TV Suspense

I've grown enamored of watching TV dramas; I love being excited about finding out what will be revealed in the episode I'm going to watch next. But there are a couple shows that I started watching and grew tired of before the suspenseful questions were answered: Weeds and Desperate Housewives.

I think part of this is due to a split between different kinds of suspense. On the one hand, there's what I think of as forward-looking thriller suspense -- basically, "how will they get out of this?" On the other hand, there's backward-looking mystery suspense, or "how did they get into this?".

Weeds excelled in building up "how will they get out of this" situations. How will Nancy escape the cadre of drug dealers with guns pointed at her? But it eventually grew tiresome, at least to me, because it seemed like there was no "so what" or larger structure behind it. Desperate Housewives built up some "how did they get into this" questions about the past of Wisteria Lane. Why did Mary Alice kill herself? What happened to Dana? Yet with the forward-looking storylines much less compelling, I didn't feel motivated to keep watching.

I think the best suspense interleaves both styles: like one of my favorite shows, Lost. Lost mixes "how did they get into this" questions (why is there a polar bear in the tropics?) with "how will they get out of this" questions (how, if at all, will they get off the island?). The answers to both questions are often intertwined. Who built the hatch in the jungle? What will happen when they open it? Both types of suspense are given more emotional depth with flashbacks and flashforwards that show just enough to keep you curious.

Which is to say, OMG I am so impatient for Thursday night!!

I recently finished two books by pop science writer Steven Johnson -- Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good for You. He's a good writer to the point where I start suspecting his arguments -- something so glibly and smoothly articulated can't possibly be fully accurate, can it? -- but overall, I found the books interesting and informative. Mind Wide Open is essentially a survey of some neuroscientific research as it applies to regular everyday feelings, like the way we're wired to remember scary things more precisely or the way our moods depend more on the mood immediately preceding them than on actual events.

Everything Bad is Good for You, though, is the one with its own substantive argument -- and the one that stuck with me. Johnson argues, quite convincingly, that modern "pop culture" -- video games, TV, the internet -- is more intellectually challenging than equivalent entertainment of a few decades ago, and stimulates our brains to interesting kinds of problem-solving, thus raising the intellectual capability (in some realms) of the average person. I breezed through the first half of the book, mostly because it was essentially preaching to the choir -- I was born in 1985, I've played Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto and seen The Brady Bunch and Arrested Development, and I can tell which are more sophisticated and challenging! I perked up when he mentioned reality TV, which I don't watch; he echoed some of the "emotional intelligence" themes brought up in his earlier book, and suggested that reality TV is interesting and challenging because it requires you to read emotions and social situations. Similarly, he describes the ways in which popular TV of today requires you to discover and follow much more complex social networks than popular TV of thirty years ago; this echoed the argument I've seen (I don't recall the source) that social tools like Facebook are a positive extension of human evolution, since one of the major things that distinguished us from our less successful ancestors was our ability to process and remember a large number and kind of social relationships. This idea stuck with me as I started watching Weeds ("Showtime: the slightly more ridiculous network"?) -- I don't think the show is very good, but I feel compelled to continue watching in order to continue to build up a model of the bizarre social network it depicts.