[cyrus_]

Relevant quote from David Foster Wallace:

If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature’s current marginalization is the reader’s fault. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.

[Tloewald]

Well put but insulting to television which, at its best, is well beyond the quality of the kinds of writing he refers to.

[JasonFruit]

That is excellently expressed. Again it becomes evident to me that I need to read David Foster Wallace.

[derleth]

> television on the page

By which he means most novels, I suppose, which, in turn, means it's nothing to do with television. Add to that all of the wonderful programs on television, such as the films on TCM, the serial dramas on AMC, HBO, and PBS, and the better comedies on the major networks, and this becomes puzzling.

Oh. Wait. No, it doesn't. It becomes a relic from an earlier time, the 1950s and the 1960s, primarily, which has been repeated mindlessly down through the decades as it feeds into a certain classist mindset in the kinds of people who read David Foster Wallace. It reassures them that, even if they haven't given to NPR in five years, they're still better than Those People who still watch television.

[cyrus_]

Before a hundred channels of cable TV, most TV entertainment was pretty unchallenging because they needed to please everyone. Modern TV can carve deeper niches because there are more channels. I don't know if it's gotten more challenging in those niches, but perhaps it has.

[derleth]

Breaking Bad is certainly more challenging than Gilligan's Island. And yes, the broadening of television did save it.