If you watch Vinyl you’ll notice as part of each episode they tack on a 2-3 minute Inside the Episode segment which rolls contiguously following the credits. It’s not uncommon for shows to do a behind the scenes feature or a teaser to get you excited about the next episode. What appears unique about Vinyl is that this segment appears to exist solely to explain to people exactly what they started watching 59 minutes ago.
There isn’t any backstage access. No theoretical analysis or criticism. It’s mostly the show’s Executive Producer Terence Winter explaining the subtler points of the show which they must assume were lost on the slower members of the audience. It truly shows a cynical lack of faith in the American viewing public. I don’t blame them at all. People are really stupid now. Watching Vinyl an hour every Sunday is now tantamount to making it through Moby Dick.
It should be noted the show isn’t very subtle. I think it’s of great quality. It’s very entertaining. But it’s not hard to follow. The characters are archetypes. There are 4 or 5 plot lines. You don’t need to be walked through it. We’ve reached the point of Idiocracy in this country that we’re being given Cliffs Notes for our serial dramas.
In the clip above, for example, Winter explains that when the main character is hitting a couch with a tennis racket in his marriage therapy session, that something else is actually bothering him and he’s displacing his aggression.
No shit. Unless you suffer from extreme attention deficit disorder or have just been shot in the face, this is readily apparent. I thought part of the joy of watching a show is filling in these details yourself. People have different interpretations. Being explained exactly what just happened seems to negate part of the reason people actually watch drama.
At the risk of sounding like an old man I’m going to remind everyone that I have made the Millennial cut, just barely: This is a byproduct of the increasing omnipresence of the internet. Audiences are more used to Twitter’s 140 characters, 90 second Youtube clips, 2 paragraph Jezebel posts, and the constant onslaught of TMZ blaring fickle trash at the gym and in the waiting room of my fucking dentist’s office. Kids look at iPads in the backseat now instead of looking out the window. Our brains are being compressed.
People don’t read as much, and based on the necessity of this Behind the Scenes feature, it appears they can no longer follow an episode of a TV show without zoning out and mechanically checking their phones over and over and over.
The people at HBO are smart. They’ve done their research. They know – we need this now.
I don’t have any solution and I don’t believe this is going to improve. Apart from technological aspect, part of this can be blamed on the shrinking education budget in this country, which is tied directly to the inflated defense budget. It breaks down like this: Keep people dumb so they don’t question policies, divide the poverty line just so, force poor kids to join the armed services. Start wars. Keep that shit going.
Ten years from now HBO will probably be forced to concede that Entourage is too heady for contemporary audiences and greenlight a Kanye West vehicle where he tries on shoes.
In the meantime chalk up Vinyl‘s Behind the Scenes segment along with Donald Trump’s successful candidacy as another exhibit pointing to the fact that America has collectively become a nation of fat idiots.
*This was not meant to diss Vinyl. I like Vinyl.