Teaser
Television in the 80s. I remember the Flemish public broadcaster’s Wednesday evening schedule. At eight o'clock the fun kicked off with 'Allo 'Allo, a festival of farcical complications and silly accents, all different and yet somehow all centering on peepee and boobie jokes. We watched it with the entire family. At about eight thirty I went upstairs, to my room – the Teutonic seriousness of Derrick or Tatort was lost on me – but I came back down an hour later for Married… with Children, another comedic highlight. Week after week, the studio audience went wild when Al made a nasty remark about the size of the neighbour’s breasts. Really, that show was less a comedy, and more of a sociological phenomenon.
Television in the 90s. I remember Beverly Hills 90210, a soap disguised as a hip teenager series. And MacGyver, the Homebase that could save you life. And Sledge Hammer, a laugh or I’ll shoot sitcom about a trigger-happy cop who literally slept with his gun. Think back to television in the 80s and 90s, and let's face it: the only show that stood the test of time is Ducktales.
In the mid-1990s, I became a client at an arthouse video store, near the Antwerp central park. I was in my most extremist years, my Frasier phase: no more blockbusters for me, I wanted art. So I sped through the entire Wong Kar-wai back catalogue, threw myself at Pasolini, nouvelle vague and finally David Lynch. It taught me the entire video store had a Lynchean quality. The desk was located all the way at the back and you could scroll through twenty meters of movies before seeing a soul. In the middle was a patio, with some plastic furniture, surrounded (or rather, enclosed) by potted plants and ferns. Nobody every sat there.
The first episode of Lynch's tv show Twin Peaks came as a shock. I felt completely disoriented. This was television, that most art-less of mediums, with clearly designated add breaks, and yet nothing was as it should be. The show’s mood could change at any given moment, from suspenseful to grotesque and several times I wasn’t even sure if a scene was meant to be serious or funny.
In one scene, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and sheriff Harry Truman investigate the contents of a bank deposit box. The room they are led into has a mounted deer’s head, just lying there on a table. The characters look bemusedly at the head. Oh, the bank employee goes, it fell down. He hands them the deposit box and leaves. The scenes continues as if we’re watching a regular cop show.
Now it’s the viewer’s turn to be bemused: was this just a little joke or does it somehow tie in with the rest of the story?
Admittedly it didn’t help that I had started with episode 2. The 90 minute pilot episode, I found out later, was on a separate videotape. I had accidentally skipped all character introductions. That would certainly contribute to one’s disorientation.
I continued to think of Twin Peaks as the exception to the rule. The bulk of what was shown on TV remained shoddily made nonsense. Over the next couple of years, I of course watched The X-Files and Friends. My ex got enraptured with The Sopranos, but I found the series lost all its bite as soon as Livia Soprano croaked. (There is no chapter on The Sopranos in Spoiler.)
Then, about eight years ago, in a period of depression, I became a seriesphile. I felt the need to draw the blinds and not see any human beings for a while. That’s when big box sets, with 24 episodes of 45 minutes each, are nothing less than a life saver. My sister recommended House M.D. Despite not being a fan of medical shows, I was hooked by the end of the pilot. The shock this time was caused by the fact that this was clearly purely commercial fiction, every episode built on the same blueprint, and yet it was miles beyond the standard 90s fare. The TV revolution, unleashed by HBO, had also raised the bar for network television.
From House M.D. I sped towards Battlestar Galactica and The West Wing, dipping my toes into Deadwood and Carnivàle next, discovering (admittedly, together with the rest of the planet) Game of Thrones and watching the entire run of Six Feet Under a second time. Somehow I also kept up with Dutch and Flemish literature (since that is my job) and I moved to Barcelona (since that is the best thing to do when you’re depressed). And I started wondering: is there really that much of a gulf between literature and American tv shows?
I am not talking about the parallels that the writers point out themselves. The creators of bikers series Sons of Anarchy are very keen to anchor their story to Hamlet. Their main character, a leather-clad modern version of Hamlet, finds out his father, the founder of an anarchist biker club that has degenerated to a gang of gun smugglers, was killed by his right hand man, who later married the hero’s mother. Yes, in Shakespeare’s play it takes the main character three hours and a half to finally pick up the rapier and avenge his father. In the series, however, this decision is delayed for over four seasons, not because the story demands it but because the bank accounts of the creators couldn’t tolerate a speedier resolution. Saying that Sons of Anarchy is like Hamlet is a bit over the top. (Nevertheless, the first three seasons are very much worth your time. Maybe I’ll write about the show at some point.)
Tv writers know their classics, though. Vince Gilligan, the brain behind my only real binge experience, Breaking Bad, clearly references Faust throughout the series. Mad Men winked at the stories of John Cheever. The literary sources of inspiration for True Detective were so emphatically present that they led to accusations of plagiarism. And so on. I was tempted to delve deeper into the connections between modern-day television fiction and literary classics.
Every reader should work out his or her own “reading path”. Don’t just rely on the reviews, don't follow the bestseller lists. Those are the books that apparently offer something that applies to everyone. It’s reading fodder for the largest common denominator. You should always look for the books that connect to your own interests and passions. When watching Heroes, I was struck by the importance of generation conflicts in the plot of season 1. It seemed logical to go and read Turgenev’s Fathers and sons, the best-known example of a novel about generation conflicts. Fathers and sons led me to Turgenev’s debut novel, Rudin, which really brought Heroes in perspective for me. So there are chapters in this books in which I duely follow the literary clues a tv show offered up on a plate… but there are also chapters where I follow my own path. Neither Heroes nor Spartacus explicitly spoke of literary influences, but implicitly they did bring me to books about generation conflicts and our difficult relationship with the concept of freedom. This book is thus a condensation of five years of watching and reading.
You try to organize a book as logically as possible. For example, the chapters in Spoiler are organized chronologically, starting with the oldest series, ending with the most recent ones. Another example: I only wrote about American television shows. So no Sherlock, no Les Revenants and no Top of the Lake – you’ve just got to draw a line somewhere, to prevent chaos. And besides, to quote 30 Rock-character Kenneth:
More than jazz, or musical theater, or morbid obesity, television is the true American art form.He’s probably right. Nevertheless I tried to give an overview of the current televisual landscape. The inevitable, often innovative HBO prestige dramas stand side by side with more mainstream shows in this book. And why wouldn’t we be allowed to enjoy both In Treatment and Flashforward?
Then there are the things you don’t plan. It was never my intention to write about politics, but there it is, in the chapters on The West Wing, Game of Thrones and The Man in the High Castle. There is a series of musings on identity and how little we know about ourselves, spread through the chapters on In Treatment, Dexter and Mad Men. And apparently I’m also fascinated by the most difficult of questions: how do we give meaning to our existence? It’s a nagging and daunting issue, that crops up in the chapters on True Detective, Westworld and Flashforward. So clearly you can structure and plan and edit a book, but in the end, part of it escapes from the plan. You follow your personal obsessions. And that’s good.
In the chapter on Flashforward, there is a lot of talk about spoilers, the phenomenon that gave this book its title. The spoiler is the reason for the existence of this book. Which doesn’t mean, by the way, I plan to spoil all the aforementioned shows. The artistic growth spurt of tv fiction has everything to do with the fact that tv started to believe in the story. The story that is told from beginning to end, with internal logic and cohesion and characters that undergo evolutions. What made television until the mid-1990s so terrible, was the formulaic approach. Each episode started back at zero, every development was eliminated by the start of the next episode. Remember FBI Agent Dana Scully from The X-Files? Time and again, her stubborn rejection of the supernatural was proven to be a limitation, but she never seemed to learn and by the start of the next episode she was back to being her sceptical self. The average pet is more able to learn stuff than this highly intelligent character. The characters in tv shows were stuck in an exceptionally cruel circle of hell, endlessly running in the same hamster wheel. That may be a solid business model for a tv network, but it hurts the characters’ believability. HBO (slogan: 'It's not tv, it's HBO’) and later AMC ('Story matters here') broke the wheel. Characters evolved now: episode after episode they gained more nuance, more colour, more shading. Decisions were no longer automatically undone but had real consequences. Character could get hurt. They could die. Thus, the spoiler was born. In a world where nothing changes, nothing could every be spoiled.
However, the spoiler can also be stifling. By constantly focusing on the big "spoilable" developments, the tv show can only be appreciated in the moment, the brief present. With this book I have the ambition to focus on the roots of the shows, their cultural past. I think this will add an extra dimension of pleasure when watching the shows.
And why shouldn’t we treat tv fiction as a form of literature? Drama is counted among the literary genres. Nobody disputes its place next to prose, poetry and essays. Of course, nobody's going to buy a tv script and read it at home on the couch – but how many people read drama? If an art form is based on language, if it speaks of our time and if it simultaneously is aware of its cultural and philosophical precursors... what else can we call it but literature? (The exact relationship between tv fiction and prose is the subject of this book’s bonus feature, the final chapter called “The gamba with no hands”.)
About five years ago, when this book was just a blurry idea, a good friend of mine told me: “The only reason you want to write that book is because it's an excuse for you to watch so much television.” Ironically I’ve hardly seen my television in the past months, because this book took up all of my time. I look forward to wrapping up this introduction, so I can return to my couch, to watch Better Call Saul (believe it or not, but I haven’t seen it yet) and The Young Pope. I think I’ll interweave Orange is the New Black with episodes from HBO’s old prison drama Oz – maybe there’s an essay in that. I just bought the first season of American Gods on BluRay. And my partner wants me to watch Feud as soon as possible, because he loved it.
So many possibilities, so much fiction, enriching your life with nuanced character, making you read the classics and motivating you to think deeply about what makes life so heavy and so exciting. In truth, we are totally spoiled.
Table of contents
• Scenario 12-D. The echo’s of 9/11 on tv (The Lone Gunmen)
• The Utopias of Thomas More and Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing)
• The indescribable experience (House M.D.)
• New blood for the serial killer (Dexter)
• The cleansing fire of nihilism (Heroes)
• If only every day were Monday (Mad Men)
• The little stories we tell ourselves (In Treatment)
• What kind of man sells his soul? (Breaking Bad)
• Deep into the blue forests (Flashforward)
• Seat of power (Game of Thrones)
• A trip to Carcosa (True Detective)
• Life under Hitler in the 1960s (The Man in the High Castle)
• Lost robot, knight-errant (Westworld)
• Shirley Jackson’s ghosts, David Lynch’s bodies (Twin Peaks)
• Bonus feature: The gamba with no hands
• Credits
• Thank you
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