How TV is defined is changing, along with the ways we receive it
10/30/2014 Times Union
What is television? It seems a fair and timely question to ask, now that it’s coming at us from so many angles, on so many platforms, from so many producers.
Let’s begin near the beginning.
Once upon a time there was a thing called a television set. You knew where you stood with it, and you knew where it stood: in your house, in a fairly stationary, semi-permanent, prominent way — a box, sometimes a very big box, a piece of furniture. It didn’t hang on a wall, you couldn’t carry it around in your pocket or wear it on your wrist.
For many years, everything that came into a television set came out of the air, on invisible waves of light. Just how much TV you were able to see had to do with how the frequencies in your area were apportioned and how close you lived to a transmitter. There wasn’t much of it, compared to today, but there was still more than anybody could watch, even if, like Lyndon B. Johnson or Elvis Presley, you had three sets going at once.
Then television started coming through a cable as well, bringing dozens upon dozens of new channels to what was now just a figurative dial. Eventually, it would also arrive through the telephone line or off a satellite or by way of a computer modem — and not into the squat single-purpose set of yore but into other machines that would become televisions just for a time and then go back to being computers, cellphones or a thing to play video games on.
Each new technology created new sorts of content, some of which bore only a cursory resemblance to the TV that preceded it and new sorts of business models that remodeled the older models. Now, for instance, HBO, a premium cable network, and CBS, one of the original broadcast networks, are making their wares available directly over the Internet — doing a Netflix — while Vimeo, the arty YouTube, is selling its first scripted series for $1.99 an episode (It’s called “High Maintenance,” and it’s about marijuana), as if it were iTunes or Amazon.
I once would have described television in terms of the formal qualities of its content: its standardized length, its episodic nature. And, as a professional critic, it seemed for a time necessary to limit the definition, almost as if one were defending “real” television against the barbarian hordes of terrible first-generation Web series — things that either tried to be like real TV and failed, like the twentysomething soap “Quarterlife” from the creators of “thirtysomething,” or that wrapped themselves prankishly in the medium, like “Lonelygirl5,” revealed to be nothing but a limp conspiracy thriller once it stopped pretending to be an actual vlog.
We have moved on from there into a world of video wonders. Now I am inclined to define television as any moving picture — at all — watched on any sort of screen not located within a movie theater.
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