Entertainments

People spend billions on advertisements in the belief that they change people's attitudes. They seem to work. The shows must have an impact too.

To film a TV show you need to have room for the cameras and the lights and for characters to come in and out dramatically. The room being filmed is therefore necessarily large. So when you watch, you see something larger than life--or at least your life. How come the people like me have bigger houses and more stuff? And they don't have much work to do, either income-generating or household maintenance.

A play now and again might give you a sense of things you could aspire to. A steady diet of amusements in which everyone has plenty of stuff without obvious effort has got to effect you too. I'd think it would redefine what "normal" is. Work 9to5 isn't normal on TV, and even on shows where a character's job is significant, the work doesn't usually seem to be the center. I can think of exceptions, and you can probably think of many more, but on the whole that seems to be the rule.

A fantasy now and then is harmless, and probably good. We want something different from everyday life, with a little drama and conflict, or silliness that we wouldn't care for in real life. I don't want to watch an assembly line, or a man writing code, or another planning meeting.

I don't see how a steady diet of entertainments can avoid shaping your attitudes about what "normal" life is like--and not in a good way. A steady diet of "entertainments" that were "realistic" sounds cruel and unusual. It seems as though many of us grew up with one foot in a land where problems are solved and there are no trade-offs and everyone seems wealthy without effort. One candy bar is good, but a box of them...

Since we are, by and large, rich enough that existential problems are rare, we don't have as many reminders that the magic land isn't real.

A lot of the action in society happens from the tails of the distributions in attitudes. It doesn't take a very large change in the average to make major changes in the proportions of the political players, or the cultural players. Can you imagine someone 50 years ago offering to "celebrate her abortion?" That fringe wasn't nearly big enough. They were there, but didn't seem to be applauded by very many.

It hasn't been hard to find people in every era who believed that the vague "rich" were responsible for our woes, and that if they were found and properly shaken down all would be well. We have a significant number of them today among the nominally educated.(*) Open a newspaper Click a news-site and find what used to be fringe personality problems staking out self-important claims to be society leaders. Most of us don't care, but the tails of the distributions have shifted a lot, and that's where the cultural action is. And the political action.

Don Quixote lost his mind from over-indulging in heroic romances. At least he got a sense of duty out of them. Us--not quite so noble.

(*) Perhaps I am unduly snarky here, but most of these people I've met seem not to have spent much study in "subjects where there is a right answer or the bridge falls down" or in "subjects where there is perennial debate and good arguments all around."

Remakes

Freely stealing material:

An unfortunate man broke the law and went to prison. He was feeling very scared his first night alone in his cell.

After the lights went out he heard one of the other inmates in a cell quite a long way off shout out "32". Then all the prisoners burst out laughing. When the laughter subsided he heard another inmate call out "66". Once again followed by a burst of laughter. This went on for some time before they all fell to sleep.

The man was intrigued by this behavior.

The next morning during breakfast in the eating area the man gathered up his courage and spoke to one of the older prisoners and asked him what was going on.

The older inmate said, "Many of us have been in here for a long time. There's not much you can do when the lights go out. So, to amuse ourselves we tell jokes. But after a while we all seemed to know all the jokes, so it became easier to just give the jokes a number and just shout out the number rather than taking all that time to tell the joke."

Ahhh. Now it all made sense.

So, for the next few weeks, the man listened to the numbers and found out what joke corresponded to what number and which numbers got the biggest laughs.

Finally, one night he decided to join in. After about five or six jokes had been told "by the numbers". He shouted out "22!" Nothing happened? Dead silence. He thought that maybe the others didn't hear him. So, he waited till a few more jokes were numbered and shouted out, as loud as he could, "66!" Again, just silence? This happened to him about five times.

The next morning he just had to find out why no one laughed at his numbers. He went to the old man again and asked him. "Why does no one laugh at my jokes?"

The old man replied, "Ahhh, it's the way you tell them."

I noticed that somebody is thinking of making a Gilligan’s Island movie. No doubt they are short of ideas, but never mind that for now. I got to wondering why it seems like such a bad idea.

I’ve never tried to cast a play, and suspect one might do a better job by having the candidates draw straws. But I’ve been in groups that just seemed to click—the conversations were lively and kept everybody involved. Replace a person, and it wasn’t quite the same—maybe nothing happened at all. Some people seem to have a knack for figuring out what sorts of groups will work (or maybe that’s just selection bias—we only remember the ones that did work).

I doubt the original show would get any traction today (that’s a whole other topic), but at the time the combination of the mannerisms of the cast and the writers writing to match the team gave a particular and very popular flavor to the humor. With a different Ginger and her slightly different tone, MaryAnn has to react a little differently, and so on. The flavor has to be different. And it might or might not catch the public fancy the same way.

That’s not a bad thing, of course. But I suspect that trying to recapture a flavor is a fool’s errand. In one Newton’s Apple episode the host was offered an ice cream cone, and gagged a little to discover it was filled with mashed potato instead of ice cream. He probably liked potatoes just fine, but his palate was set for something sweet.

I don’t watch enough movies to be able to say for sure, but from the reviews I read I gather that sequels sometimes hit the same sort of problem when the cast has to change: the chemistry is a little different, and the flavor isn’t quite the same.

I can think of a few exceptions in the serial/sequel line. The Avengers had several different female sidekicks, and the series seemed to go on anyway; though not for long after Diana Rigg left. Dr. Who seems to have survived a dozen actors.(*)

I suppose the producers wouldn’t come up with remakes if they didn’t make at least some money—nostalgia viewers if nothing else. Still, on the whole it seems like a bad idea to try to remake a show. Inspired-by, maybe. Remake—please don’t.

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(*) I saw Dr. Who in the dorms at Fermilab in WTTW’s weekly BBC-fest. It exasperates the younger fans in my household that I still think Tom Baker is Dr. Who.