Steven Johnson, author of the upcoming Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, explains the Sleeper Curve and how watching TV makes you smarter:
But the explicit violence and the post-9/11 terrorist anxiety are not the only elements of ”24” that would have been unthinkable on prime-time network television 20 years ago. Alongside the notable change in content lies an equally notable change in form. During its 44 minutes — a real-time hour, minus 16 minutes for commercials — the episode connects the lives of 21 distinct characters, each with a clearly defined ”story arc,” as the Hollywood jargon has it: a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and specific relationships with other characters. Nine primary narrative threads wind their way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and personalities, and you get structure that — where formal complexity is concerned — more closely resembles ”Middlemarch” than a hit TV drama of years past like ”Bonanza.”
For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ”masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ”24” episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ”24,” you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ”24,” you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all.
I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.
In the past few decades, storytellers have learned quite a bit about storytelling from an unlikely source:
According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of ”Hill Street Blues,” the Steven Bochco police drama invariably praised for its ”gritty realism.” Watch an episode of ”Hill Street Blues” side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades — ”Starsky and Hutch,” for instance, or ”Dragnet” — and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every ”Dragnet” episode, and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case.
A ”Hill Street Blues” episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands — sometimes as many as 10, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters — and not just bit parts — swells significantly. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end.
Critics generally cite ”Hill Street Blues” as the beginning of ”serious drama” native in the television medium — differentiating the series from the single-episode dramatic programs from the 50?s, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But the ”Hill Street” innovations weren’t all that original; they’d long played a defining role in popular television, just not during the evening hours. The structure of a ”Hill Street” episode — and indeed of all the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from ”thirtysomething” to ”Six Feet Under” — is the structure of a soap opera. ”Hill Street Blues” might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that ”Guiding Light” and ”General Hospital” mastered long before.
Bochco’s genius with ”Hill Street” was to marry complex narrative structure with complex subject matter.
Definitely read the whole article (and read it before it’s placed in the pay-only archives).