But What If We're Wrong? (16 page)

All of which leads to one central question: What TV show will this be?

Removed from context, it's a question that can also be asked like this: What is the realest fake thing we've ever made on purpose?

I'm (slightly, but not really) embarrassed to admit that this is an inquiry I've been thinking about for my entire life, years before I ever had a financial incentive to do so. It is inexplicably hardwired into my brain. For as long as I can remember, whenever I watch
any
scripted TV show, part of my consciousness interrogates its relationship to reality. “Could this happen? Does this look the way it would actually look? Does this work the way it would actually work?” It does not matter if the details are factually impossible—if I'm watching
Game of Thrones
, I can readily accept that dragons exist. Yet I still wonder if the dragons on my TV are behaving in the way I believe real dragons would behave in reality. I still question the veracity of those dragons, and I instinctively analyze the real-world plausibility of a scenario that's patently impossible. This is just the way I am, and I never had to try.

So I am ready for this question.

(And I'd better be, since I appear to be the only person asking it.)

The first candidate to consider—and the easiest candidate to discount—is reality television. As a genre, the social and generational importance of these shows is vastly underrated; they are postmodern picture windows. But they're pretty worthless at demonstrating the one quality they all purport to deliver. Even if
we take
The Hills
and
Storage Wars
and
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
at face value—that is to say, even if we're willing to accept (or pretend) that these are normal people, behaving naturally in unnatural circumstances—the visual presentation makes no attempt at masking the falseness of the staging or the contrived banality of the conflicts. Nothing on TV looks faker than failed attempts at realism. A show like
The Bachelor
is instantly recognized (by pretty much everyone, including its intended audience) as a prefab version of how such events might theoretically play out in a distant actuality. No television show has ever had a more paradoxical title than MTV's
The Real World
, which proved to be the paradoxical foundation of its success.

Programming that nakedly operates as a subcultural roman à clef actually gets a little closer. The early twenty-first century spawned a glut of these series:
Empire
(a fictionalized portrait of the “urban” music industry) and
Entourage
(a fictionalized portrait of the celebrity industry) were the most successful attempts, but others include
Nashville
(centered on the country music scene),
Ballers
(the post-NFL brain economy),
UnREAL
(the reality of reality TV), and
Silicon Valley
(a satire of the Bay Area tech bubble). None of these programs claim to depict actual events, but all compel viewers to connect characters with the real people who inspired them. The star of
Empire
is some inexact synthesis of Jay Z, Suge Knight, and Berry Gordy. The protagonist in
Entourage
was supposed to be a version of
Entourage
producer Mark Wahlberg, had Wahlberg experienced Leonardo DiCaprio's career. There's a venture capitalist on
Silicon Valley
based (at least partially) on a melding of billionaire Mark Cuban and online entrepreneur Sean Parker. Part of the pleasure these programs provide is an
opportunity to make these Xerox associations—and once the connections calcify in viewers' heads, they can effortlessly inject living public figures into fake story lines.
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That intellectual transfer makes this programming far more watchable than the writing justifies. But this essential process, somewhat ironically, erodes the level of realism. It exaggerates every narrative detail and forces the characters to unload bushels of awkward exposition, simply because casual viewers won't make those subtextual connections without heavy-handed guidance. Beyond a few key exceptions, simulacrum shows are soap operas, marketed as fantasies, geared toward mass audiences who don't want to think very hard about what they're watching. Characters need to invent ways to say, “This is who I'm supposed to be,” without saying so directly. Nothing in a simulacrum is accidental, so you end up with the opposite of naturalism: It's bogus inside baseball, designed for outsiders who didn't know anything to begin with. You can't be real by
trying
to be real.

“Aha,” you might say to yourself after reading the previous sentence. “If you can't be real by trying to be real, the inverse must be the answer. The path to TV realness must involve trying to be fake on purpose.” Well, not quite—although it does get closer. Television shows that make no attempt at tracing reality hold up better over time: the best episodes of
The Twilight Zone
, early Fox experiments like
Herman's Head
and
Get a Life
, the stridently meta
It's
Garry Shandling's Show
, and anything featuring Muppets. If a piece of art openly defines itself as 90 percent fake, whatever remains is legitimized (and it's that final 10 percent that matters most). But a self-aware vehicle like
Community
or
Mr. Show
still collides with the reality-killing property of self-serious programs like
Homeland
or
St. Elsewhere
—premeditated consciousness. The former takes advantage of people's knowledge that TV is not real; the latter does whatever it can to make people forget that this unreality is something they recognize. In both cases, the effort exposes the hand. For this to work, the people creating the TV program can't be thinking about how real (or how unreal) the product seems. They need to be concerned with other issues, so that the realness is just the residue. And this kind of unintentional residue used to build up all the time, before TV decided to get good.

What I'm talking about, in essence, is a disrespected thirty-five-year window of time. The first Golden Age of Television started in the late 1940s and lasted until the demise of
Playhouse 90
in 1960; this was a period when the newness of TV allowed for unprecedented innovations in populist entertainment. The second Golden Age of Television started in the late 1990s (with
The Sopranos
and
Freaks and Geeks
and the mass metabolizing of
Seinfeld
) and is just now starting to fade; this is a period when television was taken as seriously as film and literature. But as a reality hunter with a reality hunger, my thinking occupies the dark years in between. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, watching TV was just what people did when there was nothing else to do. The idea of “appointment television” would have been considered absurd—if you missed a show, you missed it. It was not something to worry about. The family television was simply an appliance—a cathode box with the mentality of
a mammary gland, actively converting couch owners into potatoes. To genuinely care about TV certified someone as a dullard, even to the dullards in the band Black Flag. This perception turned television into a pure commodity. The people writing and producing the shows were still smart and creative, but they were far less concerned with aesthetics or mechanics. There was no expectation that audiences would
believe
what they were seeing, so they just tried to entertain people (and to occasionally “confront them” with social issues). From a linguistic standpoint, this allowed for a colossal leap in realism. Particularly with the work of Norman Lear, the creator of long-running, heavily syndicated shows like
All in the Family
,
The Jeffersons
,
Good Times
, and
One Day at a Time
, it became possible for characters on television to use language that vaguely resembled that of actual humanoids. The only problem was that these productions still had the visual falseness of thirty-minute theatrical plays. The sets were constant reminders that this was not life. Archie and Edith Bunker's living room furniture already resembled the museum installation it would eventually become. George Jefferson and Ann Romano
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seemed more like symbols than citizens. It was not until the late 1980s that the residue really stuck, and most of it stuck to one specific vehicle:
Roseanne
. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't reasonable, and—sometimes—it wasn't
even clever. But
Roseanne
was the most accidentally realistic TV show there ever was.

The premise of
Roseanne
was not complex. Over time, it adopted an unrepentant ideology about gender and oppression. But that was not how it started. It was, in many ways, an inverted mirror of
The Cosby Show
: If
The
Cosby Show
was an attempt to show that black families weren't necessarily poor and underprivileged,
Roseanne
was an attempt to show how white families weren't necessarily rich and functional. The show was built around (and subsequently named after) Roseanne Barr, a domineering comedic force from Colorado who did not give a fuck about any vision that wasn't her own. John Goodman was cast as her husband. By the standards of TV, both of these people were wildly overweight. Yet what made
Roseanne
atypical was how rarely those weight issues were discussed.
Roseanne
was the first American TV show comfortable with the statistical reality that most Americans are fat. And it placed these fat people in a messy house, with most of the key interpersonal conversations happening in the kitchen or the garage or the laundry room. These fat people had three non-gorgeous kids, and the kids complained constantly, and two of them were weird and one never smiled. Everything about
Roseanne
looked right. The house looked chaotic and unfinished—it looked like it had been decorated by people who were trying to trick themselves into believing they didn't have a shitty house.

Roseanne
ran for nine seasons, and the dialogue changed considerably over that span. The (popular) early years were structurally similar to other sitcoms; the (unpopular) final season was the equivalent of a twenty-four-episode dream sequence that canceled
out almost everything that had come before. But there was realness residue from start to finish. Episodes would conclude with jarring, unresolved arguments. Barr was an untrained actress working with veteran performers, so scenes sometimes felt half rehearsed (not improvised, but uncontained by the normal rules of TV). There appeared to be no parameters on what could qualify as a normal conversation: An episode from the eighth season includes a sequence where Barr sits in the passenger seat of a car, reading Bikini Kill lyrics aloud. If these details strike you as immaterial, I understand—when described on paper, examples of ancillary verisimilitude usually sound like minor mistakes or illogical choices. And sometimes, that's what they are—essential flaws that link a false reality to the real one.

So what does this mean? Am I arguing that future generations will watch
Roseanne
and recognize its genius? Am I arguing that they
should
watch it, for reasons our current generation can't fully appreciate? Am I arguing that future generations
might
watch it, and (almost coincidentally) have a better understanding of our contemporary reality, even if they don't realize it?

I don't know.

I really don't. It's possible this debate doesn't even belong in this book, or that it should be its own book. It's a phenomenon with no willful intent and no discernible result. I'm not satisfied with what my conclusion says about the nature of realism.
But I know this matters.
I know there is something critical here we're underestimating, and it has to do with television's ability to make the present tense exist forever, in a way no other medium ever has. It's not disposable, even if we want it to be. And someday, future potatoes will prove
this.

On a frigid evening in February 2010, I was asked to appear at a reading series held in a Brooklyn art gallery. I accepted the invitation. I did not, however, pay much attention to the details of the invite and erroneously assumed this art gallery was located in Manhattan, which meant I was twenty-five minutes late for the opening of an event where I was the opening act. The evening's headliner was writer Malcolm Gladwell, whom I'd met in person maybe five or six times before (and on two of those occasions, we'd discussed the Buffalo Bills
58
). Since I was still crossing the East River in a taxi at the seven p.m. start time, the order of the speakers was flopped. Gladwell graciously spoke first. When I finally arrived, he was almost finished with his piece, a reported essay from
The
New Yorker
about why NFL teams are habitually terrible
at drafting quarterbacks. Upon finishing the reading, he took a handful of questions from the audience, almost all of which were about football. The last question was about the future of the sport. Gladwell's response, at least at the time, seemed preposterous. “In twenty-five years,” he said, “no one in America will play football and no one in America will eat red meat.” He thanked the crowd and exited the stage.

After a brief intermission, it was my turn to perform. Sensing a mild degree of bewilderment from the audience, I tried to break the ice by making a joke about Gladwell's closing prediction. “There is no way people will not be playing football or eating meat in twenty-five years,” I said. “In fact, there is a much higher likelihood that in twenty-five years, I will literally eat the flesh of all the various football players who've died during whatever game I happened to watch that day.” Forty people laughed. I then favorably compared the state of Alabama to the island of Samoa. Four people laughed. But here's the pivotal takeaway from that particular night: At the time, my absurdist jokes felt more reasonable than Gladwell's analysis. Predicting that the most popular game in the country would no longer exist in less than two generations made it seem like he didn't really know what he was talking about. But now, of course, everyone talks like Gladwell. In the span of five years, that sentiment has become the conventional intellectual take on the future of football. It is no longer a strange thing to anticipate. Gladwell has grown even more confident: “This is a sport that is living in the past, that has no connection to the realities of the game right now and no connection to the rest of society,” I heard him say on a local TV show called
Studio 1.0
. “[The NFL] is completely disconnected to the consequences of the sport
that they are engaged in . . . They are off on this nineteenth-century trajectory which is fundamentally out of touch with the rest of us.” The show's host asked if he still believed football was destined to die. “I don't see how it doesn't. It will start to shrivel at the high school and college level, and then the pro game will wither on the vine.”

It's disorienting how rapidly this perception has normalized, particularly considering a central contradiction no one seems to deny—football is not only the most popular sport in the country, but a sport that is becoming
more
popular, assuming TV ratings can be trusted as a yardstick. It's among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture; it could be convincingly argued that football is more popular in America than every other sport combined. Over 110 million people watched the most recent Super Bowl, but that stat is a predictable outlier—what's more stunning is the 25 million people who regularly watch the NFL draft. Every spring, millions of people spend three days scrutinizing a middle-aged man in a gray suit walking up to a podium to announce the names of people who have not yet signed a contract. Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about
how many
people would have to die on the field before we'd seriously consider giving it up. Which is the kind of conversation that pushes everyone else toward one of two conclusions:

1. Football is doomed.
   This is the Gladwellian outlook, and it generally goes something like this: The number of on-field concussions continues to increase, as does the medical evidence of how dangerous football truly is. More and more pro players proactively quit (San Francisco
   linebacker Chris Borland being the first high-profile example). Retired players start to show signs of mental deficiency at a higher and higher frequency. Perhaps a prominent wide receiver is killed on national television, and his death dominates the national conversation for three months. The issue becomes political, and the president gets involved (much like Teddy Roosevelt did in 1905, the year nineteen college players were killed on football fields). Virtually all parents stop their children from playing youth football, and schools can't afford the insurance liability required for a collision sport of this magnitude. The high school game rapidly disappears, leading to a collapse of the college game. With its feeder system eliminated, the NFL morphs into a sloppy enterprise that's still highly dangerous and prohibitively expensive. Public interest evaporates and a $50 billion bubble spontaneously bursts. Like thirty-two brachiosaurs, NFL teams are too massive to evolve. In less than a generation, the game vanishes. Its market share is split between soccer and basketball.
   
2. Football will survive, but not in its current form.
   The less incendiary take on football's future suggests that it
   will
   continue, but in a different shape. It becomes a regional sport, primarily confined to places where football is ingrained in the day-to-day culture (Florida, Texas, etc.). Its fanbase resembles that of contemporary boxing—rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves. The NFL persists through sheer
   social pervasiveness—a system that's too big to fail and too economically essential to too many microeconomies. The game itself is altered for safety. “As a natural optimist who loves football, I can only really give one answer to this question, and the answer is yes. I believe that football can and will still have a significant place in American culture in a hundred years,” says Michael MacCambridge, author of the comprehensive NFL history
   America's Game
   . “That said, I suspect it will be a less violent game than it has been in the past. And this would be in line with the changes throughout American spectator sports—and society at large—over the previous century. In the nineteenth century, in baseball, you could throw a runner out on his way to first merely by pegging him in the back with the ball while he was hurrying down the first-base line. That age of bare-knuckles boxing and cockfighting and football as organized mayhem eventually changed to reflect the sensibilities of the modern era. So football will continue to change over the next century, and so will protective football equipment.”
   

Though they empty into dissimilar cul-de-sacs, these two roads share one central quality: a faith in reason. Both the Gladwell model and the MacCambridge model are built on the thesis that logic will dictate the future of sport. Gladwell believes consumers are too reasonable to continue supporting a game that kills people; MacCambridge believes the people who drive football are too reasonable to allow the game to continue killing its participants. Both perspectives place trust in the motives and intelligence of the populace.

But I am less willing to do that.

If forced to gamble on which of these two men will eventually be correct, I would flip a coin. But I find myself wondering if that coin might end up irrationally balancing itself on its side. I can imagine two other possibilities, both of which exist in the margins. The first possibility is that football survives
because
of its explicit violence, and that this discomfiting detail ends up being its twisted salvation. The second possibility is that football will indeed disappear—but not just because of its brutality. It will disappear because
all team sports
are going to disappear, and football will merely be the first.

[
2
]
When does something truly become popular? And I don't mean “popular” in the sense that it succeeds; I mean “popular” in the sense that the specific thing's incontrovertible popularity is the most important thing about it. I mean “popular” in the way Pet Rocks were popular in 1975, or the way
E.T.
was popular in 1982, or the way Oprah Winfrey was popular for most of the nineties.

The answer to this question is both obvious and depressing: Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don't particularly care. You don't create a phenomenon like
E.T.
by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like
E.T.
by appealing to people who see one movie a year. And this goal is what the NFL has been working toward since the late 1970s. The hard-core football audience is huge, but not huge enough—the NFL also wants to lasso those who can't name any player whose wife doesn't get mentioned in
Us Weekly
.
They want people who watch three games a season to join their office fantasy league. They want informal sports fans to feel like they
must
follow pro football, lest they be seen as people who don't like sports at all. You can't perpetuate a $7 billion industry without aggressively motivating the vaguely unmotivated. Yet this level of social saturation is precisely what places football on the precipice. There are many athletic activities more dangerous than football—bull riding, BASE jumping, auto racing. It has been alleged that seventy-one of the first seventy-five people who pioneered the wingsuit died during the testing process. Every year, multiple people perish climbing Mount Everest (in April of 2014, sixteen Sherpas were killed
on the same day
). But the difference with football is the ethical compliance, particularly for casual spectators with little emotional investment. The audience for the Brickyard 400 is a marginalized audience (they all know what happens when cars crash into walls at 140 mph). The audience for Cheyenne Frontier Days is a marginalized audience (they all know what happens when a 2,200-pound bull lands on a cowboy's neck). These are fully invested fans who aren't alarmed or confused by the inherent dangers of their niche obsession. They know what they're getting into. No UFC fan is shocked by the sight of a man knocked unconscious. Football, however, appeals to a swath of humanity many magnitudes larger. It attracts people who haven't necessarily considered the ramifications of what they're witnessing—people who think they're relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon, nonchalantly watching the same low-stakes distraction as everyone else. So when this type of person is suddenly confronted with the realization that what he is watching might be killing the people who participate—or if he was to actually
see
a player killed on the field, which seems increasingly inevitable—he is overcome with guilt and discomfort (and bewilderment over how he's supposed to feel about economically supporting a game that mildly terrifies him). The sheer scale of football's popularity likewise creates an opportunity for media grandstanding—self-righteous pundits denounce football the same way histrionic gatekeepers denounced booze in 1919 and
Dungeons & Dragons
in 1985. Over time, this fusion of public discomfort and media theatrics generates a political meaning. It now “means something” to support football. Those who self-identify as enlightened believe it means something tragic. And in ten years, that sentiment might reflect most of the US population.

But it won't represent
all
of the population.

It will never represent all of the population, even if it becomes the dominant way to think and feel. And that will make it unkillable. When any idea becomes symbolically dominant, those who dislike the idea will artificially inflate the necessity of whatever it opposes. (Second Amendment purists do this all the time.) This is why I can imagine a world where football continues to thrive—not in spite of its violence, but because of it. And not in some latent, unspoken context—openly, and without apology.

In the present moment, football operates as two parallel silos, both of which are shooting skyward and gaining momentum. One silo reflects the overall popularity of the sport, which increases every year. The other silo houses the belief that the game is morally reprehensible, a sentiment that swells every day. Somehow, these two silos never collide. But let's assume such a collision eventually happens, and the silo of popularity collapses on impact. It stops rocketing upward and is obliterated into a pile of bricks.
That brick pile will be titanic, and it won't disappear. Neither will the people who built that silo, or those who lived inside it, or those who grew up worshipping its architecture. So they will use those bricks as weapons. They will throw them at the other silo. And since the game will no longer appeal to the casual fan, certain innate problems will turn into strengths.

A few months after being hired as head football coach at the University of Michigan, Jim Harbaugh was profiled on the HBO magazine show
Real Sports
. It was a wildly entertaining segment, heavily slanted toward the intellection that Harbaugh is a lunatic. One of the last things Harbaugh said in the interview was this: “I love football. Love it. Love it. I think it's the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males.” Immediately following the segment, the reporter (Andrea Kremer) sat down with
Real Sports
host Bryant Gumbel to anecdotally unpack the story we'd all just watched. Gumbel expressed shock over Harbaugh's final sentiment. To anyone working in the media (or even to anyone who cares about the media), Harbaugh's position seemed sexist and ultra-reactionary, so much so that Rush Limbaugh felt the need to support it on his radio show.