A Show About Nothing
Apr 11th, 2007 at 1:11 pm by Susie
Matt Taibbi on the presidential race:
Mainly in an attempt to preserve my own tenuous grip on sanity, I made it through this past weekend without reading much coverage of the campaign. The election, after all, is nearly a full Martian year away, with a Super Bowl and two World Series still to play out in between — which means that the “urgency” of breaking campaign news is now and will remain for at least a year an almost 100 percent media concoction.
Like Seinfeld, the presidential campaign is essentially a “show about nothing,” a prolonged prime-time character-driven drama crafted around a series of fake conflicts that always get resolved by the end of the program, in this case November 2008. Marcia and Greg make driving-test bet in segment one; Marcia imagines instructor in underwear in middle segments; Marcia and Greg’s bet ends in a tie, family loves each other again. In the old days the presidential show’s writers tended to use actual political issues (Georgie and Hube argue about Vietnam!) as the starting points for their dramatic conflicts — a natural artistic strategy, given that the subject matter was a real election in a giant country teeming with ugly social and economic problems — but in the last few cycles the networks seem to have figured out that you can shoot even a whole season of a presidential race without including any of the boring political shit.
Go read the rest.
Taibbi manages to hit a home run at nearly every at bat. This is another.