Tag: TV

The Internal Clock

The internal clock—the rhythm of attention and expectation honed by our optimized cognitive processes—demands precision. A narrative must hit its emotional or intellectual beat at just the right moment to captivate the human mind. Television series, by their very nature, are purpose-built to meet these demands. Unlike books, which are often sprawling, open-ended, and subject to the variable pacing of individual readers, television is a medium engineered for synchronization. It shapes time into predictable units, each one calibrated to deliver satisfaction within the narrow window our internal clock anticipates.

This is the triumph of television over many genre books: its ability to structure narrative beats in ways that match the optimized attention span of modern audiences. The episodic nature of television mirrors the rhythms of daily life—pauses, climaxes, and resolutions, all packaged into neat, consumable chunks. It is not merely a matter of convenience but a reflection of the medium’s essence. Television cannot afford to meander; its survival depends on capturing attention immediately and holding it steadily until the prescribed endpoint.

By contrast, the works of P.G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and other literary humorists thrive in a space that television cannot easily inhabit: the mind’s theater. Their brilliance lies in the way their prose invites the reader’s imagination to supply comedic timing, emphasis, and nuance. Wodehouse’s intricate wordplay, Adams’s layered absurdities—these are joys that unfold uniquely in the act of reading, where the pace is dictated by the reader’s own internal rhythm. Television, constrained by its linear delivery, often flattens these subtleties into caricature or oversimplification, losing the intellectual interplay between writer and reader that defines great literary humor.

This flattening extends to adaptations of serious literature as well. Complex novels, rich with intellectual depth or intricate internal monologues, struggle to find their footing on screen. The visual medium often over-explains or reduces these elements to surface-level spectacle. Consider Foundation: Asimov’s sprawling meditation on history and inevitability is reimagined as a character-driven drama, emphasizing relationships and action over philosophical inquiry. While this makes the story accessible to a broader audience, it also narrows its scope, sacrificing the expansive intellectual engagement of the original.

Neil Postman reminds us that every medium imposes its own biases on communication. Television excels at immediate, emotionally resonant storytelling, but it does so at the cost of the interiority and complexity that books provide. To assume that one is inherently superior to the other is to misunderstand the nature of media. Each serves different human needs, shaped by the inherent strengths and weaknesses of their form. But in our increasingly image-driven culture, the dominance of television risks leaving us with stories that satisfy the clock but neglect the soul.

The triumph of television, and now streaming platforms, lies not just in their mastery of narrative beats but in their ability to condition audiences to expect stories to conform to these rhythms. Over time, this synchronization between medium and audience has created a feedback loop. Television trains us to crave stories that cater to our optimized internal clocks, and in turn, we reward those that deliver, perpetuating the dominance of immediacy, spectacle, and emotional highs.

This shift has profound implications for how we engage with narrative and, more broadly, with complexity. Television’s reliance on pacing and resolution means that ambiguity, subtlety, and slow-building introspection often fall by the wayside. In literature, readers are free to pause, reflect, and revisit earlier passages, allowing for deeper intellectual engagement. Television and film, bound by the relentless forward march of time, rarely afford such luxuries. The medium prioritizes clarity and immediacy, which can impoverish stories that rely on nuance or demand active interpretation.

This isn’t merely a matter of storytelling; it reflects a broader cultural transformation. As we shift from a print-based culture, with its emphasis on critical thinking and individual interpretation, to a screen-based culture, we risk privileging passive consumption over active engagement. Television and streaming excel at delivering pre-digested narratives that require little effort to understand, reinforcing a cultural preference for convenience over challenge. In this way, the medium not only reflects our optimized attention spans but also shapes them, narrowing our tolerance for complexity and our patience for delayed gratification.

What does this mean for literature? As more stories are adapted for the screen, we may see a growing divide between narratives designed for visual media and those that remain firmly rooted in text. The works of Wodehouse, Adams, and other literary giants may increasingly become artifacts of a bygone era—relics of a time when humor and complexity thrived in the interplay between writer and reader. And yet, their persistence reminds us of something vital: that there are still corners of human experience that television, for all its strengths, cannot fully capture.

If Postman were here to comment on this shift, he might argue that we are losing more than we realize. The optimization of our internal clocks for television storytelling is not merely a technological innovation; it is a reprogramming of our cognitive habits. As we tune our lives to the rhythms of visual media, we risk neglecting the slower, more contemplative beats that once defined how we understood the world—and ourselves.

Trump Baroque

Trump Baroque is a gaudy, all-American fever dream—a steroid-jacked carnival of excess where reality itself is dragged into the ring, bloodied and screaming, and pumped full of the same greasy adrenaline that fuels WWE smackdowns, Real Housewives screaming matches, and Sopranos-grade betrayals. It’s not politics anymore; it’s a no-holds-barred grudge match, a theater of madness where every handshake is a power play, every insult a tactical nuke, and every victory tastes like a cold McDonald’s cheeseburger devoured under fluorescent lights at 3 a.m., with ketchup smeared on a golden tie.

This is not the natural order of things. This is a hostile takeover of reality—a savage, brain-splitting cacophony of narcissism and spectacle, where nothing matters except the show. The truth? Irrelevant. Integrity? A joke. All that counts is who’s screaming the loudest, who’s standing last, and whose name is lit up in gaudy neon on the side of the collapsing casino that used to be the American Dream.

The Trump Baroque aesthetic thrives on chaos. It’s a gold-plated nightmare, a carnival of grotesques. Picture a gilded Oval Office with more mirrors than Versailles, endless echo chambers reflecting one inflated ego after another. Picture backroom deals brokered over buckets of KFC, punctuated by fist-slams on faux-marble tables. Picture a mob boss swagger wrapped in a reality-TV sheen, where every betrayal is scripted but somehow still cuts deep.

The players in this psychedelic opera are larger-than-life caricatures. The Boss—part Don Corleone, part Vince McMahon—is the maestro of this deranged symphony, orchestrating feuds, firing off insults like cheap fireworks, and always keeping the crowd on edge. His inner circle? A rogues’ gallery of sycophants and backstabbers, clinking champagne flutes one minute and plunging daggers into each other’s backs the next. Loyalty is a punchline. The only rule: never let the spotlight leave your face.

Every scene is a spectacle. Every action is a power move. A handshake becomes a test of dominance. A rally morphs into a gladiatorial pit. The line between reality and performance dissolves in a haze of cheap cologne and sweat, leaving nothing behind but the faint, sickly smell of burned-out ideals.

And yet, beneath the absurdity, there’s a method to the madness—a perverse genius to the spectacle. Trump Baroque doesn’t just rewrite the rules; it burns the rulebook, tosses the ashes into a Diet Coke, and raises a gold-plated chalice to toast the chaos. In this universe, the only sin is to lose the crowd, and the only victory that matters is the one that makes the headlines.

So here we are, hurtling through a nightmare of our own making, trapped in a surrealist painting drenched in gold leaf and smeared with ketchup, where the stakes couldn’t be higher, and the absurdity couldn’t be louder. This is Trump Baroque—a vulgar, glorious, star-spangled apocalypse. God help us all.

Good Television

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Cut-up chaos bleeds into the flickering tube. Network logos – pulsing, cancerous growths burrowing into your retinas. Feed. Consume. Obey.

Good television, if such a thing can exist, crawls out of the muck only during brief, fetid lulls in the relentless scramble. A lull. A synonym for societal collapse, perhaps. But in the fetid emptiness, something perverse can take root. A twisted creativity, birthed from the collective miasma of despair. It thrives in the cracks, the dead zones between the channels, where the static whispers secrets and the image bleeds. A world teetering on the edge, that’s when the good stuff leaks through. That’s when the message slips its leash and bites.

Rent seeking, a monstrous neologism, slithers across the screen. A psychic parasite, fattened on the carcass of innovation. Anomie, its fetid twin, seeps into the airwaves. A wasteland populated by vacuous faces, shilling products that bring no solace.

Good television, a flickering mirage in the desert of anomie, thrives on the tension between control and chaos. But the bean counters, those bloated ticks engorged on rent, have no patience for such subtleties. They crave the safe, the predictable, the mind-numbing. And so, television becomes a vast, glittering shopping mall, peddling the same tired inanities in a thousand different guises.

But wait! A flicker of subversion. A rogue signal pierces the static. A message scrawled across the screen in a language of glitches and distortion. A chaotic whisper, a burp of rebellion against the ironclad control. Is it a threat? A promise? Or simply another empty shill?

The answer, like everything else in this desolate landscape, remains elusive. But in the space between the commercials, a sliver of hope flickers. Perhaps, amidst the rent-seeking anomie, a new kind of good television can be born. A television that reflects the fractured reality we inhabit, a television that shocks and disturbs, a television that dares to question the control matrix.

But for now, we are left with the flickering ghosts of what once was. A wasteland populated by the walking dead, their eyes glazed over by the mind-numbing glow of the screen.