Channeling today's America

Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television
By Lee Siegel
Basic, 353 pp., paperback, $15.95

I read some of this book while watching TV.

Such an admission would likely horrify critic Lee Siegel, who turns over parts of his new book, "Not Remotely Controlled," to pained hand-wringing over the amounts of TV that Americans (and particularly young Americans) watch. If television "is about to surpass film as the dominant entertainment medium," as it surely is (if it has not already done so), the paucity of serious writing on television is downright scandalous. Siegel may not be a rah-rah booster of television, but neither is he a weekend visitor from the provinces of high art, popping in to sneer at the lowbrows and their mindless diversions.

Instead, Siegel looks to television for answers to the burning questions of contemporary life. Diving into television (which he characterizes as a "deliciously thin" medium) and emerging on the far side, Siegel asks astute questions about what television reveals about American society, its politics, and its culture. Most of these essays were originally published in The New Republic, where Siegel was TV critic from 2003 to 2006, and they are invested with that magazine's political seriousness, intellectual rigor, and good humor.

As a cultural critic expounding on television rather than a straightforward television critic, Siegel mostly dispenses with plot summaries and judgments on the quality of new series. Instead, Siegel uses television (easily the most influential, comprehensive, and far-reaching of the popular arts) as a springboard for his musings on American politics and culture. Often, the shows in question are mere excuses, the locomotive driving Siegel's train of thought. Siegel borrows from literature, high culture, and current events as grist for his pieces, referring to George W. Bush, Mircea Eliade, and Richard Serra as often as "Friends" and "CSI." In short, Siegel is admitting a soon-to-be-obvious truth when he mentions in the introduction that "the marketing people are going to kill me when they read the following, but if you've picked up this book looking for straightforward television reviews, you're going to be disappointed."

Siegel's unique conception of the television critic's role stems from his pessimistic assessment of the reviewer entirely superannuated by the exigencies of his task. "Is there any form of popular or serious art that has it as critically easy as a television series? . . . Since using the first episode to pass judgment on an entire series is the conventional way of doing television criticism (and I'm as guilty as anyone else), the judgments of television critics have precisely zero effect." In the absence of any noticeable impact on the viewing habits of readers, Siegel chooses to turn the TV review on its head, emptying it of its putative function and cramming it full of the world pressing in at the edges of the screen.

Using television as a societal X-ray, Siegel diagnoses a country enthralled by the allure of money, and terrified by a shadowy conflict seemingly without end. As he says of one of the more popular network series, " 'Lost,' with its secrets multiplying minute by minute, episode by episode, in twisting, turning, multilayered plots, is like a metaphor for a country that feels it has suddenly dropped out of halcyon, ahistorical skies into a mysterious, alien, menacing world." Television's prescribed balm for political dread ("Thanks a lot, Al Qaeda, for, among other things, ruining the fall season," Siegel mutters to himself) is the numbing topical gel of reality programming, which "invites an entire country to step forward and be calmed and stupefied and appeased."

In addition to stupefaction, reality TV also formalizes and dramatizes the squalid American grab for money. Siegel, a curmudgeon for whom the sight of a guy in flip-flops at the gym is an intimation of societal decline, bemoans television's ability to encourage its viewers' most selfish tendencies. Siegel (who can be quite funny when so inclined) proposes measuring the SAL (self-absorption level) of new series, and bitterly indicts television's entrance into "the business of making you believe that everyone is raking in huge sums of money except you." Turning capitalist contention into couch-potato drama, television insists on rendering everything as Darwinian combat.

"It's hardly surprising that the trend of turning every mundane activity into a do-or-die struggle to win has now surfaced in the kitchen. Soon they'll have people on a row of toilets straining for the evacuation to end all evacuations. As the money culture grows, as competition becomes more widespread and intense, the vicarious release of seeing competition ritualized and formalized to the point of absurdity seems to be proliferating."

Television is not merely a malady, though; in its finer moments, it is capable of a miraculous alchemy, whereby the fantasies and fears of Americans are transmuted into cultural gold. Equal parts dross and mother lode, television is too large, too ever-present, to be adequately judged or summarized as a whole. Such categorizing is lazy, and the heavy intellectual lifting of Siegel's essays is an explicit rebuke to the boob-tube-despising elites who regard television as trash culture.

Neither a TV disciple nor a reflexive TV basher at heart, Siegel is a judicious observer of television as a tributary flowing into the ocean of mass American culture. More interested in what television has to say about American life than TV itself, "Not Remotely Controlled" bypasses many of the most acclaimed series of recent years; "The Sopranos," "The Wire," and "The Office" only make guest appearances in Siegel's essays.

Not one to obsess over details when a larger point waits in the distance, Siegel occasionally jumbles his facts. The author notes that "until the advent of television, there never was a mass medium for entertainment or information that had such intimacy," neglecting to acknowledge the impact of radio as a homebound form of media. In his discussion of the cinematic precursors of "Deadwood," he overlooks "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and the 1970s revisionist Western genre, and in pontificating on the impossibility of a comic cop show appearing on the air, Siegel forgets the short-lived but esteemed early-1990s Fox series "Bakersfield, P.D."

His eyes firmly fixed on the end zone, Siegel occasionally drops catchable passes. But with so few receivers running routes, we should be thankful for his astute, authoritative essays, and for the sharp eye he casts on the box with which we spend so much of our days.

Saul Austerlitz is the author of "Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video From the Beatles to the White Stripes."