On 11/21/2011 9:46 AM, Ken Norton wrote:
>> Everyone ...........John Cleese would be downright furious if he thought
>> that Basil Fawlty was not being taken seriously :-)
> The biggest crime against humanity is that there were only 12 episodes.
Not so sure I agree. It seems to me that way too many TV shows go on way too
long. Most of them have what you might call
a story to tell of a view of the world to express. Often, if they are
successful, the economic reasons to keep going are
powerful, but the creative energy has all been expended. So they go on, and on,
and on, but the original brilliance is
long gone, and only a shadow remains.
There are endless examples. Rescue Me was breakthrough, brilliant TV for the
first couple of seasons, and quite good for
1-2 more. Then they ran out of gas. They'd told their story, what to do next?
If they let Tommy continue to move toward
actual adult maturity, as he had been doing, the series changes into something
completely different than what it had
been, losing all the edge its creators wanted.
So they chose to have him regress, and started telling the same story over
again. But now it wasn't new, the edge/shock
value was gone, and we soon stopped watching. House has the same problems. The
Simpsons stopped doing anything new
years, maybe decades, ago.
Part of the smarts of UK tele is that they often do limited series, with all
the creative energy concentrated in what is
intended to be a 'limited edition'. Of course, I don't see the weakest stuff
over here.
Think about Fawlty Towers a bit. What is there for them to have done in another
series of 12 shows? It seems to me that
they concentrated comic genius fully in what they did. Anything further was
almost certain to be weaker.
Just last night, I fell into watching part of an Austin City Limits show with
Randy Newman. It soon became clear that he
has been writing and singing the same handful of songs for his whole career.
All the later stuff he did was just
rehashes of his early work. I very much liked his early work, so the show was
pleasant enough. But really, one needs no
more than his first 2-3 albums to hear what he has had to say. I'm happy for
him that he is still working, but it's
redundant for me.
I've found the same to be true of many famous photographers, painters, etc. Go
to a large show of their work and it all
starts to look like the same thing over and over again.* Mike on TOP was just
referencing Elliot Erwitt again, so I
looked up some of his famous work. Some interesting, some OK, some
passé, to my eye. But is immediately becomes apparent that he used the same few
tropes over and over again.
This is not to discount those relatively few artists who continue to grow and
change and create amazingly new stuff for
most or all of a lifetime.
Back to my point. It seems to me to be enough to have the privilege of fully
enjoying a great work of art. Rather than
asking for a repetition of the same thing, enjoy it fully and be open to the
next great thing. If your eyes and ears and
heart are open, it will surely show up.
Philosophical Moose
Moose
* Yes, I recognize that my own work, though on a less exalted plane, suffers
from the same problems. But I so much enjoy
making the same sort of images over again - and once in a long while, I do
manage something new. :-)
--
What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?
--
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