Here's Dan Harmon, the now-ousted creator of Community, on the relative worth of TV shows that we're "supposed to like" and all TV in general. It's candid and thought-provoking (but what incendiary comment isn't these days):
I mean, as the creator of Community, I'm telling you: It's all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y'know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn't deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you're looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It's just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can't feed back, can't change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you're watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you're just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They're not allowed to say whatever they're thinking! They're not allowed. You're definitely not getting truth; you're getting lies...
...The conversation we're not having is: "Hey, there's 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell."
It's all garbage.
Allow the weight of that statement to wash over you. If this is true for TV shows, something people actually want to enjoy, then it has to be true for advertising, something people PAY to avoid.
To a certain extent everything is garbage. Including the things we hold on to with such fastidiousness.
This isn't meant to be pessimistic. It's can even be a freeing thought. Accepting that everything, anything, is garbage creates a necessity for doing something that gets noticed. Something that demands attention because it knows that time is short.
It's like that saying that life would be completely worthless without the promise of death. It adds urgency to life, an unseen deadline. And that's not a terrible way to approach work either. It may be garbage, but for a moment it can be something more.
Not to say that Harmon is objectively right. This is his opinion. But if a perspective like this created Community it can't be terrible.
