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.