Wax Banks

American TV is not popular.

2009-11-10T00:25:57-05:00

The population of Great Britain is somewhere around 60 million.

In the year 2000, 19.8 million people watched a 'two-hander' episode of EastEnders on BBC One - essentially a one-act play featuring just two actors from that long-running British soap opera.

Take out the very young, the blind, the TV-less, the tragically hip, and you've got well over a third of the TV viewing audience tuning in to the equivalent of As the World Turns. Indeed, a 1986 episode of EastEnders drew more than 30 million viewers (at the time the population of the UK was roughly 57 million).

The most-watched one-off broadcast in BBC history, according to Wikipedia, is the 1966 World Cup final (England 4-2 Germany). I believe my dad can name England's starting 11 in that game; 400 million people watched the game on TV, 32 million of them in the UK.

The 2008 Doctor Who finale drew more than 13 million viewers - nearly a quarter of the human beings in the UK (not a quarter of TV viewers, a quarter of living domestic apes) tuned in to the broadcast.

Now.

Elvis's first Ed Sullivan appearance was watched by 60 million people - more than 82% of the households in the entire nation. The Beatles drew more than 73 million in the US on their first trip to see Mr Sullivan, but by then there were many more domestic TVs, and the viewership share fell to 45%.

Since the year 2000, the most-watched non-sports event on American TV - not counting the various news reports on 9/11/01 - was the finale of Friends, which drew 52 million viewers - roughly 1/6 of the population of the US. The finale of M*A*S*H drew more than a hundred million viewers in 1983, and 76 million white people watched the finale of Seinfeld fifteen years later.

In a nation of 300 million, the finale of The Sopranos drew 12 million viewers, while 'The Truth,' which closed out The X-Files's soggy final season, got more than 13 million viewers.

In other words, while event-driven TV broadcasts can still command the world's attention - 2.5 billion people watched the funeral of Diana Spencer on TV, for instance - only a single American theatrical production has been watched on TV by even a sixth of the U.S. population in the last decade, and only a small number of TV shows have ever done better in terms of overall population percentage. And the most-watched episode of Seinfeld drew a smaller percentage of TV viewers than several regular episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.

In still other words: American TV costs and makes great gold-plated bucketloads of money, but scripted TV drama and comedy just aren't that big a deal anymore. TV no longer unites Americans of all ages. And we are not hearing - and very definitely not telling - the same stories. No wonder we've got so many problems!

Making a note here: huge success.

2009-11-08T00:34:57-05:00

Just caught up on Mad Men - the penultimate S3 episode, I believe. I think this show is on par with The Sopranos in many ways, and has surpassed it in some (e.g. the complexity of the women's roles, both theatrically and sociologically, and the amount of attention the writers lavish on their (outstanding) actresses). Pete's still Pete - but his consciousness has grown more quickly than Don's, and this season he's had more surprises up his sleeve than Peggy...

Sidebar: Mad Men's wardrobe work these last few weeks has been unbelievable. As Kennedy's death, the rise of the modern right wing via the '64 election (note the dismal Rockefeller fundraiser), the arrival of the Pill in 1960, and the eruption of the African-American civil rights struggle into public consciousness announced the end of American (read: middle-class white male) cultural consensus, the Great Variegation, so the outfits in 'The Grownups' reflected the splintering of the chilly/cozy grey-suited style that had been Mad Men's symbolic baseline. Check out Betty's groovy leggings during The Confrontation, Pete and Trudy's weirdly uplifting transformation from ironic wedding wear to turtleneck'n'frankness, Joan's evolving style, the evolving hipsteria of Paul Kinsey, Suzanne the teacher's earth-chick simplicity...though the show has sometimes gone with grandly theatrical outfits - recall Joan's magnificent red dress of course - the pinpoint details of recent weeks' costumes have drawn notice without demanding it.

Good thing the writing has been impeccable. Don and Betty's big sequence in 'The Gypsy and the Hobo' was so good I couldn't believe it existed in the same universe as everything else on TV.

Silenced, silencer.

2009-11-02T09:59:17-05:00

Spent much of the weekend listening to the simulcast of Phish's 'Festival 8' on Sirius XM radio - they covered all of Exile on Main St among other feats - and am otherwise pleasantly occupied. See y'all later.

Best Halloween costume of all time, bar none, discussion over.

2009-10-30T16:35:47-04:00

Wally

Still the Daily Show's strong suit: media analysis (read: disemboweling the vile cretins at Fox News).

2009-10-30T16:27:45-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

For Fox Sake!

www.thedailyshow.com

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Jay-Z is not yet the Dave Eggers of hip-hop.

2009-10-30T09:11:04-04:00

"With the same sword they knight you / They go and goodnight you / See Martin, see Malcolm / See Biggie, see Pac, see success and its outcome / See Jesus, see Judas / See Caesar, see Brutus / See, success is like suicide...Now the question is / Is to have had and lost / Better than not having at all? Because dawg: 'I'm just waiting 'til the shine wears off...'"

This passage - from Jay-Z's guest spot on Coldplay's 'Lost+' remix track - is what's known among New Yorker types as an 'echt Jay-Z flourish,' which I do not mean as a compliment. The idea that Jay-Z is hip-hop's best MC has been common currency for the better part of a decade, but it's never been believable. Hell, let's go along with the stupid charade and restrict our c consideration to commercial acts: in a world containing Gift of Gab, Eminem, Mos Def, Outkast (both halves), Latyrx (as a unit), Nas, Lauryn Hill, Black Thought, and Boots Riley - never mind cats like Aceyalone or Q-Tip or Kool Keith(!!) or even the infuriating trickster Kanye West - Jay-Z has to come bowing and scraping just to get into the top half-dozen. He's got skill and arguably taste, sure, but his sole subject of interest is his own adolescent messianic complex. And that disqualifies Mr Sean Carter from top MC honours.

If Dave Eggers had followed his moving, messy, ferociously sentimental A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with a half-dozen books in which complained at ever-increasing length that no one understood how difficult his life was even though he was the baddest and the richest - and indeed wrote a second and a third memoir insisting that he was finished writing and everyone was really, really gonna miss him when he stopped - but then was back on Entertainment Tonight a year later - Eggers would be a fucking laughingstock, and rightly so. Jay-Z is inexplicably still taken seriously by 'critics' despite having pulled this juvenile shit time and again. Now, Eggers has Jay-Z's technical skill, his energy, his hunger to collaborate, and his (admirable!) willingness to mentor. But unlike our Yet Another Self-Proclaimed 'Best Rapper Alive,' Eggers keeps challenging himself with increasingly esoteric (and increasingly powerful) projects in an ever-widening circle of colleagues and collaborators.

In other words, Dave Eggers managed to grow up. He got past himself, which was no small task. Mr Beyoncé has been churning out the same tired cliché psychobabble for half a decade, piling indigestible sentimental treacle atop misogynist bile atop vacuous self-justification and self-admiration. He's under the impression that he's intrinsically interesting; he's wrong.

'If you can't accept that / Your whole perspective is wack / Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black.' But he's never faded, never seriously entertained the possibility of doing so. He's a prolonged-adolescent narcissist with more money than ambition. That he's avoided Kanye's pathetic drunken self-parody is creditable, but Jay-Z's too childishly self-serious to pull off Kanye's frat-boy pranks (never mind the far more subversive boundary-crossing of Andre 3000).

The worst thing about this? Jay-Z's smart as hell. He could be doing something other than preening and boasting and whining and spouting the same dull money-sucks cautionary tales in song after song. If he wanted to, he could put aside his own self-love and self-loathing and status fixation and get on with making music about the world beyond the window of his SUV. But he's not even trying. His big mould-breaking album of this decade was American Gangster, for Christ's sake.

Jay-Z needs to get on the phone to Billy Martin or DJ Spooky or TV on the Radio or ?uestlove or John Zorn or Andrew Bird or the Pet Shop Boys or Elvis Costello or Fiona Apple or the Flaming Lips or even Trey Anastasio (remember that Jay-Z sat in with Phish in Brooklyn in 2004) and explode himself for once. Find a new idea, which these folks have in spades.[**] Jay needs to put his verbal talent and metrical dexterity to work on the story of another human being. He needs any new story to tell. Why? Because we need storytellers and musicians with ambition, persistence, skill, and honesty, and if Mr Sean Carter wasn't moonlighting as a fashionista businessman he'd be a fine source of all those things and more. Why not? Stranger, finer things have happened.

* * *

[**] I'm dead serious about all of the above, except possibly the inscrutable genius Andrew Bird. But they are, as you can see, mostly white rock'n'roll dudes. My hipster parochialism shouldn't surprise you, but it does bother me. Not enough to do anything about it, mind you, just enough that I have to footnote the thing. I do think a Jay-Z/John Zorn collaboration would be awesome - the JZ initials match is a good omen, no? - and when they want to, Medeski Martin & Wood have the 'best hip-hop producers on earth' trophy waiting for them. But these pairings hold cultural significance for me because I'm a stodgy little white nerd. They're not particularly transgressive, I know. To be clear, I don't want Jay-Z to stop cutting tracks about dimwitted consumerist hedonism and start documenting life in the suburbs of Houston. I just want to know whether he can even do it. Easier prescribed than pursued, as the narrowness of my suggestions makes clear.