Life, Writing, Weirdness

If I had to pick a single subgenre of rock music to base my entire collection on, I would be very sad to lose the breadth and eclectic variety I’ve gathered into an extensive playlist spanning nine decades across multiple subgenres of rock and beyond. I would nonetheless not hesitate longer than it took to gather the breath to speak the words Progressive Rock, although I’d say Prog Rock out loud.

I like wild, inventive, and creative music, but as importantly, I like music that’s about stuff – important stuff, big stuff, interesting stuff – and I’m more likely to find that in Prog Rock than anywhere else. Oh, it’s present in every type of music, even in pretty much every variety of pop, but that’s not the standard. A lot of popular music is just mindless bubblegum for people to dance to or sing along with. And that’s okay, it’s even fun. It’s just not what I want most of the time. Yes, I have some soft spots for some of the music of my youth, and yes, I can bop along to some electronic music, and yes there’s some synthpop that really speaks to me, and yes some Punk is so awesome it makes my soul bleed.

But Prog Rock is where my musical heart is.

Wanting my music to be about stuff translates to other art forms as well. For example, most of my episodic video viewing (TV shows for the older folks in the audience as this doesn’t appear to me to be the way things work anymore and hasn’t for a little while) comes under the heading of Science Fiction. There doesn’t have to be a speculative element to get my eyes on it, but it helps. It’s also easiest to find episodes or entire series that are about stuff. Sometimes that stuff is very tied into the time period the show was made in, and sometimes it’s the same stuff every episode. Both of those are okay.

But it’s not like that’s the only genre of television you can find substantive discussion happening in. It’s just those discussions aren’t always the ones I want. Police procedurals and legal dramas aren’t my thing, for example, at least not set in whatever the current world looks like. If the basic objective of the show is to show me that there are a certain number of really shitty humans in the world, I can figure that out from consuming news media of various types, thank you. I’m not a reality TV fan because it’s mainly semi-scripted and definitely polished reality, or a game show dressed up as reality. Generic action stuff will once in a while have something, but generic action gets boring for me very quickly. Similarly westerns, spy thrillers, and so on.

Sitcoms are the worst, though.

Hear me out.

Not all of them, but the vast majority of sitcoms are essentially the same episode over and over. There are several flavours, of course. Escalating misunderstanding until a big reveal, e.g. Three’s Company. Characters find themselves in a ridiculous situation, e.g. Two and a Half Men. Characters annoy each other until someone gets angry and blows up so someone can realize they’re wrong, e.g. later seasons of the Big Bang Theory. One cast member is a jerk to another for most of the episode, eventually realizes they were wrong, e.g. The Goldbergs.

Then the writers see how many jokes and one-liners can be strung together until you get to a heartwarming family/friendship moment at the end.

You get the occasional show that every episode is about something. I’ll pull MASH as an example here, because while it’s essentially dedicated to bringing the horrors of war into our living rooms, it also does it in a way with characters who have to deal with real issues. Shows like All in the Family routinely dealt with big issues but also had fluff episodes here and there to break the tension. And then you have a show here and there that every episode has an overarching theme of something significant that they deal with and sometimes they deal with something bigger, too. I’ll use The Golden Girls as an example here.

But most shows, you’re lucky to get one or two episodes in a 20+ episode season dealing with something substantial.

I have watched any number of sitcoms over the years but with the proliferation of streaming services in the last few, particularly free services that add some commercials into things to pay for showing classic shows, other folks in my family are discovering classics.

Recently, the old Drew Carey Show was playing in the background while I was relaxing in the living room doing some slow work editing a novella. Half a dozen episodes played over the course of a couple of hours of a show I found entertaining on first watch in the late 1990s when it aired. Aside from the fact that I was doing some editing and not really trying to focus too hard while I was doing it, the show was distracting but mostly not for more than a moment or two, a joke or two. Otherwise, it was boring.

Yup, boring. I know I was supposed to be doing work at the time, but I couldn’t muster the interest to care. Five episodes went by and I still couldn’t. Those weren’t about anything, just a bunch of jokes strung together in a silly situation.

But the sixth episode was the introduction of Drew’s brother who was quickly discovered to be a crossdresser (as presented in the episode), and Drew both rapidly adapting the change in how he understood his brother and then making his boss adapt too. And then the next episode was about nothing again and I lost interest enough that when the room was empty I turned the TV off and picked up the editing pace.

When I was finished editing, I started to think about my reaction to the show, during the course of which I remembered reading an essay about how the production of sitcoms in the Streaming Era, apparently widely agreed to start about 2015, has dropped to about 10% of what it was in the “2^nd Golden Age” of TV of 1995-2015.

These aren’t necessarily related. Classic sitcoms are heavily consumed on streaming services. They just aren’t making many new ones because they don’t fit the business model for some reason.

And so we don’t even get those shows with occasional episodes dealing with a current social or political issues. Which I think, even though I personally wouldn’t bother watching most of them, is probably a substantial loss for society as a whole.

Be well, everyone.