The TV shows that have shaped us
During much of its 20th-Century infancy and early childhood, television had a bad reputation. Known as a killer of intellects and a gateway to laziness and slothdom, it earned nicknames like “idiot box” and “boob tube”. Actors cast in TV shows were considered inferior to those who did movies because cinema was the real art form. (Note: one cannot correctly pronounce “cinema” in this context unless one’s nose is turned all the way upward.) A grown adult who knew a lot about contemporary film was a smart sophisticate. A grown adult who knew a lot about television was – to use a term that only a frequent TV viewer could understand – a total dum-dum.
Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century:
– The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century
– Who voted?
– Why The Wire is a worthy number one
– Twenty-five series that define the 21st Century
– Why I May Destroy You is the future of TV
Of course, great television was made and seen in the mid-to-late 20th Century, a pioneering period that gave us I Love Lucy and Fawlty Towers, Roots and Brideshead Revisited, Twin Peaks (the original) and House of Cards (also the original). But the prevailing cultural attitude toward the medium was often dismissive, dictated by the idea that TV was lowbrow and that its quality programmes were happy anomalies rather than the norm.
Television and our view of it started to change early in the 21st Century, and now, two decades in, has completely transformed. The way it is watched, discussed, and regarded has done a full gymnastics routine, speeding forward, somersaulting and landing in a different place. Now television is our primary pop-cultural vocabulary, and if you’re not paying attention to it, you’re the idiot. The transformation, if I may use an image from the movies to draw another completely different television analogy, is akin to the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens her front door and her entire world switches from black-and-white to colour.
To be clear: there is still plenty of extremely silly, lowbrow television, more than we’ve ever had access to before. I mean, Sexy Beasts not only existed, it was adapted in several countries, then adapted again for Netflix. But because the amount of television available at any given time has swelled so much, there is also more good to great television than there ever has been in the history of the medium. That has changed what the conversation surrounding television sounds like, both in terms of the kinds of stories told and how they’re consumed by the public.
