The Vast Wasteland and You
People used to stare at fires. Now they watch TV. We need to see moving images, especially after dinner.
–Truffaut, playing himself in Day For Night (1973)
Let’s start with some impossibly broad generalizations about the human experience as a whole. People like to watch performances of young, talented charismatic people. There exists a shared deep human love of watching a performance by young, beautiful skilled members of your community.
Our desire for performance differs from our desire to watch sports, which comes from the need for identifying hunters and combatants.
Performance is fun, warm and not centered on competition.
Performance is less centered on competence than athletic
competition. Someone needs to win at sports because someone needs to be a good enough hunter to feed the tribe. The outcome space for a bad hunt includes starvation. But nobody needs to be great to entertain us. The outcome of a poor performance is mild annoyance, not death. Any performance is probably better than a dark night of silence and solitude.
The closer the performers are to your kin and community the more imperfection you are willing to tolerate. Five year old grandkids want to “do a show” at Thanksgiving dinner? Yes of course, 100% buy-in. Skill level doesn’t matter. Sports has less tolerance. Same five-year-olds want you to watch while they “play basketball” against each other? There will be much less enthusiasm if they can’t actually put a ball in the net.
Old performers are nice but young performers are the best. We want to know that “the kids are alright.” The evo-psych angle here is pretty obvious: if you’re in a community with happy young people who have the luxury of time, security and excess calories to practice their arts and devote evenings to entertaining you and the rest of the group, your genes are probably in a good place to live on. If you don’t have happy youth you don’t have a future.
The always-approaching, always-consuming “future” is what evo-psych is concerned with. Everything dies except the genome. That is why…
Performance is not just virtuosity
Why don’t people want to watch “greatness” always and only? How does the age of mechanical reproduction affect this? We have access to high quality recordings of the “best” singers so why does anyone care about seeing anyone live below the best?
Because it matters how “close” they are to you and how much of a clue they give you about the viability of your society’s future. An aged virtuoso from far away can offer a pleasing performance, but it doesn’t soothe the soul like the “sweet spot” of young, culturally close and pretty good. (Which is why American Idol’s effort to prove the singers are “us” offset the less-than-virtuoso talent on display.)
Thought experiment: What would be more pleasing? (1) Seeing the greatest singer in the world on stage in person with thousands of other cheering fans or (2) seeing your own child performing with their closest friends and some other of your relatives cheered wildly by everyone you knew? Let’s set the rules: in both scenarios you must be fully convinced in your heart of the talent of the performer. The greatest singer in the world really is great, and thousands of strangers agree. But in the second scenario your kid really is good enough to warrant your pride and the cheers of hundreds. It’s not close, right? Suburban UMC moms paid $3000 for Taylor Swift tickets. There’s no limit to what they’d spend to lock in the second scenario. Do you know what private schools, private lessons and carpool time opportunity costs are already?
Performance is not just sex appeal
Evo-psych: it’s not (just) about sex. The muses were hot but they weren’t just sex symbols: Aphrodite is a different goddess. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is filled with singing girls who were concubines but some really were singing girls. (Full disclosure: I couldn’t finish R3K. Maybe there’s a big reveal in part 1000 about all the singing girls.) Because evo-psych puts reproduction at its core so many observers (both good and bad faith) reduce it to stories and motive concerning actual sexual reproduction. It takes a lot more than just the act of mating. Evolution wants you to produce children but also grandchildren. Surrounding yourself with talented, beautiful youth is an evolutionarily advantaged act apart from mate selection.
This is from the Egyptian wing of the British museum depicting a lavish royal party 5000 years ago. There are naked dancing girls and a beautiful troupe of (clothed) musicians.
The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, the Ballet Russe and yes The Olympics are alluring because the sexuality of the performers is presented in the context of extremely talented performance.
Performance is not just “story”
Narrative, character, the dramatic arts: that’s all a different level. Let’s call that “high” performing art. So much of “high” performing art is story. Story driven offerings have completely consumed television but it doesn’t have to be that way. Story devotees can be snobbish about non-story performance but ironically non-story performance can require more from its viewers.
American Idol as the skeleton key
There is a question implicit in the story of the success of American Idol in 2002. Something about it has always struck me as very strange. Why did it take so long to put such a basic distillation of performance on the air?
The “American Idol” template is a kind of ur-show: Young people we “know” singing well known songs for all of us sitting appreciatively in the shadows while a highlighted council of elders offers encouragement and criticism. We learn more and more about the best of the young singers as we return for regular performances. They are us, selected from across the nation. It is possible to envision a television timeline before 2002 that is made up of a plurality of shows like it. It was famously cheap and an instant “surprise” hit that made tons of money for Fox and inspired many imitators that are still on the air. Why wasn’t “Idol” the default, not the ground-breaking exception?
Let’s go back forty years.
Television’s long journey around performance
The Vast Wasteland speech doesn’t seem to occupy as much cultural space today as it once did but it was a monumental piece of the midcentury landscape. (My 10th grade nonfiction survey textbook included it for example.) You often heard the term thrown around in a knowing way as a cheap putdown of the general quality of television programming. Newspapers.com has over 9,000 matches for “vast wasteland” in the 1980s alone and most of them are winking television references like this, from The Ventura County Star Jan 5,
1980.
It was expected that readers of all levels would know “vast wasteland” is shorthand for a general attitude of bemused “what are ya gonna do, TV’s pretty crappy but we watch it” informed by this 1961 speech.
The gist of the speech is a threat from the US government. By that point in the early 1960s it was obvious what an incredibly concentrated power lay in the hands of the US television networks. Three companies controlled this magic box that beamed hypnotic moving images into more and more American homes. The realization was settling in that the networks could show almost anything and still attract enough eyeballs to make their ad business wildly profitable. At a certain point Newton N. Minow “ran the simulation” and saw what a race to the bottom a market-oriented TV system could be.
He said in essence: The existing networks tri-opoly is supported by the FCC. Whatever forces gave rise to it, it can be harried and pulverized by the power of the federal government should it come to that. The trends in content aren’t great. Go above the baseline and create something good… or else. Censor yourselves to a “reasonable” middlebrow.
We all know the government works via this kind of self-censorship with lots of things like FTC and anti-trust or DOJ and disparate impact. It only takes a few examples to bend the compliance math for all the companies participating in the market.
What happened?
See American network television as a sort of closed guild or church. The money is almost limitless but the supply and the number of participants is very limited. The government has issued the vague threat “be kind of good and not total slop.” Until cable there is literally no competition or room to expand.
Pump ambitious people and money into a closed system with these
constraints and you get an ever more baroque system. Think of it like the medieval Roman-centered Catholic church. Cable is the reformation, the walls come down and suddenly simple brutalistic variants emerge with simple doctrines. Early MTV is all music performance, no stories. Early ESPN is all sports, weird sports, highlights, just sports. Faced with this competition the original institution responds by turning inward and becoming even more insular and baroque. (Again, think of the Italian Catholic Church.)
The general trend line from Cosby Show to Seinfeld is an increasing detailed and self-referential refinement of the form, where it peaks in jewel box 2000s shows Arrested Development and 30 Rock. (Meta-shows famously popular with critics that barely attracted a mainstream audience.) Then the streaming era kicked in and the whole network tri-opoly dried up and blew away for good.
Let’s track the decline of naive “performance” on network television
through incidence of “Variety Shows” and music hours. Variety shows
used to be a thing: It’s a simple formula with charismatic host and non-story performers. The back half of the classic late night talk show is the spiritual descendant. David Letterman used to make such a big deal about being indebted to Ed Sullivan but The Ed Sullivan Show was a primetime show, not late night. It ended in 1971.
I asked ChatGPT for a graphic showing relative percentage of US
primetime schedule devoted to Variety Shows and this is what it
produced:
It might be lying to me because it refused to give a full data source for what it used, but reading over the schedules it seems to be accurate. Wikipedia has amazing primetime schedule records.
1960-61 (before the Vast Wasteland speech) had the Dinah Shore Show and the Ed Sullivan Show (Sunday), Glenn Miller Time (Monday), The Red Skelton Show (Tuesday), Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall (Wednesday), The Ford Show (Thursday), The Bell Telephone Hour and Sing Along with Mitch (Friday)
Every day of the week you could turn on one of the networks and get a fairly simplistic show with isolated non-story performances.
By the 1970s there were still a few (Flip Wilson and Mac Davis had eponymous shows on this 1973-74 schedule.) In the 1990s they were gone. Even these variety shows, as the category name implies, made an effort to avoid all the entertainment being in one category. Few were willing to provide the baseline of a full hour of one type of performance until American Idol came along.
So the answer to our question is that human nature, incentives and competition in the closed world of television created a system that eschewed the most basic form of performance. Or maybe simple performance is always too simple for the high court of television. We had MTV in the 80s and today we have TikTok/Reel product to give us the simple sights of young people singing and dancing. (Although MTV misses the mark by being too virtuosic and too “high” and TikTok dancers are a constellation of strangers and thus too “far” and so leave us unsettled. The spluttering rage of online commentators for seemingly innocent trend-of-the-moment dances makes more sense when you see it as distress that they don’t have simple soul-nourishing performance in their lives and only this pale simulacrum on the screen.)
The devils advocate case for the status quo goes like this: Big TV really did find a sweet spot in the 1970s, creating story-driven entertainment that was highbrow enough to keep the censors happy while offering aggregate audience satisfaction that beat whatever barebones alternatives we could have had: either simple sports or simple performance. (As I never tire of pointing out with regard to the NBA, 1970s network TV wouldn’t show sports in prime time because sports wasn’t getting good enough ratings. Or at least that was the behavior. Hard to know if sports ever got a fair shake.) We should be grateful for all the effort and money pumped into tuning Frasier b-stories for it produced a consumer surplus of “free”, evolved, finely-wrought entertainment never seen before.
The opposing counsel’s case: Faced with a novel technology and a license to print money the church of television let itself be entangled in a complex status game that ultimately proceeded orthogonally to actual audience taste and the very core entertainments that humanity has preferred for millennia. Vague government guidelines provided a fig leaf for naked aspirational behavior by the participants. Because the returns for the individuals in prestige and money were so very high there was no check to how much the actual product had “evolved” away from pure entertainment. The walls came tumbling down and we’re still figuring out what happened, all of us alone in the dark with our screens trying to find the simple performances we crave.
There was one special time every four years (in the summer ratings doldrums) when the networks brewed a treacly mash of sports and performance ladled out by unctuous and condescending hosts. Curse The Olympics. I’d rather binge a season of Scarecrow and Mrs King with commercials than watch one twelve minute segment about a swimmer’s practice schedule. Let me try to explain that one next.