Good afternoon lovely email friends, hope all’s well. Before I pick out some links, one of the unexpected pleasures of spending all this time at home has been acquainting myself with the daytime television schedule. That sounds strange to say, but it has me thinking about our relationship with TV: what we want from it, and what it asks in return.
🌍 Climate Primer: Climate Science, Risk & Solutions: from MIT, climate knowledge for everyone. A strong summary of the most important lines of evidence for human-caused climate change, sticking to the facts and avoiding the politics.
🔊 From Techno to Go-Go, How Music Is Moving Protests Around the World: Hardcore, reggae, hip-hop, and Beyoncé provide the soundtrack to protests against police brutality and systemic racism.
😷 How to Be Alone When You’re Really Bad At It: Filmmaker Sindha Agha was struggling with quarantine, until she found the polar explorers. The result is this beautiful short film.
🏢 Rough, cold and politically charged: why do we love to hate concrete? Although we rely extensively on it, we also regularly express distaste for how concrete looks, what it feels like and how it performs. Sometimes people express negative feelings for concrete through everyday resistance. Other times, people are more organised and political.
🧨 JUMP is a really interesting essay by Michael Solana. If everyone in China were to jump at once, we were told as children, the whole planet spiral away from its axis, spelling doom for all its inhabitants. Fortunately there was no way of getting a billion people to do something together. But now there is.
🤔 If you believe in nihilism, do you believe in anything? The risk of nihilism is that it alienates us from anything good or true. Yet believing in nothing has positive potential.
✏️ The rise of the anti-anxiety Instagram cartoon: Usually Instagram is a hateful place. The gruelling, endless scroll can take a toll on our mental health. But here’s an exploration of the relatively new and incredibly popular wave of artists posting quick, hand-drawn cartoons that communicate a hell of a lot with very little.
Getting through to the final round
At first glance, daytime TV appears to be relentless dross, but there is the odd needle amongst the haystack. If you filter out current affairs, antiques, cookery, cheap dramas and gossipy talkshows, what remains is a much maligned genre: the humble quiz show.
We’re on a bow-wave of a television renaissance, driven by mega-budget long-form dramas. Fears that channel scheduling would be wrecked by timeshifting overlooked that new entrants would bring big investment in programming. The result has been stretched-out dramas, brave comedies and meme-worthy documentaries.
Shows in the loose bracket of ‘reality’, not that television knows anything about reality, have continued on too. But quiz shows, a workhorse of broadcast television, are still to find a place in the on-demand world. There’s been no huge Netflix quiz show capturing everyone’s imagination and that, I think, is an oversight.
The best thing about quiz shows is they ask for so little commitment from their viewers. In an era of dramas getting really, really long, you can watch ten minutes of a quiz show and get something out it. They’re shows you can invest in, if you wish, or instead pay only glancing attention.
If you’re not up for a movie or trying to keep up with the plot of some slick 62-part drama, quiz shows are there for you, whatever your mood. You can either root for the contestants, or smirk at their terrible hair and poor general knowledge. This low investment means there’s an unseen social element to a quiz show: perfect for family viewing, even socially-distanced families to enjoy together over a video call.
Some US formats are going from strength to strength, even impervious to the pandemic. The same cannot be said for many British formats: Countdown cries out to be killed off. By far the best (by which I mean objectively worst) current example is Tipping Point: a game with questions so easy and outcomes so random it asks virtually nothing of either its viewers or contestants. It’s the televisual equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank; the perfect antidote to current affairs.
Quiz shows, like many newspapers, are yet to capitalise on the digital era, perhaps seeing it as the enemy. Googling, after all, kills quizzes. But I reckon the need for low-commitment TV persists, just as the need for good journalism does.