A TV Critic in the Post-TV World

The day after thanksgiving, my TiVo died. Because it doubles as my cable box, this meant that for the week it took to get a replacement, my TV was dead as well. This would be a tragic circumstance for most Americans. But for a TV critic, it was a blow to my livelihood. I was like a cotton farmer after a weevil infestation. I was cut off from the main pipeline of American media life.

Or I would have been, a couple of years ago. Now, however, my situation offered a learning experience in TV-free TV. I had no cable, but I had DSL and a houseful of gizmos with screens: desktop, laptop, cell phone. Could I make do with them? (See the top 10 TV series of 2008.)

Plenty of my countrymen do. Through necessity, I was entering a club more viewers are joining by choice: the posttelevision society. Some download TV to avoid ads. Some Netflix series so they can watch them in one big marathon. Some like the convenience, some the portability. Some are cutting their cable or satellite bills to save money in hard times. Millions of others use online video as a backup–Huluing dramas they missed live, watching March Madness on CBSSports.com or Wimbledon on ESPN360. (Preferably at work.)

The business implications of all this are huge. Who will get paid for the TV of the future? (With online piracy rampant, will anyone get paid at all?) How do you replace TV-commercial revenue? And how do you measure a hit when more and more of the audience is watching on computers, on DVD players, via video-game consoles or on the screen of the bike at the gym?

These are all important questions. But not for me. Mine were: Could I satisfactorily watch TV without a box? How would it change my experience? And more broadly, now that TV (the medium) is divorced from the television (the machine), now that video is as portable as a Grisham paperback, now that big-budget series can be blog-embedded and e-mailed just like your YouTube video of your cat falling asleep–what are we even talking about when we talk about TV?

My TV Is Dead. Long Live TV!

First hurdle first: Online video has gotten much better since the days of watching a jerky postage stamp over the din of your hard drive whirring like an espresso grinder. While my plasma monolith sat mute, I watched 30 Rock in high-quality video on my laptop through Hulu.com My iPhone doubled as a wireless video device. (My kids were already using it to sample YouTube’s vast library of homemade Lego Star Wars animations.) By downloading free apps like Joost and Truveo, I could use its brilliantly lit display–a munchkin plasma screen–to watch last night’s Daily Show and Gilmore Girls reruns. Much of what I couldn’t get free, I could buy from iTunes and carry with me. I watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on the subway, The Office in my office.

Some things were unavailable–quit being stingy with the Top Chef, Bravo!–but what I lost in choice I made up for in serendipity. I downloaded video podcasts from Cook’s Illustrated, watched Rob Corddry’s Web comedy Children’s Hospital and rediscovered the cult comedy Strangers with Candy (with a pre–Daily Show Stephen Colbert) because it turned up randomly through the Joost app on my iPhone.

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As for live TV, I learned that cell-phone companies are glad to provide it. I test-drove the Flo TV service–one of several cell-TV options–on an AT&T LG phone, complete with a tiny retractable antenna that made it look like something you’d see in Couch Potato Barbie’s living room. I set the tiny screen on a kitchen shelf and watched MTV as I peeled carrots. I tuned it to Morning Joe and balanced it inside my medicine cabinet, discovering an exciting new way to cut myself while shaving. So long as I had a signal and battery juice, I could go shopping, take the bus or go to a kids’ soccer game and never, God help me, be out of reach of Wolf Blitzer.

Was it possible to replace TV? Sure. (The real question is how to get away from it.) And that may change TV as a cultural force.

For a good half-century, “watching TV” meant one thing. It was something you did at home, with friends or family, in front of a stationary machine in a dedicated room, preferably with snack chips. You experienced a broadcast exactly when and how millions of others did–same Bat-time, same Bat-channel–or you did not experience it at all. And unless you got proactive with a VCR, you did not copy, carry or remix what you saw. This was why mass media were culturally unifying (or homogenizing): those moments that mattered, we all saw in exactly the same way. (See the top 10 movie performances of 2008.)

Not anymore. Today TV broadcasts are just starting points, raw material to be curated in a collective online canon. During the election, I was immersed in political news and comedy, but I saw only a fraction of this material–interviews, skits, Joe the Plumber encounters–on a television. I saw bits embedded on blogs and on YouTube. I saw them straight up, or edited and surrounded by comments. If I saw the Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin on the liberal website Talking Points Memo and you saw it on the conservative Townhall.com did we really see the same program as each other–or as the shrinking number of viewers who still watch the 6:30 news?

More people watched Tina Fey’s takedown of Palin online than on Saturday Night Live. And well they should. Why sit through 90 minutes waiting for the good bits when an army of online editors will separate the wit from the chaff? This isn’t just a knock on SNL. The View, the nightly news–they’re all albums, which the Web breaks down into singles.

That brings us to a truism about online video: it rewards brevity and scatters attention. That’s true to an extent. Five to seven minutes seem to be the sweet spot for a webisode; “Baby Panda Sneezes” loses its magic after about 11 seconds. But a funny thing happened in my cable-free week: I found myself paying closer attention to the TV shows I watched online.

Here’s the important physical fact that separates online from off-line TV: you’re holding something. Watching old-school TV, you flop on the couch and let the medium wash over you. New school, you hold a screen in your hand, balance a laptop or sit at a desk. There’s a small but constant effort, the tiniest bit of physical feedback.

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This makes me a much more impatient viewer. If a video doesn’t grab me immediately, I kill it. But when a show does engage me, the connection is deeper. The wide-screen image is a foot or two from my face, filling my field of vision. The connection is tactile and intimate. (Coincidentally, I’m told the Internet is also a popular medium for porn.) As you lean in, focusing physically and mentally on, say, an episode of The Wire, watching becomes something more like reading.

I apologize to all the English teachers to whom I have just given aneurysms. But the watching-as-reading analogy is true in more ways than one. Whereas channel-surfing is like turning on a faucet, finding a show online is more like rummaging through a new-and-used bookstore, where House is shelved next to Hill Street Blues. (See the top 10 iPhone applications.)

Like reading, viewing online TV is more solitary. You don’t gather the family around your MacBook to watch the Super Bowl. Yet in some ways it’s more social. There’s no online-video TV Guide to rely on–though some start-ups, like eGuiders.com are trying to create one–so your social connections become your TV guide. And the same interactivity that enhances regular TV-watching is even more immediate with laptop in hand. When I watch Lost, I rush to write a blog post–not so much to get my thoughts out as to see the comments fill and find out what other people thought. When the show is over, it’s just begun.

Big Screen, Little Screen

Does this mean I’m ready to abandon that video altar in my living room? Oh, God, no. When my TiVo box was finally replaced, I ran back to my big-screen TV like a child reunited with his mother. (Not as fast as my kids, who quickly began TiVoing a new stash of Clone Wars episodes.)

But what we once called the “small screen” is fading away. We’ll have tiny screens and giant screens: online devices and ever cheaper flat-screen video walls. To me, lush cinematic shows like Big Love and Mad Men need a big canvas; for others, it’s football that demands the real estate. Some shows are more interchangeable. I was not surprised to find that MTV’s The Hills, with its sleek visuals and forgettable dialogue, is perfectly suited to the bauble-like screen of the iPhone.

So some shows will be big and grand for the giant screen. Other shows, like Comedy Central’s on- and off-line hits, will thrive on both platforms. Producers will start conceiving series both as whole entities and repurposable parts–like the Jan. 31 SNL skit involving Pepsi that ran the next night as a Super Bowl ad for Pepsi.

Media messages will be tailored both ways: already, President Obama is doing network TV to broadcast messages wide, and online videos for a more intimate, fireside-chat connection. And as more people watch traditional TV on the tiny screen and online video on the big one, more will jump the boundaries. Collegehumor.com just debuted a show on MTV, while this spring ABC premieres In the Motherhood, a sitcom based on a webisode series.

All this may change traditional TV, but the tiny screen could also revive genres. For a decade, sitcoms have struggled on big networks. But online, few offerings do as well as humor. Be it funnyordie.com or the faux Japanese talk series Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, people want the tiny screen to make them laugh.

Some would argue that that’s a matter of scale–that it’s impossible to be moved by something in a 4-in. (10 cm) video window. I’m not so sure. Hunched over my tiny screens lately, I’ve found myself riveted by Battlestar Galactica, provoked by a YouTube animation about the credit crisis and verklempt over an old video I posted of my son blowing bubbles in the bathtub. Big screen and tiny may have their differences, but where there’s engagement, there’s emotion. The screen that matters most is still the one where the story lingers and replays, inside your head.

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