TV Nation came to American television this summer and came as a big surprise. An iconoclastic, left-leaning TV news magazine show, TV Nation uses humor to lighten the load. The "name" that runs the show is Michael Moore, director of Roger & Me, one of the funniest looks at corporate America ever concocted. TV Nation carries on in the tradition of caustic, anti-establishment criticism that Moore's other work contains, odd considering it appears on NBC (owned by General Electric). The six-pilot shows have been aired and a five-week "best of" show was put together. Now NBC must decide whether to sign on for a whole season.
Imagine any other TV show ever trying features like these:
* Interviewing real estate agents in Love Canal
* Challenging CEO's to tackle their rank-and-file's tasks
* Following NYC's feces to the Texas Desert
* Examining pets on Prozac
* Exposing NYC Taxi racism: Yaphet Koto or white habitual felon
* Investigating DC-insiders by lobbying for TV Nation day
Add to this mix Michael Moore harassing random people on the streets and goofy statistical factoids and you've got the basic gist of how the show worked. The general sensation of watching was like riding a topical roller coaster -- sometimes the humor would provide the rush, sometimes the subject did it, and other times you'd just coast to the next spike. All in all a pretty consistently surreal TV watching experience.
While its presence on NBC is somewhat ironic, the co-sponsors of the show are the BBC (it ran there simultaneously this summer) and that connection makes a little more sense, for two reasons. First of all, the BBC has been messing around with the documentary format for a while in the form of docudrama. Thinking about TV Nation as a docucomedy helps explain it, especially since one of the two main threads of English comedy is that sort of social comedy. The second and more powerful connection with British media practice is the simple fact that the British audience is much more aware that every statement made by the media has a political position. (English education and culture are more aware of the scope of political expression within society and media, a relative weakpoint in the US.)
The jarring "voice" of TV Nation is motivated by the attempt to genuinely address social and political issues. Television news production in the US usually follows a very well established set of codes (especially in regards to editing) to maintain a false position of objectivity. Subjects cannot be attacked by the editor to highlight their ridiculousness because that would give away the producers' intent to present them in a certain way. The twist here is that the producers always have some intent to present someone in a particular light, because a neutral story is bad/boring TV. TV Nation has no reason to hide its agenda, just the opposite -- its interest in telling issue-oriented stories in an entertaining way leads it to embrace the various technical ways it can make the subjects look goofy, or stupid or whatever. That's why watching TV Nation can be so jarring, because it doesn't work like a news show in terms of structure (angle, edits, pace, etc.); it works more like an existential comedy -- the technical maneuvers are used to present subjects in a judgmental light. Moronic public figures are treated oafishly and stolid regular folks more favorably. One of the charms of the show is, despite its unconventional form, how natural the political bent works. And it works by acknowledging that any statement made in a public forum implicitly carries a political position.
For a lot of people this sort of TV is too much to deal with, mostly for reasons of form rather than content (like with Twin Peaks, innovations of form alienated a lot of the audience before they even watched a whole show.) The content problem is handled by focusing on middle-of-the-road moral outrage for stories instead of lefty shock tactics.
Apparently the response to the show has been good, but can it be enough to overcome the natural revulsion of your standard corporate TV type? We can only wait to see if all these great innovations in storytelling translate into the ratings numbers that beancounters at NBC can understand. At least we can look back fondly on the six episodes of TV Nation and hope it can inform some other TV production.