Television has been talking about itself almost since the beginning. Artists in the medium have always been fascinated by the guts of the business, especially the more journalistic part. In 1961, the pioneer Carl Reiner told the misadventures of a screenwriter in The Dick van Dyke Show, inaugurating a genre of meta-television series that ends (for the moment) in The Morning Show (Apple TV) and demonstrates that the silly box was never so stupid or so narcissistic: most of these fictions are far from being exercises in what Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio called omphaloscopy (that is, the art of contemplating the omphalos or navel). No matter how cruel those of us who write about television are, it is difficult to find in our texts portraits as merciless as those that television itself has made of itself.
The Morning Show, whose third season just premiered, has so many meta layers that it takes a potato peeler to peel them off. It sounds a bit like an elegy, as if it were narrating the fall of the cathodic gods, and it explains very well the war and the changes that are taking place in the Spanish private networks, a slaughter for an almost lost hegemony. He also anticipated the cases of DeGeneres and Fallon in the United States. Fiction does not surpass reality, but it often anticipates it.
Contrast this tone of Thomas Mann’s novel with the joy of the previous satires. It is far from the lively and hooliganism of 30 Rock (by far, the best comedy about the art of comedy on TV) and the moralizing epic of Murphy Brown or the incontinent Sorkin’s goofy The Newsroom. I wouldn’t say that meta-television is dressed in mourning: it has not yet considered its medium dead, but it is beginning to become tragic and even nostalgic. In no time, they will tell us about the military battles.
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2023-09-17 03:19:27
#fall #television #gods
