Why do fictional television shows often do better than factual journalism at giving viewers a truer sense of the world in all its complexity?
Here’s a big reason: TV script writers understand that viewers can deal with nuance and contradictions. Good TV, whether cable or broadcast, shows us fully rounded people grappling with challenges that viewers can identify with on some level, invented and over the top though they may be. They can be larger than life, like the mafia-don-in-therapy Tony Soprano, or more ordinary people like Coach and Mrs. Coach, doing the hard work of marriage on the Texas high-school football drama “Friday Night Lights” or Gretchen Cutler, a narcissistic sociopath on the road to maturity on “You’re the Worst.”
These characters don’t always have the answers. They believe and do contradictory things. Stuff doesn’t always work out. You know, reality.
[For more on this story by Tina Rosenberg, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...-from-todays-tv.html]
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