A Symposium On TV

Anything as bad a TV must be susceptible to some improvement, but the one sure way of not getting it is to make the programs more “cultural.” The TV chains and the FCC are momentarily nervous, and so they chatter about public responsibility and raising the cultural level, as if these things could be done the way barren fields are sprayed with fertilizer.

Perhaps, in one sense, they can. We should expect in the next few years a proliferation of the solemn and the pompous, a growth of programs featuring adaptations of the classics, prose poems about moral values, and drippy conversations with intellectuals. No prospect could be more chilling. Pumped up with significance, the average program will undergo a transmutation. Johnny Loves Suzie will reappear as Antigone or Moby Dick; a sad minority of culture-seekers will make appreciative sounds because they equate art with boredom; and the mass of spectators, less inhibited, will simply decide that if that is art, then ...