Damon Griffin
First Post
Olive said:
The theoretical basis for TV rotting your mind when reading and radio shows don't is that TV is a "passive medium" which puts everything in front of you so that you don't have to use your imagination. This theory is flawed in that visual media require you to use your imagination on different parts of the story. The camera's viewpoint is always third person limited omniscient - it can show you what people do, but not what's in their heads. It is possible to film distortedly, so that you aren't sure what's going on in the real world, in order to simulate an unreliable narrator; but the audience's reaction will still be its own reaction, not that of the character. There is no total immersion in the character experience, as with, say, Jane Eyre or Holden Caulfield.
In practice it is true that television is more likely to be a passive medium than an active one, but this is due largely to the exigencies of the market. Since commercial television is funded by advertising, a lowest-common-denominator approach that would bring in large audiences has been favored. This is not an essential feature of TV any more than it is of film. No one claims that film, per se, dulls the brain, though we can all think of films that do. In many ways, film and television are experimental media whose depths have not been fully explored; and in the case of television, where exploration has been explicitly discouraged.
In recent years, creators with a dedication to the format and the will/time/money (very important, that last) to try to subvert the system have begun to show what TV can do. Babylon 5 is another example, and X-Files is an excellent example of what happens when the process goes wrong over time. Buffy, and its spin-off Angel, can be accused of a lot of things, but of catering to the lowest common denominator - never! Even the very worst episodes have thematic depth. I promise it won't rot your mind or slack your jaw.
That doesn't mean you'll like it. Gamers who haven't seen Buffy and are interested, but live in an area that doesn't carry it, or find themselves merely confused when they tune into an episode (lots of continuity and backstory), can check out the non-D20 system Buffy RPG, which quotes the show dialog extensively, provides profiles of important characters, and attempts to adapt the mileu to gaming without losing the atmosphere of the show. It should, if nothing else, give you a sense of whether Buffy is worth the effort to explore further.
This is not Damon, this is his wife, Peni, who writes books for children and thinks about this sort of thing a lot; and who goes around singing "Walk Through the Fire" even though she had grave doubts about the musical episode on first viewing
