Why TV Sucks

Is that a video camera in your hand?

I run 3-4 miles every morning.

I used to listen to music on my iPod, but my friend Mark Bittman (who just ran the Albany marathon yesterday) suggested I try books on tape. So I did.

I started with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

Now, I am half way through the third volume, which is too bad, because it’s also the last one.

Larsson died in November 2004, at the age of 50.

He was, in that year, the second best selling author in the world, behind Khaled Husseini (who wrote The Kite Runner).

Larsson’s Millenium trilogy has sold 27 million copies in 40 countries.

OK.

So why is this interesting to us?

Larsson began his career in Sweden as a journalist, working for a number of small papers and magazines.

He started writing his books at home, in his spare time.

If you have the desire to write a book, you just sit down in front of your computer and start writing.

Maybe you’re Steig Larsson.. maybe you’re not. But the only way to find out is to just start writing.

If you want to be a painter, you just get yourself a brush and a canvas and start slinging paint. Maybe you’re the next Picasso. Maybe not. But there’s only one way to find out.

If you want to be a musician, you get yourself a guitar and start rocking out.  Maybe you’re Sting.. or maybe you just stink. Who knows until you try.

Literature, Music, Art… all have produced real genius.

But television?

500 channels of crap.

Can anyone point me to the Michelangelo of television?

The Mozart of TV?

The examplar of genius in that medium?

Anyone?

Not yet.

And why?

Because until now, if you wanted to make TV, you went to work for CNN or NBC.

Unlike writing or music or painting, you became an employee of a major corporation, with all the bureaucracy that that entails.

And while corporate bureauracracies may make money, what they don’t make is fine art.

Or anything all that interesting.

Steig Larsson didn’t get himself a job working for Bertelsmann, the publishing house and a contract to write a book about Elisabeth Salander.

He just sat down and banged it out.

From inside.

Picasso wasn’t an employee of the Sherwin Williams Paint Company.

Up until yesterday, the idea that anyone could pick up a camera and make TV was crazy.

It was too complicated and too expensive.

But not any longer.

Now YOU can do it.

You CAN turn this crappy medium around and give it the creativity it so richly needs and wants and is capable of.

YOU can do this.

YOU can become the Steig Larsson of television, the Picasso.

But it won’t happen by going to work for CNN.

It will happy by picking up the camera and starting to create what is in your head.

As Don Hewitt, the former EP of 60 Minutes use do say

Tell Me A Story.