years, who knows. (Don't think I have a problem with sex and death, but I don't think, say, How I Met Your Mother or Criminal Minds are really appropraite for a 9 year old). Sure, I'll be introducing my daugther to Dr. Who and Star trek and Harry Potter, but those connections won't be shared with her peers.
It's easy for an iconoclasitic pseudo-intellectual like me to pooh-pooh the power of communal experiences, but I do have to admit that there is a power to them. The truly mass consciousness ones make sure that you're part of the society, while the smaller, subtler ones help you pick like minded people out of the crowd (many of my friends read the same books purchased from the same Scholastic book fairs, so that years later we can reference things that none of our friends at the time enjoyed with the other people of our age who also found themon our own). Both are useful, and powerful things. But I'd like my daughter's to be built on a foundation of quality rather than drek.
