I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night

 

Like virtually everyone I have dreams when I sleep at night, multiple dreams. I don’t remember, as I have said before, most of them. I wouldn’t have remembered this one except for the fact that I wrote it down immediately after the last dream I had last night woke me up this morning.

In my dream I was milling around Flinders Station in Melbourne. I was doing ethnography. I was trying very very had to notice and pay attention to the people around me. 

And there were lots of people around me. There were a lot of people milling around Flinder going into it and coming out of it. I noticed that one in three people I saw were wearing red t-shirts with Zero Culture stamped in white on a black circle in the middle of the shirt. I interpreted this as a celebration of Melbourne’s trams, trains, and buses. 

There were celebrities who I did not recognise. Some of these celebrities seemed to be trying to hide themselves perhaps bashful of what they had become. Or perhaps they were trying to hide from the celebrity chasers who were out in force and who were chasing the celebrities.

Finally, there were people I recognised as spies. These spies were chasing other spies who were chasing other spies. Everything was becoming a swirl.

And then I woke up.

The Books of My Life: The Essential HBO Reader

 

In my book both forthrightness and bluntness are virtues, virtues of the highest order in fact. So, let me be forthright and blunt. I don’t think HBO is, particularly when you put it in comparative context, all that innovative or aesthetically remarkable. I will explain why I think that later. but now, I want to take a closer look at a book I read recently, Gary Edgerton’s and Jeffrey Jones reader on HBO, The Essential HBO Reader (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008).

The editors of the book—one presumes it was them—divide The Essential HBO Reader into four genre categories they assume HBO has played a prominent and important role in: drama, comedy (including stand-up and series), sport (translation: boxing), and documentaries. They have commissioned authors, including themselves, to write overviews of those genres along with essays on specific programmes such as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and America Undercover, within these four genres. Sport, despite its importance particularly in terms of the bottom line, income, only gets an overview. Many of the overviews provide information on the history of these genres on HBO. Many of the essays on individual shows are celebratory in nature praising the network for its hiring of auteurs like David Chase and David Milch and giving them the space to strut their stuff, HBO's supposed progressive mentality, and HBO's supposedly new model of operation. Many of the essays, however, tend to follow the party line that it’s HBO  not TV, not “normal” TV anyway, making many of the essays in the book basically academic versions of fanboy and fangirl "analyses". That said all of the essays are interesting, informative, and enlightening particularly the overviews of sport and documentary which take a more critical approach to HBO’s programmiing.

Though The Essential HBO Reader is focused on HBO programming particularly in the areas of drama, comedy, sport, and documentary, they don’t ignore the important broader economic, political, and cultural aspects of the network. Most of the authors of the various and sundry essays in the book argue that HBO has pioneered in a new model of television, subscriber television, a model of TV which, given that they are a pay TV network, allows the network to broadcast oodles of nudity and profane language, all things that make HBO different from commercial over-the-air television claim most of the essayists. The essays also note that HBO’s programming, save perhaps sport, was aimed at those who with the requisite cultural capital who came to believe that HBO was different and that it had brought quality to US television. HBO, in other words, was the network for high brow TV watchers looking for some stuff to talk about at the water cooler (now that's branding!).

But was HBO really that different? Most of the essays in the book argue that it is. A few, and particularly the essay on sport, argue that it really isn’t. The thing is HBO may be innovative if one is looking exclusively at the American scene and one ignores PBS. One has to forget, in other words. PBS’s pioneering role in documentary programmes, cooking programmes, news programmes, children’s programming, and fiction programming in the American scene. PBS, after all, at its zenith, when, it in other words when had the monies to do so, PBS showed excellent fictional programmes in its American Playhouse series and its WonderWorks series (the series the broadcast the highly regarded Sullivan and CBC Anne of Green Gables series), which was aimed at young people, along with programmes like its and Channel 4s adaptation of Tales of the City, which thanks to the centrality of gays in it along with its nudity proved controversial and damaging to PBS’s funding, its Ursula Le Guin adaptation The Lathe of Heaven, and its interesting TV movie Prototype. PBS in other words, at its height, was a bit like a poor cousin of the CBC and the BBC, Canadian and British public television.

And it is here that another problem I have with many of the celebratory essays in The Essential HBO Reader surfaces, namely, its lack of comparative focus and, apparently, comparative knowledge. When looking comparatively at television across the world it becomes apparent that HBO is rather like the BBC. Its subscription model bears some similarities to the licence fee in the UK. The BBC has, historically speaking, pioneered in comedy. One essayist in The Essential HBO Reader goes so far to claim that for him Seinfeld is the greatest comedy made, well perhaps for those not familiar with the Beebs Fawlty Towers, Absolutely Fabulous, Worst Week of My Life, and Monty Pythons Flying Circus and E4s Inbetweeners, all of which, in my opinion, better than Seinfeld. Its programming bears similarities to the quality programmes commissioned and broadcast by the Beeb, ITV, and Channel 4, both of latter, of course, have been impacted by the BBC. British television has produced some of the best programmes on television such as its adaptations of the Brontes, Austen, Le Carre, Shakespeare (the BBC Shakespeare adaptations of every play remains a benchmark in TV and Shakespeare broadcast history), and Agatha Christie, and shows like Upstairs Downstairs, the adaptations of the Forsyte Saga, Wolf Hall, Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley, At Home with the Braithwaites, I Claudius (HBO’s The Sopranos is is some ways a kind of remake of this superb show), Scott and Bailey, The Naked Civil Servant, Shoulder to Shoulder, Red Dwarf, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (which first appeared initially on BBC radio), Gentleman Jack, Broadchurch, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse, Lewis, Spaced, Prime Suspect, Cracker, The Jewel in the Crown, The World at War (arguably the greatest historical documentary ever made), and the Up series, to name just a very few. Finally, we should remember that nudity and fouler language can be shown and heard on British TV during the adult hours.

When HBO is looked at in the context of American commercial TV it is not that different or exceptional either. Like them it cancels shows that don’t get the viewing numbers the suits at HBO think they should. For instance, HBO recently cancelled its brilliant Gentleman Jack, which it, and let me emphasise this, co-produced with the BBC. Shades of ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. I suppose one could argue that in the post-Game of Thrones era, an era in which HBO dedicated lots of monies to the kiddie corn that dominates Hollywood films these days and is increasingly dominating HBO, HBO has to worry about low ratings given its increasing dedication of millions of dollars to shows like Game of Thrones, which seems aimed at the pimply faced fantasy and science fiction crowd that likes its shows to have some misogyny and a lot of female nudity (dicks mostly not allowed), the same crowd Hollywood adores and aims its comic book kiddie corn at. And let’s be clear, HBO uses sensationalism, nudity, and sports, which as it has on network TV here and in the UK, played a major role in making HBO economically solvent by drawing eyes to it making it similar to US network TV which uses sensationalism and sports, if not nudity for legal reasons, to draw viewer eyes.

On a normative aesthetic level I have to say that by and large I have found the HBO shows I have seen to be less than “quality” TV shows. I found The Sopranos and Game of Thrones overhyped and overrated. I did like Chernobyl which it co-produced with Sky UK, The Wire (probably the most interesting of the bunch), Sex and the City, and Big Love (I study Mormonism so I had to watch it and did notice some mistakes). I didn’t find the ones I liked, however, to be in the league of the great British quality” TV series like Lewis and The Jewel in the Crown, however. I didn’t even like them more than the CBC’s Heartland or Twitch City, the truly innovative and remarkable US series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or series like those of Julia Davis in England or the BBCs The League of Gentlemen, comedy series that are more innovative, in my opinion, than anything on HBO I have seen.

But back to The Essential HBO Reader, I liked it even though much of it was academic fanboy and fangirl gush (which made me blush). As one of the few books out there on this important, from an American perspective and increasingly from an international perspective, thanks to the media of the brave new digital world, anf given HBO's global reach and hefty finances (the US with its population makes size matter). Anyone interested in contemporary television history, economics, and culture should give it a look.