Hope. Life, and Television

My recent assaults on television are aimed at tabloid, reality, and talent oriented shows. Only uneducated young people will be gullible enough to enjoy their fodder. Longstanding icons of late night comedy should not be included in my scathing reports such as Late Night with David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and…. Well that’s about it I guess unless you want to include the “jerk off the public” type shows that aren’t interested in cutting edge entertainment. What has happened? I base my analysis upon shows of the past that far supercede anything that is being produced today. Shall I list them?

Dallas
Love Boat
Love American Style
Mannix
Hawaii Five-O
Barnaby Jones
The Wild, Wild, West
The Waltons
Apple’s Way
Family
Man in a Suitcase
Zoom
Knot’s Landing
The Hitchhiker
The Night Stalker

Somewhere along the line television producers decided humoring and including the masses was more appropriate than teaching them. You don’t have to work as hard to be ahead of the “In Crowd.” You just regress to the lowest common demoninator and call that your show. The problem is when everyone in the public eye sells out, there is not much left to lead the public in the right direction. Television has always been a large influence on the American people. In the case of the shows listed above, the major difference is… Well there are a lot of things that are better, but one in particular is live music. Live music “back in the day” consisted of a composer that scored each show weekly. It is a serious schedule, and not every composer is cut out to score television. Jan Hammer commented on what a rigorous job scoring TV is. There have been many an article in the earlier Keyboard Magazines that talked about producing music for television. The biggest difference back then was the producers used live musicians. Each studio had a “sound stage” that was set up to record LIVE music. That meant either an orchestra or a smaller compliment of musicians consisting of a rhythm section and a few horns were set up to be recorded weekly. Live players had to come in and read the “cues” the composer had written. Now it is all done by a computer. A computer? How can a computer replace the heart and soul of so many talented individuals? It can’t, and that is why today’s television is suffering. Where once a show included a plural interpretation of the drama, now it is taped in a vacuum like the rest of life. The youth of America have come to believe sitting in a dark room alone in front of a computer is the appropriate way to live. “Back in the day” things were done in the public forum. As a result the product spoke to a much larger group of people, possibly the mainstream. Small productions written and produced in a vacuum are unlikely to produce art. The writer of The Yearling produced nothing until she, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, actually moved to Florida and experienced something other than her own shortcomings. At our local regional theatre they are preparing the musical Oliver. My next door neighbor got the part she wanted but largely was disappointed to find out instead of having a live orchestra they were using prerecorded “tracks.” I know something about this, because I have been playing in the Showband on cruise ships for the last five years. We play production shows “with tracks.” That tracks are provided because nine times out of ten the musicians hired are not competent enough to play the shows. A production show on a ship is a different affair than a musical theatre performance. Theater is about live interpretation and interaction. When you use a prerecorded track that means there is NO room for improvisation. Not only do you have to do the performance the same way each night, there is no emotional contribution from the live music. Few moments will be created except the moments that are created by the producer of the “tracks.” Those are large shoes to fill. Luckily Carnival has a competent arranger who usually is at the deepest level of the music. He used to play for Buddy Rich. Another line I will not mention is comfortable at the “pop” level, meaning the drama that is inherent in the music is not actualized. That means there is vast room for improvement in the shows, but the performers get brainwashed into thinking a half-assed effort is good enough. The connection that can be made between stage performers and musicians in the pit is gone, reducing the product to nothing more than TV. I have had to fight tooth and nail to salvage the live theatre aspect of production shows. Often I am jeered by my fellow musicians for trying to hard to make the show better than it actually is. Since I have been involved in academia for nine years, I don’t know how to contribute less. Not having live music is like the way life is today in America. Everything is programmed. There is a diluted formula for life that translates into despair, because nothing is being left to spontaneity or hope. Without the prospect of new things being able to happen, life becomes bleak. Even for those of us that know about depression first hand, we eventually realize basking in darkness is no answer. You rely on the prospect of hope for salvation. Without it then you would be left stranded in darkness. In this way the possibility of new achievement and accomplishment is crucial to our lives. Imagine the way those stranded occupants of New Orleans feel with no lives and no seeming hope. At the moment there seems to be a huge, demonic, monolithic hand with a hammer that is shaping the way things are. Whether this is big business, big government, Al Qaeda, or the devil is not readily apparent. The American people feel it, and it does not feel good. The prospect of prosperity was a defining element of America when she was first born, and we as a country need to work hard to discard the rigid little black box in which we are being forced to live and rekindle the idea that someone wants the heart of the American people. Who is this demon?