BY John Jurgensen
Wall Street Journal
25 April 2013
When 21-year-old Stuart Goldberg went into a job interview last fall with a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the University of Pennsylvania senior expected to discuss his 3.8 grade-point average, his internships in private equity or the data-crunching he'd done for the Philadelphia Eagles. Instead, the interviewer went straight for a different bullet point on Mr. Goldberg's résumé: his interest in the cable-television series "Breaking Bad."
They spent 10 of the interview's 45 minutes discussing the dark drama about a high-school teacher who becomes a methamphetamine kingpin, Mr. Goldberg recalls. "I was shocked that he wanted to allocate so much time to that."
The candidate was also pleased that his strategic decision to represent himself with a "popular yet relatively highbrow" TV show had worked. He starts as a business analyst at McKinsey this summer, the consulting firm confirms.
Everywhere you go it seems as if all anyone wants to talk about is TV. Watching the boob tube used to be the couch potato's hobby, hardly a subject to trot out over cocktails. Now, that stigma has vanished, and a few knowing remarks about "House of Cards" can confer gravitas. Ever since fictional mob boss Tony Soprano had an existential crisis over the ducks in his swimming pool in 1999, viewers have been feasting on a growing bounty of high-quality dramas.
The result is that TV has infiltrated almost every setting, from dinner parties to the torrent of tweets on Sunday nights. That's when a glut of good shows air, causing twice the amount of TV-related activity on social media than on Mondays, the next busiest night. Major publications (including this one, which has a law professor and Supreme Court advocate leading a "Mad Men" discussion online) recap every plot development, even of ratings-challenged shows.
Some people are ready to change the subject. Art adviser Elizabeth Jacoby is a dedicated follower of "Suits" (USA), "Mr. Selfridge" (PBS) and "Shameless" (Showtime). But the vice president of New York consulting firm BSJ Fine Art has lost patience with certain shows that hog more than their fair share of discussion time among friends and colleagues.
"I begrudgingly read Plutarch for college, and I begrudgingly watched 'Girls' to know what all the fuss was about. But I don't want to talk about Plutarch, and I don't want to talk about 'Girls,' " she says, referring to the HBO series created by and starring Lena Dunham. The comedy, featuring lots of cringe-worthy sex, stifling jobs and frequent nude appearances by Ms. Dunham, made a big splash with critics and pundits that was disproportionate to its relatively puny viewership.
Recent months have seen additions to the ranks of obsessively watched shows, including FX's "The Americans," about married Soviet spies embedded in an American suburb at the peak of the Cold War, and, on the frothier side, ABC's "Scandal," a series about a Washington fixer that goes to outlandish lengths to live up to its title.
Throughout the year, networks (and now upstarts like streaming-media services) are rolling out series that seem meaty enough to merit at least a first round of sampling and debate. This week, the Sundance Channel introduced "Rectify," a simmering drama about a man released into his small hometown after 20 years in prison for a heinous crime. On May 26, Netflix will unveil 15 new episodes of a densely woven comedy that disappeared from network TV seven years ago, "Arrested Development."
A new halo of prestige now floats over serialized dramas. Recently the Paris Review, the 60-year-old literary journal whose "Writers at Work" feature has included Capote, Hemingway and Nabokov, commissioned the first-ever interview in that series with a television writer: Matthew Weiner, creator of "Mad Men."
"The stuff is art," says editor Lorin Stein. He still doesn't own a TV set. ("The day is short. I love to read.") But the 40-year-old has polished off a select group of series on his computer or with friends. To discuss, say, the themes of masculinity in the moody FX comedy "Louie" is an instinctive part of the experience, he says.
"Social TV" is the term for the real-time conversations happening online, and that's a major force keeping serial shows at the forefront. According to Trendrr, a company that tracks social-media activity around TV, the top 10 most-discussed dramas include young, soapy fare like "Pretty Little Liars" (ABC Family) and "The Vampire Diaries" (the CW). Topping the pack so far this year is HBO's epic fantasy series "Game of Thrones," with an average 777,000 social-media interactions on days an episode first airs. By comparison, the Daytona 500 broadcast on Feb. 24 had 704,000.
Intellectuals have long dismissed TV, except as a lens through which to study the masses. Bridgette Alexander, a Chicago-based expert in 19th-century French art history and philosophical culture, used to hide her TV habit from her scholarly friends like "a rendezvous with a secret lover," she says. "Now the conversation has shifted."
Thanks to shows like HBO's "True Blood," which enabled her to pipe up about political identity in the relationship between vampires and humans, TV themes are now routinely dissected on Ms. Alexander's party circuit. Over appetizers her friends have analyzed how Kevin Spacey's character in Netflix's "House of Cards" adapts the Brechtian strategy of breaking the "fourth wall"—speaking to the audience directly as if from a three-walled stage. The group includes a political scientist, the head of an African-American studies department, an English professor and a former city attorney. "These are the people who would say 10 years ago, 'I don't watch television,' " Ms. Alexander says.
Her husband, David Alexander, mostly sticks to the "Masterpiece" series on PBS (though he quit "Downton Abbey" after one season because it was "too superficial"). He says he doesn't object to the TV repartee at parties, but there have been times he privately urged his wife to rein it in.
A whole category of etiquette has sprung up around the way people discuss TV (both in person and online) when they're all working through the same group of shows at different speeds. The stars of the IFC comedy "Portlandia" satirized the social booby-traps in a sketch featuring two couples who ruin everything from "Dexter" to "Star Wars" for each other by blabbing crucial plot points. The clip itself, widely disseminated online, is preceded by a spoiler warning.
Serialized programs that unfold over multiple seasons give viewers more time to develop relationships with their characters. That's making these shows seem more "culturally crucial" than stand-alone entertainment like movies or books, says Daniel Menaker, a former top editor at Random House and HarperCollins, and author of a guide to conversation, "A Good Talk." Except for fluke blockbusters like "50 Shades of Grey," he says, "I don't hear a commonality in the books people talk about."
When Brendan Francis Newnam goes to dinner with friends in New York, he grows wary when the talk locks on television, a subject that can become "a kudzu vine that strangles out other conversations."
He's no snob—he devours shows like "Mad Men" and "Enlightened," and with Rico Gagliano hosts a public-radio show called "The Dinner Party Download," an omnivorous guide to arts and culture that broadcasts nationally. But Mr. Newnam recalls several gatherings that bogged down when fans of a show he doesn't watch, "Breaking Bad," waxed on about Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and other complex characters. "It's like they were talking about friends from high school, but I went to a different high school," he says.
Still, Mr. Newnam says he prefers talk of TV minutiae to that of viral videos, which often cause guests to whip out phones and laptops so they can compare YouTube clips. "When that happens," he says, "we might as well be eating frozen TV dinners by ourselves."
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