The TV Set/Network

Making movies about television is a tricky business. The Marshall McLuhan phrase “the medium is the message” might be a cliché, but when you’re using the conventions of one medium to examine another, it’s one hundred percent true. Crossing media formats is like translating Latin to Greek, and you can’t articulate a thought in one medium exactly like you would in another. In short, you can try composing Jerry Springer: The Opera, but you’ll still have to sing some arias.

The TV Set, directed by Jake Kasdan, is a gentle walk through television’s chaotic ‘pilot’ season. As the opening credits inform you, every year the major television networks commission hundreds of scripts. Each one is the basis for a new series, but fewer than 25% of them get produced. Then only a fraction of those select shows actually make it to the air and become the new TV series that premiere each fall.

“Gentle” is the operative word here, as none of the satire has much bite. Television is a ridiculous industry any way you approach it, and transferring that to the silver screen demands that the insanity get pushed over the top until it lands on the center of the stage. Instead, The TV Set gives us a quiet, nervous David Duchovny, hiding his deadpan exhaustion behind a bushy beard. He plays Mike Klein, one of the lucky writers whose script is plucked for production. His show is “The Wexler Chronicles,” a deeply personal project inspired by his brother’s suicide.

The network loves it, but they’re not so keen on the suicide concept. And instead of a quiet, introspective actor for the lead, the powers that be would prefer a spiky-haired dimwit who’s a little more handsome. And sex up the female friend, while you’re at it. Thus begins the exquisite Chinese torture of death by a thousand cuts. By the time the network is done tweaking “The Wexler Chronicles”, the once-dead brother is now alive and in prison, the mother has been killed off by post-production editing tricks, and the once warm-hearted drama has turned into broad strokes comedy.

David Duchovny turns in a fine and understated performance. Sigorney Weaver plays the sleek and bloodless network executive, and Ioan Gruffud plays the sole voice of reason. Ms. Weaver must have had a fantastic time with the role – she’s a shark in a cream pants suit – but none of that spark ignites the proceedings.

Perhaps it’s a bit “insider-y” for the poor, star-struck folks in Kansas who don’t get out much, but anyone who has had a prized project nibbled away into banality will recognize the process at work here. It happens to everybody every day on the job, and watching a movie about a quiet guy being frustrated at work makes for a boring night out. Mike Klein seems like a nice enough guy, but in the grand scheme of things, being paid to dumb down your work is a dilemma we should all be so lucky to face.

Where The TV Set fails is in the stylistic choices. It’s OK to make a film about television, but it’s not acceptable to make film like it is television. Film demands heft, and a certain amount of the impossible. If you go to the movies to suspend disbelief, a belief-defying magic act has to be in the works. One of the biggest failings of The TV Set is the failure to grasp that. Instead of a cinematic aria, the entire venture is directed with the unimaginative claustrophobia of a television movie. We pass from one conversation to another, cutting from one tight close-up to the next, isolating each exchange until the gentle tedium lulls the audience to sleep.

A far more biting parody of the television pilot process is this recut trailer for The Shining. In less than 90 seconds, some deft editing transforms one of the most foreboding horror movies of the 1980’s into the pitch for an embarrassingly generic sitcom. It uses the exact language and conventions of a network presentation tape, and underscores the banality of television in ways that The TV Set doesn’t even approach.

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In kinder eyes, The TV Set’s failings might stem from a fear of treading under the feet of a giant, Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 masterpiece Network. The writer gets the first credit here over director Sidney Lumet here because the script is a tour de force. The whole cast and crew brought their A-game to this eerily prescient work, and thirty years later, its scathing commentary on television is still relevant.The subject and setting is television, but the telling is purely cinematic, moving with the stately inevitability of a classic tragedy. Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is a news anchor about to be fired due to his falling ratings. Instead of shuffling off quietly, he snaps on-air and promises to kill himself on live television. Naturally, the ratings skyrocket. The network’s corporate parent smells profits, and the head of the entertainment division, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), smells an opportunity. Beale’s ravings are re-packaged as entertainment, the old guard of newsmen is sent packing, and a new era of ratings-grabbing infotainment is born.

The shocking changes envisioned years ago are the reality of network television today. A fourth-place network dominates the ratings with a wildly popular show; packaging spectacle as news, and using shock value to sell it as entertainment; all to benefit the bottom line of the massive global conglomeration that owns it… It’s not satire, it’s the FOX network. Two years from now it could be NBC or ABC. Two years beyond that, it could be CBS. The lines have blurred beyond recognition, and the worst-case scenario from 1976 has almost become reality today.

Network moves with an operatic grace, parceling out speeches like arias. It has one foot in reality, but it strides through an elevated realm of drama. Each scene essentially gives one of the leading characters a monologue, a chance to step to the center of the stage and pull the action forward. Brick by brick, the small victories of each character build a precarious edifice that can only come crashing down in disaster. The line between news and entertainment, between truth and a manipulated facsimile gets a recognizable human face and emotion attached to it. Chayefsky doesn’t predict the demise of good taste as a faceless inevitability; he embodies it with the icy, ambitious beauty of Faye Dunaway.

The makers of Network grasped that television is the new politics – the surest and quickest route to power. The battles that are fought aren’t the trifling details, but the soul of the medium. Where The TV Set finds frustration in executive meddling, Network finds a creeping sense of dehumanization that can be fought, but not defeated. As a deflated and defeated William Holden notes in his final farewell to Faye Dunaway:

“You’re television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness.”

The movie both opens and closes with an image of the four television networks simultaneously. Four talking heads read the news at you in a blaring cacophony, clamoring for your attention. Today there aren’t four networks but four hundred, and every one would gladly invert fact with fiction to maintain your undivided attention.