Announcing "Ok, TV"
There's a lot of very average entertainment out there. We're watching it too
SREE’S SUNDAY NOTE is proud to welcome “Ok, TV” as a channel on our Substack. Two of my favorite people, Zach Peterson and Tara Ruff, living in the Czech Republic and NYC, respectively, are going to bring you a regular look at one of the most important forms of communication in human history: the television show.
In 1980, I arrived in New York City at the age of 9 from India, a land of B&W TV sets and I Love Lucy reruns as one of the few American shows available there. Of course, the advent of satellite TV in India in 1991 changed all that, and today there are 1,000-plus channels, including 400 all-news ones; America has fewer than 10.
I was immediately addicted to Saturday morning cartoons like Super Friends; to action shows like Buck Rodgers in the 21st Century and Star Trek re-runs (even today, I’ve never seen anyone but William Shatner as Captain Kirk) ; to sitcoms like Happy Days, Gilligan’s Island; The Jeffersons, Good Times, Diff’rent Strokes. Those last three sitcoms exposed me to life in Black America that I had no concept of, and Diff’rent Strokes saved me, at age 14, from a dangerously friendly pedophile, thanks to its landmark episode, “The Bicycle Man” (Arnold and Dudley’s troubles and their lessons learned were seared into my young brain forever).
In my lifetime, TV has evolved from a handful of networks to what Bruce Springsteen once called “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).” to VCRs and Blockbuster, to the golden age of HBO to streaming via Netflix, and countless other offerings.
And on those countless streaming networks (our home subscribes to four or five at any point) there’s no dearth of “just okay” television. The ability to churn out endless algorithm-driven supplies of new movies and series via endless amounts of money, (Netflix alone will spend more than $15B this year) hasn’t made the overall quantity much better.
Just the other day, I was quoting a line from 1993’s classic crime thriller Malice, starring Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman and Bill Pullman. It was the kind of film perhaps not worth going to the theater for (just $7 then in Manhattan, instead of $25-30 now, depending on IMAX or whatnot), but ideal for a Blockbuster rental on date night.
It features one of most memorable scenes on a screen of any size, co-written by a young Aaron Sorkin in only his second credit. In it, a gorgeous young Baldwin (as opposed to who he became as Jack Donaghy in “30 Rock”) plays a surgeon accused of having a God complex in a malpractice deposition. He responds in a very special way:
So, Netflix, how many of your slop thrillers have scenes like that? The answer, I believe, is not many. But “Ok, TV” will scour the search bar and collections folders to find them and review them.
In the end, we are consumers too. We are not always up for the heavy lift of a Kate Winslet-led murder mystery. Sometimes we all just need to switch off and double-screen an 8-episode police procedural that offers a severe plot twist every two episodes. We know you’re watching these shows, and we get it.
Importantly, “Ok, TV” is not here to denigrate the genre. Far from it. The arts are in peril, and we want to see artists writing, filing, getting series bought, hiring production crews, and making a living producing art.
We’re not critics. We don’t get screeners. We have the same Netflix algorithm as you, and we’re trapped in the same cycle: see a vaguely intriguing thumbnail, click, immediately recognize the “small town with a dark secret” setup, watch all eight episodes anyway, feel nothing, do it again next month.
Let’s get things started with Tara talking about Harlan Coben’s Run Away:
There’s prestige TV and there’s “Ok, TV.” Welcome to the watch party.