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The Restorative Power of Television

26 February 2013

Allison enjoyed a peaceful three-day staycation catching up on some of her favorite television shows and reading lots of fiction. (Turns out the restorative nature of these kinds of activities even made The New York Times last month.)

Tags: allison read, balance

I’m a lifetime lover of television. Rationally, I understand that my TiVo and I don’t actually have a relationship, but it often delivers some of the more reliable and happy moments in my life at the end of a long day or on the weekends. I don’t watch any reality TV because I like all of my TV to be pure fiction, sports or news. I often save several episodes to watch all at once and have even been known to watch an entire season in one weekend. I enjoy what might be thought of as high quality writing and acting as well as silly, teenage-focused thrills. (Oh yes… I have no shame about the fact that several CW shows are in my Season Pass Manager.)

I’ve known for a long time that TV was an important part of my balance playbook and haven’t ever felt much need to defend its role in my life. However, I must say it was somewhat gratifying to read Alissa Quart’s article, The Thinking Person’s Entertainment, in The New York Times last month. She explains something I’ve always known—TV can have a powerfully restorative effect on my psyche. “By pulling us away from Twitter, texts, e-mails, pointless videos and all the other technological distractions demanding attention, ‘Homeland,’ ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ provide coherent (albeit sometimes disturbing) refuge from our fragmented lives.”

Quart goes on to explain the work of Les Manovich, a scholar at the City University of New York, who writes about how, “Database logic (that of the computer archive) tends to lack beginnings or endings, and thematic developments are not necessarily sequential.” In the early part of the century, television tried to match this trend. “‘Lost,’ ‘Heroes’ and other shows of this era (and films like ‘Babel’ and ‘Traffic’) offered what I call ‘hyperlink television’ and ‘hyperlink cinema.’ Their ‘sideways’ and flashback-laden narratives involved constant cutting back and forth among disparate characters, reflective of an emerging culture of sensory as well as existential multitasking. TV shows, like the rest of the world, started to operate at a frenetic pace.”

While I’ve enjoyed some of these “hyper-linked” series over the years, I’m with Quart in preferring more sequential shows and appreciate how TiVo can allow me to “…watch these high-charged, emotive narratives as we once read novels, in long sittings, without regard for a television network’s schedule.” (I also read two fiction books during my three-day weekend so I suppose it’s no surprise that I’m a fan of marathon escapism.)

I hope you’ll read the article, but I think these two lines sum it all up pretty nicely, “Television shows watched in this fashion provide a kind of through-line that’s missing from most of our lives” and “…stories, not algorithms, give order to our hectic world.” What provides a through-line and sense of order in your hectic world?



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