The Unseeing Eye

THE UNSEEING EYE


I freely admit it: I'm a TV junkie. I started mainlining when I was 10 and we got what was probably the fifth or sixth set in the neighbourhood. It had a round ten-inch screen, showed only black and white, and got only three channels.
What we got was a far cry from all the channels and all the content, but at the time it seemed wonderful. Some of the limitations were interesting. No movie could be shown on TV unless it was at least ten years old! Ironically, there was a fear in the industry that TV would kill the movie business.
Contrarily, movies now sponsor TV shows and TV has become a targeted market for less-than-big-budget movies and even more specific arenas like the Lifetime woman-centered movies. (I confess; a lot of days I find myself watching them because they are often excellent thrillers adapted from first-rate women writers.
Over time, I think that TV may have given women better representation than the movies. Of hand, how many movies can you think of that featured two strong women on the order of “Cagney & Lacey” and now “Rizzoli & Isles”? A few years ago, there was a pilot called “Nikki & Nora” which featured two lesbian detectives in New Orleans, but TV, or at least the Powers That Be in TV, weren't ready for it. There were other lighter-hearted but enjoyable offerings like “She-Spies” and 'Snoops.” and, of course, the ground-breaking “Charlie's Angels.” (From what I've seen. The remake of 'Angels' looks a lot more like 'She-Spies,” with the Angels being convicted felons. In the original, they were former cops who were being squashed under the glass ceiling.)
TV is a huge market and unfortunately, the market aspect often drags down the drama. The most annoying aspect of this for me isn't so much the commercials as the ads at the bottom of the screen, often for other shows on the same channel, which distract from and sometimes even conceal, the main action.
Now, however, TV has been given a new task: it is watching us. Finally, the grimmest prophecy of '1984' has come true. We are being watched everywhere we go. We are being sold this phenomenon on the grounds that it makes us all safer. And perhaps it does. But as has been pointed out, the illusions of safety often come at the price of freedom. To quote a line from a Lord of the Rings parody song, 'the Eye is seen each night on CBS,' referring to the Eye of Sauron, a device by which the evil wizard could keep track of his enemies. (For the 20-30 people out there who have never read the books or seen the movies.)
TV is certainly here to stay. It's everywhere: in our homes, public gathering places, our cars, our pockets, and even on our telephones. It has brought the world closer together and provided great learning opportunities for children from all over the world to meet. It's given us drama, comedy, art, music, dance, and ***INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE***history, the sciences, and a load of drivel. Like many another thing, one can get out of it what one wishes.