Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television
By Lee Siegel
Basic Books ₤9.99, 304 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤7.99
Television is often dismissed as the flimsiest of all the art forms. But Lee Siegel, estimable critic for American magazine The New Republic, will have none of it. In Not Remotely Controlled, he contrasts the “deliciously thin” nature of the small screen with the “thick” expressions of higher concerns – poetry, novels, paintings – that are so dense with layers of meaning that they risk losing their sense of engagement with the outside world.
It is the intimacy and immediacy of television that gives it its allure, its evident superiority. It also stretches in so many different directions, says Siegel, that it cannot fail to inspire the viewer. He justifies his own eclectic approach with a note of defiance: “If you’ve picked up this book looking for straightforward television reviews, you’re going to be disappointed.”
But this sprightly collection of essays, taken from his regular column, rarely disappoints. Siegel’s feisty writing makes for a provocative read. He writes with refreshingly little regard to fashion or reputation, and does not shy from strong opinions.
On Larry David’s highly-acclaimed comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm, for instance, he is downright derisory. He hates the way the comic uses his wealth and sense of entitlement to bully the lesser lights in his immediate firmament. “Larry David has returned the social order to its upright position by standing comedy on its head,” notes Siegel acidly. “For perhaps the first time in the history of the genre, he has put comedy on the side of the big guy.”
Siegel is almost at his most controversial on sitcoms. He applauds Friends for its wholesome appeal. Mystifyingly, he likes its feeble spin-off, Joey, too. He prefers its “simple pleasure” to the “glamorising” – and surely superior – Hollywood satire Entourage. There is more than a hint of unwelcome moralism here. There is a running thread of disapproval towards explicitness. The absence of anything substantial on The Sopranos – surely a benchmark for high quality – is puzzling.
I loved Siegel’s column on David Mamet’s special forces drama The Unit, which cleverly traces the decline in “America’s finest living playwright’s” creative powers: “Mamet’s fascination with the amoral pursuit of the almighty buck seems to have tipped over into mundane pursuit of the almighty buck,” he concludes drily.
The book’s tour de force is its final chapter, on Oprah Winfrey. Here, Siegel lays his views on the line with startling candour: Oprah is to television, he says, “what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature.” Remarkably, he makes a decent fist of standing up those heady comparisons. He defines a shift in American sensibility thanks to the chat-show host: the public stopped being interested in idealised images of happiness and physique, and learned to love the “overweight, awkward” star who chronicled the travails of ordinary people.
Watching Oprah, says Siegel, “fills you with hope [and] plunges you into despair”. Those are feelings we associate with higher art forms, but Siegel roots them convincingly in a world that is at the same time superficial and deadly serious.
Peter Aspden is the FT’s arts correspondent
