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As the television writers’ strike winds on, you may be wondering what will happen to your favorite shows. “Heroes” just had its fall season finale with the cryptic promise of more to come in “2008,” but what exactly does that mean?
The answer is nobody knows. The story is the same across prime time: When will the new-shows silence fall, the rerun loop begin? Soon. How long will it last? Nobody knows.
But here’s something we do know. Look a little outside the prime-time box and the effects of the TV strike are already reverberating, most immediately at the point where pop culture and politics intersect. The first casualties of the strike were programs produced daily or weekly, late-night talk shows such as “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” weeknight current-events comedies such as “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” and, of course, “Saturday Night Live.”
The common element among these shows is that they draw on the headlines and buzz items of the day. And these days, with the presidential primaries starting in just a few weeks, a lot of the buzz is (or at least would be) generated by the campaign season that a year out from the election is in full swing. But now all those shows have been struck silent by the strike.
What jokes might Jay Leno have made about the recent YouTube presidential debates during his opening monologues? What other candidates may have followed Barack Obama’s lead and popped up as a surprise guest on “Saturday Night Live” as the Democratic candidate did on Nov. 3? And what endless fodder might the presidential debates have provided for Jon Stewart’s satirical sniping and Stephen Colbert’s mock-genuine belligerence?
Just as you can’t prove a negative, you can’t quantify an absence.
“What you’re talking about is very indeterminate. It’s impossible to measure the difference between the shape of the campaign process with the input of those kind of shows and the shape of it without them,” says Jeffrey Scheuer, author of “The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind.”
The dictates of pop-culture physics, however, maintain that just because you can’t quantify something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, like some sort of electronic black hole, bending, shaping and distorting what gets talked about and how it gets discussed. This is where it’s easy to fall into familiar ruts of thinking. There’s been a lot of attention paid to the new-world notion that many people now get their “news” from “entertainment,” with the iconic image of the college-age dorm-dweller who learns everything he knows about current events from watching “The Daily Show” and skimming through YouTube videos.
But as is usually the case, the truth is probably more subtle and complex. As Stewart has often observed in interviews when asked about this new generation of entertainment-as-news consumers, programs such as “The Daily Show” don’t really work unless you already know enough about current events to be in on the jokes. What is now missing from the cultural equation is the way these shows act as conversational pump-primers, taking events, quotes, moments, gaffes, images from the news and turning them into punch lines or skits that first provoke laughs and who knows what else - thoughts, conversations, new ways of looking at something or someone.
“Who knows the extent of the impact, but this has definitely had the effect of pretty much deleting politics from pop culture,” says Rich Hanley, communications professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.
There have been two presidential debates since the Writers Guild of America announced its strike. Another half-dozen are scheduled through the end of January. While you could watch them all, you probably won’t. And, of course, the pundits on the various news networks will show clips and offer comments. You could watch all of them too, but again, you probably won’t. That’s not even counting the little moments and controversies and exchanges that a presidential campaign is constantly generating. And without these shows, so much of all that passes by, not so much unnoticed as unspun and unspotlighted. If a candidate falls in the forest and there’s no one there to make fun of him, does it still make a sound?
“Campaigns are great for comedy, that’s for sure,” Hanley says. “But the funny thing is, the strikes keep going, the campaigns keep going and there’s no breakdown, no crisis. If anything, I think the strike is showing how irrelevant, or at least disposable, this type of programming really is.”
Another related effect may be that the dearth of television making entertainment out of the daily news will accelerate even more the ascendancy of the Internet as the pre-eminent platform where politics go pop. That’s certainly what a lot of Web entrepreneurs hope.
“Will it be good for us?” asks Roger Simon, CEO of PajamasMedia.com, a news and opinion Web site. “I hope so. At the very least, it may just speed up what’s already happening anyway. As video quality online keeps improving, you’re going to see talk shows online the way you currently see them on television. Maybe not in time for this election, but for sure by the next one.”
And in the meantime, strike or no strike, when politics are the hot-button happening, as they are in the buildup to a presidential election, entertainment-makers and celebrities will find a way to get in on the action. Just look at all the buzz Oprah Winfrey generated when she appeared with Obama.
“The Oprah endorsement was a reminder of what, for better or worse, a celebrity-obsessed culture we live in,” says Robin Bronk, executive director of the Creative Coalition, a social and public advocacy group representing the entertainment industry. “Oprah endorses somebody and everybody wants to know: If she can make a best-selling author, can she make a best-selling candidate?”
Perhaps we needn’t worry. The strike will go on, as will the campaign. And, to be sure, there are some jokes and skits that will never be. But at this point in American history, there’s no taking the pop culture out of politics.
