One of my favourite writers, James Wolcott, believes that television is currently in its renaissance period, citing Weeds, Dexter, Californication, Mad Men and The Wire as examples. TV, he argues, is more current, clever and cutting edge than cinema, and comes without its huge ego. "TV promises so much less, yet gives so much more. Dialogue that's fast, mordant and elliptical, intimate, layered, complex stories." My good friend Sophie would definately agree. She plans her evenings (or as she unashamedly admits "her life") around what's on the box. Her tastes differ from Wolcott's though. (The City, Girls of the Playboy Mansion and The Kardashians are favourites).
However, TV for me feels like it is in its final, dying stages. Littered with generic crime shows, banal sets and toothy, obnoxious reality stars, you have to go searching to find anything of quality, and who can really be fucked, when friends already send you obscure music videos and ingenious ads ("Cadbury Eyebrows" anyone?) via YouTube. Things are so bad it seems, that not even the saviour herself, Oprah Winfrey, can save television from the ashes of ruin. Perhaps she's just exhausted from all the campaigning she did with the Obamas, but these days she looks inert and haggard, and The Oprah Effect feels so spookily Stepford. Her rival, the perkier Ellen DeGeneres, is also starting to test the limits. Awash among the infomercials and made-for- TV movies that is day-time television, her saccharine skits and interviews with plastic celebrities were once feel-good, but now just feel forced. (Her interview with the recently de-lesbianised Lindsay Lohan was plain odd; check it out on YouTube.) But maybe its just me. Maybe I'm alone in thinking that if there is no on-air revolution sooner rather than later, television will surely go the way of the typewriter and the VCR.