Americans Like To Watch Trash!

[Montrovant]

Mass Effect 3 is HBO Meets Star Wars News Opinion PCMag.com

Here is a gritty adult Sci Fi universe.

AND if you want to see it as TV in it's original form, it was known as Babylon 5.

Even though Mass Effect was a blatant rip-off of B5; it was a great series of games.

Babylon 5.....maybe the best Sci-Fi series ever...

I've heard good things about it, but never watched it.

Better than Farscape? Better than Firefly? The good Star Treks?

this took place on a Space Station....to me thats different than the ones on a ship exploring the Galaxy.....but i thought it was somewhat better than DS9.....not much, but better.....some of the aliens were pretty unique.....the Vorlons and the Shadows were pretty cool.....their ships were organic.....it lasted 5 seasons by design and definitely worth a look.....as well as the 3-4 movies that followed....

I didn't like DS9, in large part because it was on a station and Star Trek is (IMO) supposed to be about the exploration.

 

[Harry Dresden]

Mass Effect 3 is HBO Meets Star Wars News Opinion PCMag.com

Here is a gritty adult Sci Fi universe.

AND if you want to see it as TV in it's original form, it was known as Babylon 5.

Even though Mass Effect was a blatant rip-off of B5; it was a great series of games.

Babylon 5.....maybe the best Sci-Fi series ever...

I've heard good things about it, but never watched it.

Better than Farscape? Better than Firefly? The good Star Treks?

this took place on a Space Station....to me thats different than the ones on a ship exploring the Galaxy.....but i thought it was somewhat better than DS9.....not much, but better.....some of the aliens were pretty unique.....the Vorlons and the Shadows were pretty cool.....their ships were organic.....it lasted 5 seasons by design and definitely worth a look.....as well as the 3-4 movies that followed....

I didn't like DS9, in large part because it was on a station and Star Trek is (IMO) supposed to be about the exploration.

well they did end up going through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant....DS9 went up in story quality when Worf joined the show in my opinion....

 

[Pogo]

Well now you've piqued my curiousity. I've never seen the book or read the movie.

Our internet dependence cuts deep, point well taken, but I don't quite see them as similar -- on the internet you're still in control and with enough content can go fetch any kind of info you want -- far more unlimited. I really don't find myself melting down at those times, I just make the call to the ISP and then figure, "time to play some music" or something else creative.

The perils of TV, besides sitting you down like a sponge and dictating your senses, is that that shuts off the imagination. That's why radio will always be a superior medium. Watch a movie on TV and all the tiniest details are scripted by somebody else and spoon-fed. Listen to the same piece as a radio drama and your own imagination engages to create what this character looks like, what the room looks like, what the action looks like-- infinitely more creative on both ends. Good mental exercise. Physical too because you're not pinned to one spot -- you can walk around and do other things besides become an indolent wart on the barcalounger.

Not nice to shut off the imagination.

I wonder if you are this contemptuous of stage acting?

Strange question .... certainly not. I love theater. It's a great art form, I've thoroughly enjoyed working in it or just watching it. And certainly offers infinitely more scope for expression than a two-dimensional propaganda machine.

I think of theater as a book that springs legs and comes to life.

Movies though leave me flat, which is the main reason I've never seen "451". Usually if I'm in a movie theater it's because somebody dragged me in there screaming and kicking.

You bemoan the loss of imagination in film because everything is presented to you. While certainly stage is more limited, it still presents you with much of the same information as film and requires far less imagination than reading or listening to a story. Why, then, is theater a great art form while you deride film/television and those who watch them?

I didn't opine on film. I opined on television -- as a fatally flawed technology. I didn't opine on the audience of either one; I noted the psychological manipulation going on, which is at best commentary on the vulnerability of that audience. I don't see that audience as a subject of derision; I see them as victims.

You described television watchers as an 'indolent wart on the barcalounger'. You said TV sits you down like a sponge and dictates your senses and shuts off your imagination. You said television makes the viewer's mind jello in order to sell them Jello. That sounds like plenty of opinion of television audiences, not just the vulnerability of the audience, unless you are claiming that such reactions are a universal and unavoidable reaction to watching anything at all on television.

That's exactly what I mean (the final clause). My indictment, and the party I consider guilty in all this, is the medium. The viewer is its, perhaps a better term than "victim" might be "pawn". I used to be one. The medium is a propaganda device, and the viewer is its target.

You seem to ignore that some television is commercial free, that many people watch television without commercials either through the use of dvr or dvds or services such as Netflix. Are HBO and Showtime programs selling Jello? Difficult without commercials, I would imagine.

Not at all; I spent a lot of years working in both noncommercial and commercial broadcasting (though not TV), I'm keenly aware of the functions, contrasts and purpose of both. But TV still comes down to the medium, which is fatally flawed, a device that is effective at one thing: single-direction propaganda (directly and indirectly). PBS is, taken as a whole, probably the least waste of time in its realm, or so I determined when I was mulling over kicking it to the curb. But the reality was (is) that virtually any of that kind of content is available via YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and the like, some of which you mentioned (which I don't consider the same thing). Ultimately I concluded that anything I used TV for (which wasn't much by then) I could get via internet with the exception of live sports, which usually is a separate cost anyway. So away it went.

In a large picture, which I really don't have the time to delve deeply into for a while (workload building up) it's also a matter of institutional TV being completely dominated and controlled by a concentration of megalithic elitely structured commercial operations whose interests by definition are, and must be, manipulation of the one-way communication avenue for the operation's own self-interest (as opposed to the public interest), which ensures that their programming (ironically appropriate term) will reflect a severly narrow world view and their content will always be confined to the superficial. And on the technical side its sensory-dictatorial nature simply doesn't sync well with its human sponge on any level except the sensational and hopelessly superficial. I just don't think it has the capacity for any more than that. No matter how objectively a noble noncommercial entity may try to make it work, something about its relationship to the brain as a kind of sensory intravenous needle makes the mode of communication itself --regardless of the content -- its own kind of dishonest.

I've concluded the most honest programming that exists on television is live sports. But even then, its two-dimensional nature strips out so much of the essence of the actual action -- the viewer still gets the information of what happens but doesn't get the feel -- as anyone who goes to a live sport event after seeing it only on TV can attest. It amounts to a kind of sensual perversion, where raw emotion gets emphasized at the expense of "tangible context", if that makes sense.

There's also the fact that while television certainly requires far less visual imagination than other mediums, it absolutely can require more imagination in other areas. As an example, it is extremely difficult to provide the detailed thoughts of characters the way you can in books. Television and movies have time and pacing constraints that books do not. This allows books to insert a great deal more information than the film mediums.

Not sure what you mean on this one. My earlier point was that a book, or even an audio source, leaves the reader/listener's imagination open to plug in what that character looks like or what this action feels like, while the TV picture dictates it. For this reason the former group (the nonvisual) lets the imagination breathe, while television shuts it down and dictates. If this is what you mean I agree.

And you still have not explained what it is about television that is so different from theater that the former is without imagination while the latter is great art. Based on your comparison to radio, it would seem you are opposed to the visual component of TV, but as theater employs a large visual component, it leaves your statements unexplained.

Good point -- it isn't just being visual.

For one thing, a play is a deep (or at least far deeper) exercise of a storyline that TV can handle (or put another way the effective attention span of theater is far superior), but the main aspect I guess, and this is very related, is vibrance. The art in the interpretation of a playwright's or librettist's work by actors and set designers is common to both, but in the theater they're real live people. It has depth and human expression and no net if something fails. What comes out of the TV is fixed, calculated, and dead.

I suppose an analogy would be listening to recorded music versus seeing the same music performed live. Obviously there's an interest in the latter; I suspect the reasoning is similar -- it feeds a part of the soul that the technical transcription simply doesn't have the capacity to do.

That's about as deep as I can ruminate right now, if that makes sense -- unfortunate timing as regards personal workload

I don't care if you hate all TV. When you provide poorly explained reasoning for that, and do it with the air of pretension you have here, I feel the need to comment.

Excellent commentary it was -- food for thought. It forced me into a nice further examination. I'll try to pick it up again when time permits. There is much worthy in this examination.

 

[Montrovant]

I wonder if you are this contemptuous of stage acting?

Strange question .... certainly not. I love theater. It's a great art form, I've thoroughly enjoyed working in it or just watching it. And certainly offers infinitely more scope for expression than a two-dimensional propaganda machine.

I think of theater as a book that springs legs and comes to life.

Movies though leave me flat, which is the main reason I've never seen "451". Usually if I'm in a movie theater it's because somebody dragged me in there screaming and kicking.

You bemoan the loss of imagination in film because everything is presented to you. While certainly stage is more limited, it still presents you with much of the same information as film and requires far less imagination than reading or listening to a story. Why, then, is theater a great art form while you deride film/television and those who watch them?

I didn't opine on film. I opined on television -- as a fatally flawed technology. I didn't opine on the audience of either one; I noted the psychological manipulation going on, which is at best commentary on the vulnerability of that audience. I don't see that audience as a subject of derision; I see them as victims.

You described television watchers as an 'indolent wart on the barcalounger'. You said TV sits you down like a sponge and dictates your senses and shuts off your imagination. You said television makes the viewer's mind jello in order to sell them Jello. That sounds like plenty of opinion of television audiences, not just the vulnerability of the audience, unless you are claiming that such reactions are a universal and unavoidable reaction to watching anything at all on television.

That's exactly what I mean (the final clause). My indictment, and the party I consider guilty in all this, is the medium. The viewer is its, perhaps a better term than "victim" might be "pawn". I used to be one. The medium is a propaganda device, and the viewer is its target.

You seem to ignore that some television is commercial free, that many people watch television without commercials either through the use of dvr or dvds or services such as Netflix. Are HBO and Showtime programs selling Jello? Difficult without commercials, I would imagine.

Not at all; I spent a lot of years working in both noncommercial and commercial broadcasting (though not TV), I'm keenly aware of the functions, contrasts and purpose of both. But TV still comes down to the medium, which is fatally flawed, a device that is effective at one thing: single-direction propaganda (directly and indirectly). PBS is, taken as a whole, probably the least waste of time in its realm, or so I determined when I was mulling over kicking it to the curb. But the reality was (is) that virtually any of that kind of content is available via YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and the like, some of which you mentioned (which I don't consider the same thing). Ultimately I concluded that anything I used TV for (which wasn't much by then) I could get via internet with the exception of live sports, which usually is a separate cost anyway. So away it went.

In a large picture, which I really don't have the time to delve deeply into for a while (workload building up) it's also a matter of institutional TV being completely dominated and controlled by a concentration of megalithic elitely structured commercial operations whose interests by definition are, and must be, manipulation of the one-way communication avenue for the operation's own self-interest (as opposed to the public interest), which ensures that their programming (ironically appropriate term) will reflect a severly narrow world view and their content will always be confined to the superficial. And on the technical side its sensory-dictatorial nature simply doesn't sync well with its human sponge on any level except the sensational and hopelessly superficial. I just don't think it has the capacity for any more than that. No matter how objectively a noble noncommercial entity may try to make it work, something about its relationship to the brain as a kind of sensory intravenous needle makes the mode of communication itself --regardless of the content -- its own kind of dishonest.

I've concluded the most honest programming that exists on television is live sports. But even then, its two-dimensional nature strips out so much of the essence of the actual action -- the viewer still gets the information of what happens but doesn't get the feel -- as anyone who goes to a live sport event after seeing it only on TV can attest. It amounts to a kind of sensual perversion, where raw emotion gets emphasized at the expense of "tangible context", if that makes sense.

There's also the fact that while television certainly requires far less visual imagination than other mediums, it absolutely can require more imagination in other areas. As an example, it is extremely difficult to provide the detailed thoughts of characters the way you can in books. Television and movies have time and pacing constraints that books do not. This allows books to insert a great deal more information than the film mediums.

Not sure what you mean on this one. My earlier point was that a book, or even an audio source, leaves the reader/listener's imagination open to plug in what that character looks like or what this action feels like, while the TV picture dictates it. For this reason the former group (the nonvisual) lets the imagination breathe, while television shuts it down and dictates. If this is what you mean I agree.

And you still have not explained what it is about television that is so different from theater that the former is without imagination while the latter is great art. Based on your comparison to radio, it would seem you are opposed to the visual component of TV, but as theater employs a large visual component, it leaves your statements unexplained.

Good point -- it isn't just being visual.

For one thing, a play is a deep (or at least far deeper) exercise of a storyline that TV can handle (or put another way the effective attention span of theater is far superior), but the main aspect I guess, and this is very related, is vibrance. The art in the interpretation of a playwright's or librettist's work by actors and set designers is common to both, but in the theater they're real live people. It has depth and human expression and no net if something fails. What comes out of the TV is fixed, calculated, and dead.

I suppose an analogy would be listening to recorded music versus seeing the same music performed live. Obviously there's an interest in the latter; I suspect the reasoning is similar -- it feeds a part of the soul that the technical transcription simply doesn't have the capacity to do.

That's about as deep as I can ruminate right now, if that makes sense -- unfortunate timing as regards personal workload

I don't care if you hate all TV. When you provide poorly explained reasoning for that, and do it with the air of pretension you have here, I feel the need to comment.

Excellent commentary it was -- food for thought. It forced me into a nice further examination. I'll try to pick it up again when time permits. There is much worthy in this examination.

While I disagree with you to at least some degree, I think you've done a good job elaborating on your thoughts here.

Yes, the people who run commercial television are going to be worried about making money before anything else. That is usually true of any business. However, I disagree that it makes the content on commercial TV as limited as you seem to think; there is actually a fairly wide selection of programming to choose from. Pay channels can do more, but I'm not sure how much of that is related to the commercial aspect and how much is based on different content rules from the FCC. And I don't think the companies that pay for commercial time care overly much about the content of the shows so long as they are popular and therefore the best advertising possible.

I understand that some people find live performances, whether sports or music or theater, to be far superior to recorded or broadcast versions. I generally do not. I find the quality better in film and music and I prefer the more detailed view that comes from television to live sports. Those things can be fun once in a while, but I wouldn't want to do them all the time. I also don't much enjoy crowds and television viewing allows me the ability to watch things on my own, not surrounded by strangers who more than likely will annoy me while I'm trying to watch whatever event.

As far as your desire to use more imagination, that's fine. I don't enjoy listening to audio books and assume the same would hold true with similar radio broadcasts, but I do read plenty of books. However, I think that television/film and books are simply different forms of entertainment and needn't be directly compared. I'm not looking for the same kind of experience when I read as when I watch a show. I don't always want to have to imagine how things look, particularly as I'm terrible at visualization. And in both cases, the pleasure comes from enjoying the fruits of someone else's imagination. Put another way, I could take your argument a step further and say that radio doesn't let you use your imagination enough as you are provided with the voices and sounds of a story; go further and why are you relying on someone else to provide a story? Use your own imagination!

Preferring live to televised is something I can understand even if I don't feel the same way. I feel I have a much better handle on your opinion of the subject now.