The Books of My Life: The Revolution Was Televised

Alan Sepinwall's The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever (New York: Touchstone, 2012) explores what Sepinwall calls the television revolution. Sepinwall, a former TV critic for the Newark Star-Ledger, argues that the increased diversity of American television with its smaller target demographics, its ever expanding number of TV channels, its ever increasing number of TV networks involved in the TV fictional programme business, and the increasing complexity of television programmes allowed television to, as he puts it, step out of the shadow of cinema and reach its full revolutionary potential (pp. 5 and 8).

As Sepinwall makes clear the more complex and niche targeted TV shows he explores in The Revolution Was Televised didn't come out of nowhere. Between the early 1980s and mid-1990s Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere, Cheers, Miami Vice, Wiseguy, Twin Peaks, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, The X-Files, and ER (pp. 7-17) laid the foundations for a TV revolution that "officially" began, according to Sepinwall, with Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997. It was on the scaffolding of Buffy, a dramatic, comedic, and tragic show on a largely ignored new network or netlet, the WB. Sepinwall argues that because the WB netlet was new and small it allowed Whedon a creative freedom that would become a hallmark of the revolutionary TV shows that followed in its wake on cable and, later, on the over the air networks, shows such as Tom Fontana's and HBO's Oz, David Chase's and HBO's The Sopranos, David Simon's and HBO's The Wire, David Milch's and HBO's Deadwood, Sean Ryan's and FX's The Shield, Lloyd Braun's and ABC's Lost, Joel Surnow's and FOX's 24, Ronald Moore's and SciFi's (now ScyFy) Battlestar Galactica, Peter Berg's and NBC's Friday Night Lights, Matthew Weiner's and AMC's Mad Men, and Vince Gilligan's and AMC's Breaking Bad.

I enjoyed reading Sepinwall's book immensely. It is well written. It avoids the theoretical language that makes so much academic literary, film, and television difficult to wade through for many. And it goes where academic film and television studies articles, monographs, and books generally fail to go, to primary source material. Sepinwall draws on interviews with the individuals and corporate personnel who created and commissioned the revolutionary television shows he praises.

Sepinwall's book is not without its problems, however. Sepinwall admits that other TV shows before Hill Street Blues debuted in 1981 helped lay the groundwork for the revolutionary TV shows that followed and which he focuses on (p. 7). He, for instance, mentions the importance of The Rockford Files but doesn't really explore it and other precedents for the revolutionary TV shows he focuses on in any detail. Nor does he explore other important and revolutionary shows like The Wonder Years, My So-Called Life, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Freaks and Geeks, and Tales of the City all of which contained many of the things Sepinwall praises in the later revolutionary TV shows he focuses on such as memory, arcs, and greater realism. For some reason Sepinwall places Buffy, the show that he notes that preceded and paralleled what was about to happen on cable TV beginning with Oz ([. 192) as Chapter Seven in his book rather than as Chapter One. Sepinwall focuses exclusively on American TV shows, a parochialism common among American television critics and academics. This parochialism means that Sepinwall misses the fact that British TV shows like Doctor Who, The Good Life, Butterflies, and Pride and Prejudice and particularly British TV literary adaptations in general, have long had a memory and have been arc driven making them precedents for the revolutionary TV shows in the US that followed as well.

Sepinwall ends his book by noting that revolutionary TV, Quality TV, or nerd TV, call it whatever you like, is alive if perhaps not thriving on American over the air and cable TV. One of my favourite nerd TV shows at the moment is Jason Rothernberg's and the CW's The 100 with its remarkable exploration of the moral quandaries, moral compromises, nativisms, ethnocentrisms, purges, and psychological damage that comes with war. The 100 has all the hallmarks of Sepinwall's revolutionary television programmes, the TV programmes I most enjoy watching, even if it doesn't have the audience, the critical acclaim, and the critical obsession of another "revolutionary" show Sepinwall mentions, HBO's Game of Thrones, a show, whose gender politics, unlike that of The 100, seems to be heading, at least in part, in the wrong direction. Here's hoping that the TV revolution continues.

The Books of My Life: Public Access

What stands out to me about my recent reading choices is the fact that all of the books I have been reading lately have something to do with the American right. Recently, I have read books on right wing perceptions of anti-Americanism, the White separatist and White supremacist right wing, and the conservative Christian right wing. What can I say, it is the age of Trump after all. Given all this it should not be surprising that my most recent read, Michael Bérubé's Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (London: Verso, 1994) is, in part, focused on the American right wing as well.

 Bérubé's Public Access is one part post-World War II cultural studies and literary studies, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary theory, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies history, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies in action (including a compelling reading of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey), one part exploration of post-1960s right wing attacks on post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies, and one part call for liberal-left political activism. It is the critique of right wing apologetics and polemics part of Bérubé's book that I want to concentrate on in the rest of this essay.

Bérubé's book does a good job of enlightening its readers about the contemporary American culture war right. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé notes and documents, are remarkably ignorant of post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies despite their claims that they are the vanguard of manning the barricades to protect America and America's young from its postmodern acids raising the question of how one can critique something one doesn't really comprehend and, in some cases, haven't even taken the time to read. This is, by the way, hardly the first time demagogues have claimed to be protecting someone from something they know very little if anything about. Think of all those anti-Marx folks who never read one sentence of Karl Marx's many writings. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé notes, really do have a tenuous relationship with empirical facts and empirical reality. The culture war right has consciously manipulated and lied about the writings or conference presentations of those they oppose as a strategy in the contemporary culture war knowing that few of those they aim their screed at will bother to ascertain whether the claims the culture right demagogues make about the "egghead left" are accurate or not. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé recognises, may claim to be warriors for free speech but the only free speech they vow to protect is their own politically correct right wing speech. Most of the right wing culture right, in other words, are more then willing to limit and ban the speech of those they disagree with and banish those who speak it to a kind of Foucauldian hell. Many in the culture war right, as Bérubé notes, have no interest in partaking of the rational back and forth of scholarly argument or the be fair to arguments you disagree with aspects of scholarly work. Jürgen Habermas we hardly knew ye.

None of this, by the way, is a surprise to me. I have personally seen again and again ignorance, flat out lies, and manipulations from the culture war right along with attacks on the speech of the "egghead left" on social media sites like Facebook. To state the obvious, one shouldn't expect anything else from a group of apologetic and polemical demagogues who self-righteously, arrogantly, and calculatingly see ignorance, a lack of empiricism, and demonisation as the means to the end of the right wing conquest and domination of America.

The Books of My Life: Imperial Designs

Gary Dorrien's Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004) is, like another book I recently read, Betty Dobratz's and Stephanie Shanks-Meile's The White Separatist Movement in the United States: "White Power, White Pride", quite timely thanks to the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. This is true in spite of the fact that Dorrien's book, like the book of Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, was published over ten years ago.

Dorrien, who is currently the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, explores, in Imperial Designs, the rise of neoconsevative foreign policy ideologues in the wake of the Cold War, apologists and polemicists like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Kagan, the sects that make of the post-Cold War neocon faith, namely, neocon realists and neocon interventionists, and the important role these neocons, particularly those of the interventionist Wilsonian variety, played in the administration of Bush 43 promoting, as they did, wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and even China. It is this, the neocon polemics for war against Iran, Syria, and North Korea, that makes Dorrien's 2004 book timely again. After all John Bolton, one of the neocon Wilsonian polemicists of the Bush the second era, is currently a National Security Advisor in the Trump administration and appears to be preaching the same neocon interventionist gospel he and other neocon Wilsonians preached in their years in the wilderness during the Clinton era and during their years on the inside during the Bush the 43rd administration.

There were a number of things I liked about Dorrien's book. I found his close textual reading of American neoconservatism and his typology of the various forms the neoconservative movement took in the US to be particularly enlightening. I also found Dorrien's book helpful in understanding the Trump administration, an administration that seems to be, at least for the moment, a hybrid of various paleocons and neocon interventionists all at the same time.

There were a few things in Dorrien's book I found somewhat problematic. In the fifth chapter of Imperial Designs, for instance, Dorrien explores the tensions between interventionist neocons and old Cold War and post Cold War palecons like Pat Buchanan, who, by the way, in retrospect seems like Donald Trump before Donald Trump. In chapter five Dorrien, like neocon polemicists such as Canadian David Frum, feathers all paleocons with the tars of nativism and anti-Semitism (see pages 200-202 and 220). Personally, I think it is helpful to see anti-Semitism as similar to two other antis, anti-Americanism and anti-Mormonism. There are, I think, reasonable and valid criticisms one can make of the state of Israel, of the US, and of Mormonism. There are also unreasonable and invalid polemics and apologetics one can engage in with respect to the state of Israel, the US, and Mormonism. The former are not species of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, or anti-Mormonism. The latter are. Somewhat ironically given Dorrien's claim that all paleocons are anti-Semites, Dorrien's discussion of the paleocons in his Imperial Designs suggests the opposite, namely that not all contemporary paleocons appear to be flaming anti-Semites.