Page 91 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

Could someone parked in a car outside your house really tap into your
home security system and use its motion detectors to tell which room
you’re in?
Are satellites in fact taking pictures of us every 15 seconds and can
they really zoom in on individual vehicles? Could a hacker indeed seize
control of the nation’s air traffic control system?
. . . Anyone even slightly susceptible to paranoia will be on full alert
after watching 15 minutes of “Level 9,” not so much because of the bad
guys as because of the good guys, who seem able to peer in on anyone
anywhere. . . . “Go ahead,” a savvy friend tells the still skeptical Burrows
early in the show, “underestimate the level of unauthorized government
surveillance.” We hear the conversation because “Level 9” is eavesdrop-
ping on it. 19

In fact, trends in genres can even serve as an economic indicator. Re-
porter Daniel Akst points out that 1998 sitcoms such as Maggie Winters
and Encore! Encore! shared a common premise: the hero has returned
home in defeat from the wider world:

Television is downshifting as the economy threatens to do likewise. And
as a tinge of blue creeps into TV’s collars, a dose of blue is coloring its
characters’ situations and their psychology.
Could it be that television, with its antenna forever riveted to the Zeit-
geist, has detected a kind of prosperity fatigue. . . .
Could the direction of the current TV season, planned months ago, be
an early symptom of the economy’s Asian flu?
I am aware of no study of television’s effectiveness at this sort of
prognostication, but there is logic to the idea of TV as economic indicator.
Whether television reflects consumer thinking or directs it can be argued
long and hard. But mirror or lamp, we know television is created by execu-
tives striving mightily to produce programming that is of its time.
So this fall, think of your set as an electronic version of a woolly cat-
erpillar, portending a hard winter. 20

Significantly, by 2000, the American economy began to move into
recession. Indeed, in 2006, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has posed
the following scenario for a disaster movie, based on newly discovered
consequences of global warming:

It’s a dark and stormy night, and deep within the ocean the muddy bot-
tom begins to stir.

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