Slow TV - News

Alexander Genis. Photo from personal archive

In the late maestro Fellini film brought housewife whose studio for the month selected TV to show how terrible live without him. Hall was crying, unhappy sobbed TV back – and all ended well, but only for a while.

Today TV, often feeling like an unnecessary throwback to earlier information age, dying in the course of evolution – slowly but surely. This is indicated by the figures, which are reluctant to share the whales of the American television industry. The big four channels (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) with unprecedented acceleration still loses viewers and advertising revenue. First they change with just anyone, the second goes away, because the new technology allows you to watch the program, avoiding the “kommershelz” who pay for them.

Faced with an unprecedented crisis, television giants are looking for, as they say in America, “silver bullet” that could solve their problems with one stone. To do this you need to create a show that would return to the screen the entire country. Now, as every spring, producers discover new TV series, but that the practice of recent years, almost all of them disappear after the first season, because no one is unable to collect a large enough audience – the one that was used.

past, and the truth was different. Success merilsya fractions: the popular TV series staring quarter of the country. The famous comedy “I Love Lucy” (1951-1958) attracted 50 million for the evening. The same thing happened with westerns, detective stories, soap operas, news. Television has united the country better than its constitution. Entertaining and edifying, it created a global overtones produced by all the jargon and understandable to find a common denominator to which the nation was divided evenly.

arrived without anything to America, I at first felt culturally deaf, because they do not recognize jokes, missed cues and lost in the metaphors. The natives looked at me with the same astonishment with which the Koreans would react to a stranger, had not heard about Stirlitz.

Today it’s all over – and it seems like forever. TV, is not just an American, has ceased to be universal. And not because the Internet offered him a crushing alternative. Changed the nature of post-industrial society. Having reached a critical point, mass culture is crushed into smaller pieces, which picks up the same TV, but has learned to temper the appetite.

Dinosaurs, as we humans know for myself die first. The same happens with the media. The big studios to attract advertisers, we need tens of millions of viewers, cable, living on the subscription rather than advertising, missing 4.3 million, which is easier to please and easier to please. Dimensionless audience as a tourist menu, calculated on the average taste: dry chicken. You can feed a few delicacies, including risky.

This is where the genius lies the paradox of our progress. New does not kill the old, and compels him to radical change. Photo by canceling the plot, has opened a net of painting, including the non-objective, artistic expression. Once removed, the realism of a competitor, the movie theater has led to the existential drama of the absurd austerity. After losing the Internet race, the newspaper was not so much to share news, how to protect them from the reader, taking away – and comprehending – the most important.

Television loses on all fronts. Television characters go like 83-year-old Barbara Walters, who was able (in the days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal) to gather information from the screen 74 million people. Disappears Institute Evening News, summarizing the day passed, and intolerant of his authoritative verdict. And, of course, now there are many ways to watch movies without having to wait until it appears on the small screen.

separating from other people’s roles, the TV is looking for – and finds – itself a genre that he will not be able to select. In my opinion, this is – the grandiose long-term performances, which will replace the twenty-first century is that of the nineteenth century gave thick epic novels. Flexible – and profitable! – Cable channels lure writers of the opportunities that the author does not give any book nor Hollywood. This – the circulation and scale. So Jonathan Franzen, who is considered the last great hope of prose in the U.S., a new novel by not writing the paper, and once for a cable channel HBO, which affords the most daring dramatic experiments. Another subscription channel – Show Time – saddled history. Grasp the Renaissance, he develops his whole families. At first, it was 38-series “The Tudors”, now – “Borgia.” Such projects require a mighty effort of international cooperation, s ubstantial costs, committed, though not many of these, as before, the fans, but most importantly – a new concept.

Critics call it “slow TV».

How

exacting practice slow food, captured the best restaurants and cuisines of the world, and the “slow television” in a hurry. No longer chasing the other, it opens up the half-forgotten joys detailed story, branching plot, detailed interior, priceless suits, confusing plot, complex extramarital affairs and intricately-contradictory. All that will not keep any cover or in a movie, find a place on the silver screen. Charter catch up, it slows down reality, offering us endless as the tales of Scheherazade, stories. Thanks to them, the TV did not die, and comes in a golden age that began with the fact that it is no longer in a hurry.