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Dec 2, 2007 
As you probably know, I write quite regularly for Death Ray magazine. SF Diplomat has posted a review of issue eight (the current issue) over on his blog – he’s previously reviewed issues one and two as well.As you’ll see from the reviews, SF Diplomat’s opinion of the magazine has diminished somewhat. I actually think SF Diplomat is rather unfair in surmising the magazine’s decline based entirely on a single issue, but that’s not really the subject of this blog. What interested me in particular was SF Diplomat’s criticism of the amount of coverage the magazine gives to television, and the nature of that coverage, too – ‘the usual toothless fluff’ as SF Diplomat calls it. I don’t entirely disagree with this statement, as it happens, but I don’t think it’s Death Ray’s fault, I think it’s something in the nature of television.
There’s a tendency for TV series to get an easier ride than either books or films, and thus to appear to be more favoured and subject to less critical scrutiny. With television, if you get a bad episode here and there, people write it off – there’s another episode along in a week or so, and short of a really protracted bad run, nobody really notices. Films and books are single, largely self-contained works and hence any weakness throughout reflect on the whole thing. Overlooking individual flaws in a TV series is easy; to do so with books or film is much harder, with such flaws being seen as much more of a blemish.
There’s also the difference in viewing habits. In many cases, people watch TV when they’re doing nothing else. It’s time they know they would otherwise have wasted, they’re just slobbing around in their living room and so they don’t care as passionately about the quality of what they watch. The effort required to read a book is vastly more – it takes enthusiasm, and that can transform into harsh criticism of a disappointing read. The same applies to films, to an extent. The length of most films and the cost involved in seeing them at the cinema means that watching a film represents a significant outlay in both time and money, an expenditure again sufficient to arouse strong feelings and passionate opinions. Television rarely arouses anything like this strength of feeling.
For most people, books and films are also much more occasional experiences than TV – many people will watch television numerous times in a week, following a great many regular series, but the number of books they read or films they see will be much smaller – perhaps just a few in a month or even a year.
Some might assume that these more numerous television offerings would actually result in audiences being even more selective, but in truth it seems to simply create a sort of aggregating effect – unless a TV show is the very worst of the worst (or the very best of the best), it will probably meet that rather meek standard of approval best described as ‘okay’, ‘not bad’, ‘pretty good’ or something equally harmless.
With a medium that arouses such moderate opinions, it’s perhaps inevitable that the good is lauded more than the poor is condemned, and when reviewers follow this course it gives the impression that television is being fawned over – but it just isn’t the case. If television escapes the kind of zealous and minute scrutiny that books and films are commonly subjected to, it isn’t because Death Ray, or any other magazine for that matter, has shown it preferential treatment – it’s because television just really isn’t worth it.
