But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

  “Aha,” you might say to yourself after reading the previous sentence. “If you can’t be real by trying to be real, the inverse must be the answer. The path to TV realness must involve trying to be fake on purpose.” Well, not quite—although it does get closer. Television shows that make no attempt at tracing reality hold up better over time: the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, early Fox experiments like Herman’s Head and Get a Life, the stridently meta It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, and anything featuring Muppets. If a piece of art openly defines itself as 90 percent fake, whatever remains is legitimized (and it’s that final 10 percent that matters most). But a self-aware vehicle like Community or Mr. Show still collides with the reality-killing property of self-serious programs like Homeland or St. Elsewhere—premeditated consciousness. The former takes advantage of people’s knowledge that TV is not real; the latter does whatever it can to make people forget that this unreality is something they recognize. In both cases, the effort exposes the hand. For this to work, the people creating the TV program can’t be thinking about how real (or how unreal) the product seems. They need to be concerned with other issues, so that the realness is just the residue. And this kind of unintentional residue used to build up all the time, before TV decided to get good.

  What I’m talking about, in essence, is a disrespected thirty-five-year window of time. The first Golden Age of Television started in the late 1940s and lasted until the demise of Playhouse 90 in 1960; this was a period when the newness of TV allowed for unprecedented innovations in populist entertainment. The second Golden Age of Television started in the late 1990s (with The Sopranos and Freaks and Geeks and the mass metabolizing of Seinfeld) and is just now starting to fade; this is a period when television was taken as seriously as film and literature. But as a reality hunter with a reality hunger, my thinking occupies the dark years in between. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, watching TV was just what people did when there was nothing else to do. The idea of “appointment television” would have been considered absurd—if you missed a show, you missed it. It was not something to worry about. The family television was simply an appliance—a cathode box with the mentality of a mammary gland, actively converting couch owners into potatoes. To genuinely care about TV certified someone as a dullard, even to the dullards in the band Black Flag. This perception turned television into a pure commodity. The people writing and producing the shows were still smart and creative, but they were far less concerned with aesthetics or mechanics. There was no expectation that audiences would believe what they were seeing, so they just tried to entertain people (and to occasionally “confront them” with social issues). From a linguistic standpoint, this allowed for a colossal leap in realism. Particularly with the work of Norman Lear, the creator of long-running, heavily syndicated shows like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and One Day at a Time, it became possible for characters on television to use language that vaguely resembled that of actual humanoids. The only problem was that these productions still had the visual falseness of thirty-minute theatrical plays. The sets were constant reminders that this was not life. Archie and Edith Bunker’s living room furniture already resembled the museum installation it would eventually become. George Jefferson and Ann Romano57 seemed more like symbols than citizens. It was not until the late 1980s that the residue really stuck, and most of it stuck to one specific vehicle: Roseanne. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t reasonable, and—sometimes—it wasn’t even clever. But Roseanne was the most accidentally realistic TV show there ever was.

  The premise of Roseanne was not complex. Over time, it adopted an unrepentant ideology about gender and oppression. But that was not how it started. It was, in many ways, an inverted mirror of The Cosby Show: If The Cosby Show was an attempt to show that black families weren’t necessarily poor and underprivileged, Roseanne was an attempt to show how white families weren’t necessarily rich and functional. The show was built around (and subsequently named after) Roseanne Barr, a domineering comedic force from Colorado who did not give a fuck about any vision that wasn’t her own. John Goodman was cast as her husband. By the standards of TV, both of these people were wildly overweight. Yet what made Roseanne atypical was how rarely those weight issues were discussed. Roseanne was the first American TV show comfortable with the statistical reality that most Americans are fat. And it placed these fat people in a messy house, with most of the key interpersonal conversations happening in the kitchen or the garage or the laundry room. These fat people had three non-gorgeous kids, and the kids complained constantly, and two of them were weird and one never smiled. Everything about Roseanne looked right. The house looked chaotic and unfinished—it looked like it had been decorated by people who were trying to trick themselves into believing they didn’t have a shitty house.

  Roseanne ran for nine seasons, and the dialogue changed considerably over that span. The (popular) early years were structurally similar to other sitcoms; the (unpopular) final season was the equivalent of a twenty-four-episode dream sequence that canceled out almost everything that had come before. But there was realness residue from start to finish. Episodes would conclude with jarring, unresolved arguments. Barr was an untrained actress working with veteran performers, so scenes sometimes felt half rehearsed (not improvised, but uncontained by the normal rules of TV). There appeared to be no parameters on what could qualify as a normal conversation: An episode from the eighth season includes a sequence where Barr sits in the passenger seat of a car, reading Bikini Kill lyrics aloud. If these details strike you as immaterial, I understand—when described on paper, examples of ancillary verisimilitude usually sound like minor mistakes or illogical choices. And sometimes, that’s what they are—essential flaws that link a false reality to the real one.

  So what does this mean? Am I arguing that future generations will watch Roseanne and recognize its genius? Am I arguing that they should watch it, for reasons our current generation can’t fully appreciate? Am I arguing that future generations might watch it, and (almost coincidentally) have a better understanding of our contemporary reality, even if they don’t realize it?

  I don’t know.

  I really don’t. It’s possible this debate doesn’t even belong in this book, or that it should be its own book. It’s a phenomenon with no willful intent and no discernible result. I’m not satisfied with what my conclusion says about the nature of realism. But I know this matters. I know there is something critical here we’re underestimating, and it has to do with television’s ability to make the present tense exist forever, in a way no other medium ever has. It’s not disposable, even if we want it to be. And someday, future potatoes will prove this.

  Sudden Death (Over Time)

  On a frigid evening in February 2010, I was asked to appear at a reading series held in a Brooklyn art gallery. I accepted the invitation. I did not, however, pay much attention to the details of the invite and erroneously assumed this art gallery was located in Manhattan, which meant I was twenty-five minutes late for the opening of an event where I was the opening act. The evening’s headliner was writer Malcolm Gladwell, whom I’d met in person maybe five or six times before (and on two of those occasions, we’d discussed the Buffalo Bills58). Since I was still crossing the East River in a taxi at the seven p.m. start time, the order of the speakers was flopped. Gladwell graciously spoke first. When I finally arrived, he was almost finished with his piece, a reported essay from The New Yorker about why NFL teams are habitually terrible at drafting quarterbacks. Upon finishing the reading, he took a handful of questions from the audience, almost all of which were about football. The last question was about the future of the sport. Gladwell’s response, at least at the time, seemed preposterous. “In twenty-five years,” he said, “no one in America will play football and no one in America will eat red meat.” He thanked the crowd and exited the stage.

  After a brief intermission, it was my turn to perform. Sensing a mild degree of bewilderment from the au
dience, I tried to break the ice by making a joke about Gladwell’s closing prediction. “There is no way people will not be playing football or eating meat in twenty-five years,” I said. “In fact, there is a much higher likelihood that in twenty-five years, I will literally eat the flesh of all the various football players who’ve died during whatever game I happened to watch that day.” Forty people laughed. I then favorably compared the state of Alabama to the island of Samoa. Four people laughed. But here’s the pivotal takeaway from that particular night: At the time, my absurdist jokes felt more reasonable than Gladwell’s analysis. Predicting that the most popular game in the country would no longer exist in less than two generations made it seem like he didn’t really know what he was talking about. But now, of course, everyone talks like Gladwell. In the span of five years, that sentiment has become the conventional intellectual take on the future of football. It is no longer a strange thing to anticipate. Gladwell has grown even more confident: “This is a sport that is living in the past, that has no connection to the realities of the game right now and no connection to the rest of society,” I heard him say on a local TV show called Studio 1.0. “[The NFL] is completely disconnected to the consequences of the sport that they are engaged in . . . They are off on this nineteenth-century trajectory which is fundamentally out of touch with the rest of us.” The show’s host asked if he still believed football was destined to die. “I don’t see how it doesn’t. It will start to shrivel at the high school and college level, and then the pro game will wither on the vine.”

  It’s disorienting how rapidly this perception has normalized, particularly considering a central contradiction no one seems to deny—football is not only the most popular sport in the country, but a sport that is becoming more popular, assuming TV ratings can be trusted as a yardstick. It’s among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture; it could be convincingly argued that football is more popular in America than every other sport combined. Over 110 million people watched the most recent Super Bowl, but that stat is a predictable outlier—what’s more stunning is the 25 million people who regularly watch the NFL draft. Every spring, millions of people spend three days scrutinizing a middle-aged man in a gray suit walking up to a podium to announce the names of people who have not yet signed a contract. Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about how many people would have to die on the field before we’d seriously consider giving it up. Which is the kind of conversation that pushes everyone else toward one of two conclusions:

  Football is doomed. This is the Gladwellian outlook, and it generally goes something like this: The number of on-field concussions continues to increase, as does the medical evidence of how dangerous football truly is. More and more pro players proactively quit (San Francisco linebacker Chris Borland being the first high-profile example). Retired players start to show signs of mental deficiency at a higher and higher frequency. Perhaps a prominent wide receiver is killed on national television, and his death dominates the national conversation for three months. The issue becomes political, and the president gets involved (much like Teddy Roosevelt did in 1905, the year nineteen college players were killed on football fields). Virtually all parents stop their children from playing youth football, and schools can’t afford the insurance liability required for a collision sport of this magnitude. The high school game rapidly disappears, leading to a collapse of the college game. With its feeder system eliminated, the NFL morphs into a sloppy enterprise that’s still highly dangerous and prohibitively expensive. Public interest evaporates and a $50 billion bubble spontaneously bursts. Like thirty-two brachiosaurs, NFL teams are too massive to evolve. In less than a generation, the game vanishes. Its market share is split between soccer and basketball.

  Football will survive, but not in its current form. The less incendiary take on football’s future suggests that it will continue, but in a different shape. It becomes a regional sport, primarily confined to places where football is ingrained in the day-to-day culture (Florida, Texas, etc.). Its fanbase resembles that of contemporary boxing—rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves. The NFL persists through sheer social pervasiveness—a system that’s too big to fail and too economically essential to too many microeconomies. The game itself is altered for safety. “As a natural optimist who loves football, I can only really give one answer to this question, and the answer is yes. I believe that football can and will still have a significant place in American culture in a hundred years,” says Michael MacCambridge, author of the comprehensive NFL history America’s Game. “That said, I suspect it will be a less violent game than it has been in the past. And this would be in line with the changes throughout American spectator sports—and society at large—over the previous century. In the nineteenth century, in baseball, you could throw a runner out on his way to first merely by pegging him in the back with the ball while he was hurrying down the first-base line. That age of bare-knuckles boxing and cockfighting and football as organized mayhem eventually changed to reflect the sensibilities of the modern era. So football will continue to change over the next century, and so will protective football equipment.”

  Though they empty into dissimilar cul-de-sacs, these two roads share one central quality: a faith in reason. Both the Gladwell model and the MacCambridge model are built on the thesis that logic will dictate the future of sport. Gladwell believes consumers are too reasonable to continue supporting a game that kills people; MacCambridge believes the people who drive football are too reasonable to allow the game to continue killing its participants. Both perspectives place trust in the motives and intelligence of the populace.

  But I am less willing to do that.

  If forced to gamble on which of these two men will eventually be correct, I would flip a coin. But I find myself wondering if that coin might end up irrationally balancing itself on its side. I can imagine two other possibilities, both of which exist in the margins. The first possibility is that football survives because of its explicit violence, and that this discomfiting detail ends up being its twisted salvation. The second possibility is that football will indeed disappear—but not just because of its brutality. It will disappear because all team sports are going to disappear, and football will merely be the first.

  [2]When does something truly become popular? And I don’t mean “popular” in the sense that it succeeds; I mean “popular” in the sense that the specific thing’s incontrovertible popularity is the most important thing about it. I mean “popular” in the way Pet Rocks were popular in 1975, or the way E.T. was popular in 1982, or the way Oprah Winfrey was popular for most of the nineties.

  The answer to this question is both obvious and depressing: Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don’t particularly care. You don’t create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year. And this goal is what the NFL has been working toward since the late 1970s. The hard-core football audience is huge, but not huge enough—the NFL also wants to lasso those who can’t name any player whose wife doesn’t get mentioned in Us Weekly. They want people who watch three games a season to join their office fantasy league. They want informal sports fans to feel like they must follow pro football, lest they be seen as people who don’t like sports at all. You can’t perpetuate a $7 billion industry without aggressively motivating the vaguely unmotivated. Yet this level of social saturation is precisely what places football on the precipice. There are many athletic activities more dangerous than football—bull riding, BASE jumping, auto racing. It has been alleged that seventy-one of the first seventy-five people who pioneered the wingsuit died during the testing process. Every year, multiple people perish climbing Mount Everest (in April of 2014, sixteen Sherpas were killed on the same day). But the difference with football is the ethical compliance, particularly for casual spectators with little emo
tional investment. The audience for the Brickyard 400 is a marginalized audience (they all know what happens when cars crash into walls at 140 mph). The audience for Cheyenne Frontier Days is a marginalized audience (they all know what happens when a 2,200-pound bull lands on a cowboy’s neck). These are fully invested fans who aren’t alarmed or confused by the inherent dangers of their niche obsession. They know what they’re getting into. No UFC fan is shocked by the sight of a man knocked unconscious. Football, however, appeals to a swath of humanity many magnitudes larger. It attracts people who haven’t necessarily considered the ramifications of what they’re witnessing—people who think they’re relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon, nonchalantly watching the same low-stakes distraction as everyone else. So when this type of person is suddenly confronted with the realization that what he is watching might be killing the people who participate—or if he was to actually see a player killed on the field, which seems increasingly inevitable—he is overcome with guilt and discomfort (and bewilderment over how he’s supposed to feel about economically supporting a game that mildly terrifies him). The sheer scale of football’s popularity likewise creates an opportunity for media grandstanding—self-righteous pundits denounce football the same way histrionic gatekeepers denounced booze in 1919 and Dungeons & Dragons in 1985. Over time, this fusion of public discomfort and media theatrics generates a political meaning. It now “means something” to support football. Those who self-identify as enlightened believe it means something tragic. And in ten years, that sentiment might reflect most of the US population.