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July 3, 2025
Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.
we want to know what American normality is—i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal—we can trust television. For television’s whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It’s a mirror.
Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.
They need that straightforward visual theft of watching somebody who hasn’t prepared a special watchable self.
Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window in an attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt.
For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.
One big claim of this essay is going to be that the most dangerous thing about television for U.S. fiction writers is that we don’t take it seriously enough as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan’s lame F.C.C. chairman Mark Fowler professed to see it in 1981, as “just another appliance, a toaster with pictures.”
fin-de-siècle
This is another reason why most TV criticism seems so empty. Television’s managed to become its own most profitable analyst.
