Leave it to Toilet

What’s the most controversial TV episode ever, and why? 

Genuinely fascinating, and, at 1,500+ responses, I’m not the only one that thinks so. (As an aside, this is the sort of open-ended question that used to do really well on Twitter back when Twitter was Twitter. That platform’s UI changes have now made it useless: broken threading, no searchability, no ‘save-ability’. Also, y’know, Nazis.)

The two things that struck me are:

a) wow, there’s a lot of ‘classic’ television that I’ve not seen

b) almost all of these answers are old. All in the Family, I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver (the first toilet on television!)… A nice shout out to Degrassi Junior High as well.

The most ‘contemporary’ scripted television episode that is nominated repeatedly is ‘Home’ from The X Files. And by contemporary, I mean 1996. After that, you’re into unscripted television - and, boy, reality shows are weird. (Bizarrely, no one mentions S3 E7 of Netflix’s Barbeque Showdown, which, iykyk.)

What’s happened over the past few decades? Why don’t we have controversial television any more? Are audiences more jaded? Or is the output more banal?

I’m not a TV historian - although, as I like to remind people all the time, I was once paid actual real money to write about Gossip Girl - but I’ve got a GUESS. Let’s start with a less controversial topic than controversy: what makes a cultural product ‘influential? My long-running theory is that an ‘influential’ work is one shifts the norms of a cultural space. Following that logic, influence is an equation of ‘distinctive’ plus ‘ubiquity’.

Distinctive is a metric based on did this do something visibly different. If something is simply echoing the status quo, there’s no delta. Unless it is trying to make a difference, it isn’t influencing. There is, I suppose, meta-interpretation that reinforcing a norm is a type of influence, but we still need measurability, and that means ‘context’ → cultural product → change in context. We have to be able to point to our product as ‘the thing that made this thing possible’.

But how do we know it was our product? Ubiquity is key because you can’t be an influence if no one sees you. There are lots of people that do lots of new and innovative things! The avant garde exists! Amazing thoughts and ideas abound! But unless the visibility of that idea reaches critical mass, we can’t plausibly cite it as influential. Ubiquity is a deliberately chosen word: it isn’t about popularity, per se, it is about unavoidability. An ubiquitous property is one that is simply everywhere; whether or not it is actively consumed, it still permeates the space.

This is particularly important because an influential property may never be directly experienced. Most creative influences are unconscious or subconscious. If you ask me my influences, I’ll ramble about Dorothy Parker, but is it? Or is it really late night teenage viewing of Joe-Bob Briggs? I nicked the idea of the ‘vibrating aboutness cluster’ from a talk from China Miéville: we tend to overemphasise the influences that we want to be associated with, but really, we’re wandering through life picking up cultural flotsam , Katamari-style (a game I have never played).

Whether or not you read Twilight, you know about Twilight. See also: Fourth Wing, Game of Thrones… Tolkien, Conan, Rowling, Lovecraft… Smash burgers, kale, Cats… It is a reasonable assumption to make that the core aboutness of The Hunger Games has been absorbed by cultural consumers (of that time and place) - even if they’ve never seen or read it themselves.

In chart form:

I went with ‘content’ over ‘churn’ or ‘chaff’ or even ‘chum’. (Two years on from agency life and I’m still high on alliteration.) I don’t want it to sound prejudicial. The majority of cultural stuff is probably going to fall in this area. And there is a nice double meaning of ‘content’: stuff that simply abides. Stuff that satisfies.

Back to Leave it to Beaver, or, more importantly: controversy. I posit that ‘controversy’ follows the same formula. It obviously needs to be seen (ubiquity). Plenty of challenging, provocative or just plain offensive things are said and done behind closed doors. It isn’t controversial until people become aware of it.

For something to be controversial, it also needs to do something that is unexpected (have an element of distinctiveness). This is, without being unduly tautological, a matter of expections. Controversy arises out of the gap between what the audience is prepared to see and what they are presented with. It is striking when you see a toilet on Leave it to Beaver or a pregnancy on I Love Lucy because those have never happened before: no one expects the sudden toilet! It is surprising when someone dies on a sitcom, because the entire sitcom format is based on a pleasant eternity, where nothing ever changes. It is less striking when someone dies in an HBO series, because, well, everyone dies in an HBO series.

In the era of Beaver and Lucy - and even The X-Files - we still had broadcast television with broad audiences. You saw what everyone was seeing, because there simply weren’t that many options. That’s simply not the case any more. With streaming services and on-demand viewing, you can curate your own television consumption to your own taste. You can see exactly what you want, and exactly what you expect. If you’re only watching HBO shows, you’ll never be shocked by a character death. This is, arguably, why reality TV shows will never be as controversial as scripted programming: if you’re watching reality TV, you’re expecting something melodramatic to happen - that’s the selling point.

Where we do have controversial television programmes, it is because they challenge the expectations of a specific audience. The surprise is more ‘niche’; fan-centered. It is about subversion of tropes rather than subversion of norms. The fragmentation of viewing platforms means we have fragmented audiences, who are selecting the shows they want to watch, rather than having shows foisted upon them. A show may be watched by millions of people, but it won’t be the broad, bored demographic cross-section like we had back in the days of terrestial. The few remaining moments of mass television viewing remaining are live sport; which - however angry we are at officiating decisions - is very rarely ‘controversial’.

This is all pretty spurious (I promise ‘cold takes’, not ‘cold, robust takes’), but there are parallels to every other form of cultural or media consumption. We see it on social media, of course. The death of the ‘town square’ and the fragmentation of channels means we now have niche dramas rather than main characters. Controversy, like fame, is increasingly niche and fleeting.

The Trump/Musk administration has fully adopted the Steve Bannon tactic of flooding the media with one controversy after another, not just shifting the Overton Window, but desensitising the audience. It is impossible to maintain, much less focus, outrage when there’s so much to be outraged by. I’m still het up about illegal deportation, I can’t pivot to President-as-used-car-dealer yet! It also fragments the opposition - forcing people to choose which offends them most; which controversy will get their attention.

After a Serious Internet Discussion about genre definitions, I put together this exciting survey. Is it fantasy or is it science fiction?

what I’m reading (offline)

Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is one of those big books. A #1 NYT bestseller, a GoodReads Choice winner, 350k+ reviews and counting… this is a big book. I can see why, but I can also… not.

Phoebe’s husband has left her, her job sucks, and her cat died. She’s decided there’s nothing left for her. The location she chooses is a luxurious seaside hotel that’s always appealed to her, and Phoebe plans for one final night of luxury. It turns out that Phoebe is the only person there that’s not a guest at a ludicrously fancy wedding. The bride, Lila, gets word of Phoebe’s plans and puts her foot down. Lila is not paying a million dollars for a wedding to have it ruined by a suicidal stranger. Much to her own surprise, Phoebe acquises and becomes - because plot - a member of the wedding party.

The theme, such as it is, is learning to live. But like, like, really live, you know? Lila, her family, and her friends are all hot messes largely because, it is implied, they aren’t living their real lives. Fortunately, Phoebe, who is fully in ‘give no fucks’ mode, is there to float about dropping truth grenades.

The book is oddly constructed: Phoebe wanders around and people monologue at her. Everyone is keen to open up to a total stranger, which is both entirely pitiable while also being a literary conceit with no basis in reality. There’s a romance, but it isn’t romantic. There are lots of monologues and Virginia Woolf references, but it is not actually literally. And it is undeniably funny, but not satire. I’d even go so far as to say it is feminist, but… kind of not?

The appeal of The Wedding People is that it is - somewhat ironically - a bit of all of the above, without ever having a big truth of its own. It provokes discussion, but never provides any answers beyond the superficial. It is agreeably radical. Yoga might not be the answer to all life’s problems! Weddings aren’t fun! Affairs are bad for marriages, but sometimes marriages were already bad! Sometimes women like skeezy men! People are complicated! Money is nice to have! But it can’t buy happiness! Except where it can!

These are not shocking things! None of this is controversial! But... This is the sort of book that I want to give to someone else so we can both then have a chat about how overrated it is. It is funny and I want to talk about it. So that’s that.

[I do have a serious bugbear about books that treat mental health like it is something that can be ‘solved’ by a week of hijinks. I think The Wedding People kind of avoids that trap? But also it does not? Mental health is, like every other aspect of the book, something that is batted about gently and inconclusively. That could be worse, I suppose, but also a lot better.]

what I’m cooking

Went off-piste a bit.

• Cod! I have a fishmonger (I love saying that. I have a fishmonger.) which is a whole story in and of itself. It was … ok. I think there’s a pretty low ceiling for cod. Sorry, cod.

• Chicken kebabs. Beef kebabs. And, for the sake of science, chicken heart kebabs. I’m not averse to offal, and I think hearts are particularly tasty. There is, however, something about lining up a dozen tiny hearts on a sharp stick that makes you feel like a serial killer.

• I’m now the proud holder of a Level 1 Food Hygiene Awareness certificate from the Royal Society of Public Health. It isn’t mandatory for competitive BBQ, but it seemed like a good thing to have in the bag (the bag itself is clearly labelled and kept under 5 degrees).

what I’m scheming

A quick schemes update:

• Two (2) pieces sent in last week: an essay on an old fantasy favourite (🐉); the quarterly column that Anne and I write for ParSec (🚀) — plus one proposal rejected (😔 -you can’t win them all) and one essay yet to write (😟)

• Three (3) anthologies in various stages: one contracted-but-not-announced (🍾), two out on sub (🤞🤞)

• Four (4) recent or upcoming talks: a lecture on behaviour change comms (👨‍🏫); a workshop on misinformation (🐦); another workshop on pitches for socially-conscious start-ups (🌞); a podcast on cyberpunk (🦾) — plus one proposal still waiting to hear (🤞)

None of that is particularly useful for you to know, but lists are fun.