INAUGURATING THE SEMESTER OF THE TV SHOW

When I was in college I used to have an argument with one of my good friends, a future filmmaker who would not give up his allegiance to the cinema at any cost. I’d annoy him whenever I could with a simple argument: television, I’d tell him, was set to overtake the cinema as the highest form of audiovisual art, the possibility to tell long form narratives with intense character development foretelling a genre that could be as complex as the novel without losing any of the aesthetic sensibilities which the cinema has developed in its hundred year history.
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At the time, I was admittedly a TV newbie, having been deprived of the best American programming from the 80s and 90s while living in a conservative Brahmin household still thanklessly and ineffectively holding on to some type of anti-Western puritanism, which basically meant my early relationship to television was almost exclusively limited to children’s cartoons and sports (both of which I still love dearly). And so, when I finally had the opportunity to watch TV unencumbered by any suspicious family gaze, I devoured anything and everything, binging on Alias, 24, Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, Beauty and the Geek, and untold hours of a reality TV genre that was just coming into its own and of which I remain a bit embarrassed for having consumed (and continuing to consume) so willingly.

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