This has been TV Turnoff Week (“Turn off TV — Turn on Life,” goes the slogan). And if that’s not irritating enough, from the other side of the debate, the Sunday New York Times magazine this week ran a pro-TV piece called “Watching TV makes you smarter.” It’s one of those disputes where you suspect each side deserves the other.

The TV-is-good-for-you stance, taken by Steven Johnson in a book excerpt, at least has the merit of being less predictable. He relies on what he considers the taxing complexity of plotlines in today’s TV dramas, along with a terse, allusive quality in their scripts. In TV’s dumb old days, he says, shows such as Starsky and Hutch had one plotline right through, or maybe a small, secondary one as well (he plots the plots on graphs). Starting with Hill St. Blues in 1981, shows got denser. Now, series such as The Sopranos or 24 have multiple plots per show, and are full of hints and references that viewers must fill in themselves. So they make viewers smarter, more attentive etc. I hope I’ve done his argument justice.

What bugs me is the implication that normal people start off as stupid, or at least vacant, and need to be made smart by those with greater power — politicians, pundits, TV programers — who get credit for whatever intelligence emerges. You could call it the educational prejudice: that people need to be taught, rather than that they naturally learn (with a little help). It leads people to distrust their own resources. I’d argue instead that people are about as smart as they ever were, which is pretty smart, and you can find evidence for that on TV or anywhere else.

So, back in TV’s early days, mass audiences watched long, thoughtful live dramas by writers such as Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling. The writer Ken Sobol once sat me down to view the first episode of The Untouchables, from 1959. One scene showed a meeting of gangsters that lasted about 15 minutes. His point was: No show since then would trust viewers to stick with sheer dialogue for so long. The “plotlines” argument also glosses over the vast popularity of Law and Order, with just one plot per show, or CSI with two. Yet, I’d argue that CSI (the Vegas version, not Miami or New York) is as complex and demanding as The Sopranos, if only because of what goes on inside lead character Gil Grissom’s head during any episode.

Regular people have always been able to rise to intellectual challenges thrown at them. In 1972, Theatre Passe Muraille created The Farm Show, a play based on the lives of farmers around Clinton, Ont. It had a scene about the claustrophobia of winter, represented by actors creeping across the stage on knees and tummies. It was minimalist, symbolist, even dadaist. The farmers who drove over to see the play in a barn got it, no problem. The only surprise was that the actors were surprised they did.

It’s true TV plotlines have grown more intricate and audiences have learned to follow them but, mostly, I’d say, that’s a result of changes in TV ads. Many commercials are now so compact and concentrated that some — starting with old Coke and Bell ads — amount to 20 second mini-operas. As the ads got slicker and more gripping than the programs, some of the shows copied those styles to catch up. So, as a byproduct, TV may have made people “smarter” in one way, but stupider in others. I’d say, for instance, that 24‘s hysteria about terror is way clunkier than the parodic undercutting of Cold War stereotypes on The Man from UNCLE in the 1960s. Viewers? They just have to make what they can of these concoctions, good and bad.

As they must with the current political show, which is not so different. Is “the Liberal brand” hopelessly tarnished? A month ago, I’d never heard of the Liberal brand, I didn’t know one existed, then it became a media phrase, now it’s supposed to be a crucial factor. And the deal between Liberals and the NDP: Is Jack Layton, as John Ibbitson wrote here this week, really Mephistopheles? (What — the moustache?) Because he proved there is money for housing and student fees, without going into, arggh, deficit? Poor people, they have to sort it all out by their own wits; they don’t really need the condescension too.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.