TV is Good for You...

...at least some of the time it is. Sometimes, yes, TV is one of the things you use to silence the silence, to fill the empty spaces so that you're not ever left with the dread prospect of being alone with yourself. Lord knows I'm as guilty of this as anyone else, with either music or the televison always on whenever I'm home--and even when I go to bed, I usually set iTunes to run for another thirty minutes as a kind of musical night-light. Obviously I can't bear the silence, and even though I understand this intellectually, I still need those things that drive the silence away. (This is part of what Ezra/The Alien was talking about when he mentioned "a head/heart thing"--there's plenty that I understand intellectually but seem powerless to deal with emotionally.)

Sometimes, though, TV is good for you. The other night I was planning to go to a meeting of the L.A. Final Cut Pro Users Group, which is apparently a pretty big organization dedicated to providing a place for L.A.-based editors to get out of their editing suites and see the light of day once a month. I was, as always, vacillating about going--it takes something enormous for me to actually leave home, but I had just decided that yes, I was definitely going, but first I'd stop home to change clothes. Then I saw a box from Amazon, which I knew contained the DVD set for season two of Once and Again, and that was it, I knew I would be staying home that night.

What TV can do, when it is very, very good, is to take its time with something and really dig in deep. Let's assume the same premise for both a movie and a TV series: two divorcees meet, fall in love, and try to work through the enormous difficulties of melding their separate families. In a movie, the various issues raised would have to be either eliminated (in favor of a sharp clear focus on one or two major problems) or dealt with very quickly. In a TV series, you can take all the time you want. Something that gets five or ten minutes in a movie, if that, can take a whole hour or two hours or more, and thus dealt with fully. Take the issue of Jessie's anorexia in season two of Once and Again. First the groundwork is laid in previous episodes, a little at a time; then you get a full hour just to get the character to admit she has the problem; then subsequent episodes can deal with the long process of resolving the problem. All this for what is, strictly speaking, a supporting character.

I enjoy the stand-alone shows as much as anyone, I guess--CSI and Law and Order, etc. But I can't imagine myself ever buying DVDs of these shows, because in the end they're really just about keeping the silence at bay, they are pictures that do not illuminate, noise that is never signal. Once and Again, however, falls into the same category as the dearly-departed Six Feet Under, the the recent ending of which stands as one of the most moving visions of mortality I've ever seen.

I stayed in that first night, watching several episodes. Last night I stayed in again, watching a few more episodes. And it was not about driving away the silence, it was about sinking into a rich and worthwhile experience, and after three years of waiting for the season two DVDs I just want to know from Buena Vista, when the hell does season three come out?