How TV Can Make You Smarter

By Allison Shoemaker

How TV Can Make You Smarter is a lively guide that shows readers the numerous emotional and intellectual benefits of TV.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, television can do more than help you veg out, chill, and escape.

Author and TV critic Allison Shoemaker rewires our thinking to show readers how to take advantage of our 24/7 access to this ever-evolving medium.

• TV is a powerful tool and How TV Can Make You Smarter will teach you how to use it.
• Covers a wide selection of diverse genres from scripted comedies, dramas, and classics to reality and beyond
• Find acceptance in embracing "bad" TV, and learn to love yourself in the morning.

Lessons include learning how to gain empathy (Mad Men), broadening your perspective (Rupaul's Drag Race), and discovering how working within boundaries (Doctor Who) or breaking them apart (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) can be good for you.

Part of the HOW series, the accessible and authoritative guides to engaging with the arts the world, and ourselves.

• Filled with smart, unintimidating content in a giftable foil-stamped package
• Great for TV and movie buffs, Netflix and Hulu subscribers, DVD owners, and anyone who loves to unwind with television
• Packed with insightful tips and tricks for making the most out of what you watch
• You'll love this book if you love books like Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson, and I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781797203492

Allison Shoemaker

Allison Shoemaker is a TV and film critic based in Chicago, IL.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

You’ve done it. You picked up this book. You have, at least tentatively, accepted the premise emblazoned across its cover. You have allowed for the possibility that one of the great myths of the age is false: that what is ubiquitous, or, worse still, popular, must be inherently bad for you. Congratulations! The energy you might have wasted on feeling guilty about what you like, judging yourself for how you spend your time, or denying yourself what would bring your mind or heart pleasure, you can instead spend on other things. Go for a walk. Listen to music. Make yourself a nice sandwich. Or go ahead and do what, according to Nielsen, 95 percent of US households do from time to time: Watch some television.

The idea that TV rots your brain is almost as old as the medium itself. When Newton N. Minow, a chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by President Kennedy, addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, he did exactly what a lot of people do nowadays: He said that sure, there were good programs—important ones—but that TV was, on the whole, a wasteland. (It’s commonly called the Wasteland Speech.) But in his remarks, Minow praised the great live dramas of the 1950s, as well as contemporaneous shows like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, which remains one of TV’s finest accomplishments. When television is good, he said, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.

Minow recognized the potential for greatness and for corruption alike in television, praising trailblazers like Serling even as he decried laziness, irresponsibility, and dishonesty. But if ABC’s Work It, a particularly lousy sitcom, were a novel, we would never use it as an excuse to declare all fiction worthless. Nor were Minow’s concerns limited to quality. He was focused on community responsibility and the advancement of education and culture and feared the accessibility of television—about the harm that could come from every family having a wasteland at their fingertips, a universe of detergent commercials and paint-by-numbers comedies. But if the bad stuff is a click away, then so is all the brilliance, and never has that been more true than now: If you have a TV, or a computer, or a phone for crying out loud, you have access to some of the greatest art of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. So do countless others. That means that you’re equipped to discuss, debate, and dissect what comes before you with an ease that Minow could hardly have imagined. Wheels turn. Synapses fire. Opinions change. The mind engages, stays engaged, and once that happens, what do you know: TV can, and will, make you smarter.

You can choose to see a wasteland for one, or a wonderland for many. The latter puts your brain to far better use—and it’s more fun, too.

PART I

WHAT IS TV, AND WHY IS THERE SO MUCH OF IT?

WHAT’S TV ANYWAY, AND HOW IS IT NOT A MOVIE?

In days gone by, television was a pretty straightforward proposition. If someone was watching TV, it meant they had their family set tuned to one of the major networks. On the screen would be a show: I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, Moonlighting. That show would be interspersed with advertisements, sold by the networks. Eventually, if you had a VCR, you could set things up to tape your favorite shows while you were out.

Times have changed. Yes, there are still commercials, but not always, and if you missed The Sopranos or Breaking Bad the first time around, you can now head straight over to On Demand, a DVD set, or one of many streaming services to catch up. Netflix gradually transformed from the place that sent you DVDs of The West Wing through the mail to the home of House of Cards, its first original series. Now, with the rise of the Streaming Wars, Netflix’s playing field grows increasingly crowded. HBO and other premium cable services remain dominant, but basic cable networks like FX and AMC have also had wild successes. Sometimes the watercooler show of the moment is still broadcast on a major network (like NBC’s This Is Us) or one of those cable titans (HBO’s Game of Thrones, FX’s Atlanta); sometimes it comes from a more unexpected corner, like BBC America (Killing Eve), Pop (Schitt’s Creek), or the invaluable PBS (Downton Abbey). It’s an ever-changing world.

Yet the most fundamental part of the DNA of TV remains unchanged. Put most simply, a television show is any program created for and released by a network, be it broadcast, cable, streaming, or another such source. There are exceptions, but by and large, television is a place you head to for serialized storytelling: a larger story made up of smaller stories, viewed in sequence. That category excludes some major players: event programs, such as concerts, awards shows, and other such programs, as well as made-for-television movies, talk and variety shows, and the mighty anthology show (like