Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    How TV Can Make You Smarter
    How TV Can Make You Smarter
    How TV Can Make You Smarter
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    How TV Can Make You Smarter

    By Allison Shoemaker

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    How TV Can Make You Smarter is a lively guide that shows readers the numerous emotional and intellectual benefits of TV.

    Contrary to conventional wisdom, television can do more than help you veg out, chill, and escape.

    Author and TV critic Allison Shoemaker rewires our thinking to show readers how to take advantage of our 24/7 access to this ever-evolving medium.

    • TV is a powerful tool and How TV Can Make You Smarter will teach you how to use it.
    • Covers a wide selection of diverse genres from scripted comedies, dramas, and classics to reality and beyond
    • Find acceptance in embracing "bad" TV, and learn to love yourself in the morning.

    Lessons include learning how to gain empathy (Mad Men), broadening your perspective (Rupaul's Drag Race), and discovering how working within boundaries (Doctor Who) or breaking them apart (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) can be good for you.

    Part of the HOW series, the accessible and authoritative guides to engaging with the arts the world, and ourselves.

    • Filled with smart, unintimidating content in a giftable foil-stamped package
    • Great for TV and movie buffs, Netflix and Hulu subscribers, DVD owners, and anyone who loves to unwind with television
    • Packed with insightful tips and tricks for making the most out of what you watch
    • You'll love this book if you love books like Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson, and I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateSep 1, 2020
    ISBN9781797203492
    How TV Can Make You Smarter
    Author

    Allison Shoemaker

    Allison Shoemaker is a TV and film critic based in Chicago, IL.

    Related to How TV Can Make You Smarter

    Related ebooks

    Creativity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How to Perfect Your Practice

      Mar 20, 2020

      I was recently speaking to a great musician and friend about the fact that I was hoping to get a bit more time in the practice room this year. He jokingly replied; “Practice? You mean that thing that you do in a room, by yourself, for free?” While he

      4 min read

    • Article

      Charlie Kaufman

      Aug 21, 2020

      Charlie Kaufman
      14 min read

    • Article

      Macie Stewart

      Oct 13, 2022

      Macie Stewart
      11 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Apr 6, 2023

      Shelf Life
      6 min read

    • Article

      Backwards In Time

      Apr 22, 2019

      It’s precisely at this moment, again and again, that I’m catapulted backwards in time. As the preamble ends (in this episode, the shop assistant, working late and alone, pulls back the curtain on the change cubicle, having received no response to her

      5 min read

    • Article

      Sketchbook

      Dec 22, 2023

      Sketchbook
      1 min read

    • Article

      CREATIVITY as Medicine

      May 25, 2024

      CREATIVITY as Medicine
      4 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Get Slow

      Sep 1, 2020

      Let’s Get Slow
      2 min read

    • Article

      Out Of The Inkwell

      Mar 25, 2020

      Out Of The Inkwell
      11 min read

    • Article

      Forget The Trends

      Mar 29, 2023

      Forget The Trends
      7 min read

    • Article

      Reality TV Has Shaped Our World

      Aug 13, 2022

      Reality TV Has Shaped Our World
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Depressed Person

      Mar 24, 2022

      The Depressed Person
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Book

      Oct 30, 2019

      The Book
      20 min read

    • Article

      Wild Card

      Feb 18, 2022

      Wild Card
      7 min read

    • Article

      Noteworthy:

      Nov 23, 2021

      Noteworthy:
      1 min read

    • Article

      No/20 Art Of The Home

      Jun 3, 2019

      No/20 Art Of The Home
      1 min read

    • Article

      Natasha Lyonne

      Jan 21, 2023

      Natasha Lyonne
      2 min read

    • Article

      Cat in Portrait

      Jun 5, 2023

      If one misses the startingpointone startsanywhere: even ifone losesthe catis won. And no one waits. Not eventhe cat waits for the cat. The cat’s aloneand that allows itto invent itselfits passions. Its riskis to knowand beforehandthat no one will wan

      1 min read

    • Article

      Basic Sketch

      Aug 19, 2019

      Take a sheet of sketch paper and use a soft pencil to lightly sketch the outline of the object. Draw it roughly – don’t fill in too much detail, rather focus on the basic composition (structure or compilation) and the proportions (the relationship be

      2 min read

    • Article

      Zuihitsu

      Jun 14, 2022

      Whoo, whoo. An owl in the tallest blue spruce. Before sunrise.Patches of icein the driveway. Facing each other, we held a single brush in the air with ourright hands.I, left-handed, felt awkward holding it, but, holding it higherup, hebeckoned me to

      1 min read

    • Article

      Go Your Own Way

      Apr 29, 2023

      Go Your Own Way
      8 min read

    • Article

      Little Nıppers

      Feb 17, 2023

      Little Nıppers
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for How TV Can Make You Smarter

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      How TV Can Make You Smarter - Allison Shoemaker

      INTRODUCTION

      You’ve done it. You picked up this book. You have, at least tentatively, accepted the premise emblazoned across its cover. You have allowed for the possibility that one of the great myths of the age is false: that what is ubiquitous, or, worse still, popular, must be inherently bad for you. Congratulations! The energy you might have wasted on feeling guilty about what you like, judging yourself for how you spend your time, or denying yourself what would bring your mind or heart pleasure, you can instead spend on other things. Go for a walk. Listen to music. Make yourself a nice sandwich. Or go ahead and do what, according to Nielsen, 95 percent of US households do from time to time: Watch some television.

      The idea that TV rots your brain is almost as old as the medium itself. When Newton N. Minow, a chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by President Kennedy, addressed the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961, he did exactly what a lot of people do nowadays: He said that sure, there were good programs—important ones—but that TV was, on the whole, a wasteland. (It’s commonly called the Wasteland Speech.) But in his remarks, Minow praised the great live dramas of the 1950s, as well as contemporaneous shows like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, which remains one of TV’s finest accomplishments. When television is good, he said, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.

      Minow recognized the potential for greatness and for corruption alike in television, praising trailblazers like Serling even as he decried laziness, irresponsibility, and dishonesty. But if ABC’s Work It, a particularly lousy sitcom, were a novel, we would never use it as an excuse to declare all fiction worthless. Nor were Minow’s concerns limited to quality. He was focused on community responsibility and the advancement of education and culture and feared the accessibility of television—about the harm that could come from every family having a wasteland at their fingertips, a universe of detergent commercials and paint-by-numbers comedies. But if the bad stuff is a click away, then so is all the brilliance, and never has that been more true than now: If you have a TV, or a computer, or a phone for crying out loud, you have access to some of the greatest art of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. So do countless others. That means that you’re equipped to discuss, debate, and dissect what comes before you with an ease that Minow could hardly have imagined. Wheels turn. Synapses fire. Opinions change. The mind engages, stays engaged, and once that happens, what do you know: TV can, and will, make you smarter.

      You can choose to see a wasteland for one, or a wonderland for many. The latter puts your brain to far better use—and it’s more fun, too.

      PART I

      WHAT IS TV, AND WHY IS THERE SO MUCH OF IT?

      WHAT’S TV ANYWAY, AND HOW IS IT NOT A MOVIE?

      In days gone by, television was a pretty straightforward proposition. If someone was watching TV, it meant they had their family set tuned to one of the major networks. On the screen would be a show: I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, Moonlighting. That show would be interspersed with advertisements, sold by the networks. Eventually, if you had a VCR, you could set things up to tape your favorite shows while you were out.

      Times have changed. Yes, there are still commercials, but not always, and if you missed The Sopranos or Breaking Bad the first time around, you can now head straight over to On Demand, a DVD set, or one of many streaming services to catch up. Netflix gradually transformed from the place that sent you DVDs of The West Wing through the mail to the home of House of Cards, its first original series. Now, with the rise of the Streaming Wars, Netflix’s playing field grows increasingly crowded. HBO and other premium cable services remain dominant, but basic cable networks like FX and AMC have also had wild successes. Sometimes the watercooler show of the moment is still broadcast on a major network (like NBC’s This Is Us) or one of those cable titans (HBO’s Game of Thrones, FX’s Atlanta); sometimes it comes from a more unexpected corner, like BBC America (Killing Eve), Pop (Schitt’s Creek), or the invaluable PBS (Downton Abbey). It’s an ever-changing world.

      Yet the most fundamental part of the DNA of TV remains unchanged. Put most simply, a television show is any program created for and released by a network, be it broadcast, cable, streaming, or another such source. There are exceptions, but by and large, television is a place you head to for serialized storytelling: a larger story made up of smaller stories, viewed in sequence. That category excludes some major players: event programs, such as concerts, awards shows, and other such programs, as well as made-for-television movies, talk and variety shows, and the mighty anthology show (like

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1