Upper East Side of Culture

Television dramas will do anything to get your attention. Jack Bauer saves the world in 24 hours without stopping to pee, a load of polar-bear-fearing amnesiacs run around an island in Lost and Dr House can misdiagnose any mystery illness, have a pill-popping crisis and then solve it all in the space of an episode.
If there’s a genre and formula to be exploited, television is where you’ll find it. And it’s no surprise as the battle for ratings is a fierce one. When networks find a winning recipe, they stick to it; if you don’t believe me try watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as it comes in a variety of flavours so similar that watching CSI: NY then CSI: Miami feels like a traumatic déjà vu, or another Bush family presidency.
So don’t go telling me that you can’t get snobby about TV. The majority of programming- from Oprah to American Idol- is just a slop-load of generic content designed to buffer the airtime between adverts. The producers of the CSI shows are not worried about artistic expression nor are they motivated by a sense of social conscience: they’re just laughing all the way to the bank.
But that doesn’t mean that all TV is rubbish. If you’ve seen The Wire, you’ll know it’s one cop show that shuns the CSI formula: a bleakly realistic, morally-conflicted yet socially aware exploration of the crime underworld of modern Baltimore. Corrupt politics, crumbling industries and a failing education system all provide the landscape of a ground-breaking drama where the good guys don’t always get their man. For once, it’s art and not content that we find on our screens.
The Wire is a rare achievement in television and it’s right that we recognise its significance. Its array of awards is testament to that belief. So to compare the artistic achievements of The Wire to something like Gossip Girl seems cheap and distasteful. People like the exaggerated, pinballing relationships of the Upper East Side glitterati but that doesn’t mean the programme is anything more than a banal reworking of Dynasty for teenagers.
And that’s my point really: some programmes are better than others.
From do-gooder liberal types will insist that free choice is important and nobody can tell you what to like. And I suppose that’s true to an extent. If you get off on watching Jack Bauer wield a handgun, or Dr House quip sarcastically through a diagnosis, who’s to stop you?
All I ask is that you acknowledge that some of the things we watch or hear are better than others. Miley Cyrus is no Mozart and Steven Spielberg isn’t a patch on Scorsese. Don’t be so easily fooled. In such a saturated media, it’s a rare occurrence that something transcends the generic mire to stand on its own, especially when it comes to television.
People might be uncomfortable with acknowledging the existence of highbrow culture or be reluctant to determine what is highbrow and what isn’t. Taste does come into it and really, it’s for you to decide. But don’t try and tell me it’s all the same.
That would be depressing.