I have an awful lot of work to do right now. I’m at the start of my last semester at university so am currently buried in dissertation work, self-imposed script deadlines and English reading lists. I should be spending my time working, writing something which I will be graded on, working out issues in my TV concept, reading a book I will be examined on in a few months’ time. I should be doing something productive. Instead I am writing this. This thing which shouldn’t need to be written. I thought this argument was over. But clearly, people will just not stop hating on Lena Dunham. So I’m writing this because I’m angry, because I’m pissed off, because I can’t sit writing about “Strong Female Characters in Lost Girl” before I get this off my chest.

Firstly, there is a difference between racism and a lack of racial diversity. Girls is clearly not racially diverse. This does not mean that Girls is racist. Lena Dunham has created a show about her and her friends. Girls is about people like her and yes, that means that Girls is about white women in their early 20s. A lack of racial diversity in television is a problem. There are not enough black main characters on television. There are not enough gay main characters on television either. Television is not diverse and this is something that needs to change. However, this lack of diversity is the industry’s fault, not Lena Dunham’s.

So, here is my question: why have people fixated on Lena Dunham? Why is she being vilified? Why is she being solely blamed for this lack of multicultural representation on television and why do people seem to think that her story is not worth telling?

And here is my answer: because she is a 26 year old woman with her own TV show.  

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Glee is an odd kind of show. It’s odd for many reasons but mostly because I don’t know anyone who really loves it unconditionally. We all watch it and we all love it but there’s always a “but”. There’s always a reason why it annoys us, a way it could be better. People love it but they hate it too. We watch it but we’re not quite sure why.

Let me be clear, I love Glee. The “we” in the above paragraph includes me. I watch it every week and defend my love for it to my friends. This is not a post attacking Glee. This is just an analysis of the problems it clearly has and what it could do to solve those problems. I want Glee to be better. I want to be able to say I love it completely. I don’t want to sit in front of my TV asking myself why I’m still watching this show.

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I’ve been meaning to post something about The Big Bang Theory for a while now but it’s taken me ‘till now to really understand what it is about the show that makes me uncomfortable. I’m not exactly a believer in the whole “only write about the things you like, don’t trash the things you don’t” trend which seems to be plaguing comments sections in negative articles lately, but I wanted to be able to really examine why I don’t like TBBT rather than just slagging it off. My main questions being - Why don’t I like this anymore? Why do I feel uncomfortable watching it? And why do I get so annoyed when I see people sing its praises online? The thing which really sparked this post was seeing a raft of comments on Facebook, below the last round of voting in Television Without Pity’s Tubey Awards, claiming The Big Bang Theory to be “the best comedy on TV”. This made me angry so instead of posting an impulsive comment calling out their bad taste which I’d probably regret later, I decided to really analyse why seeing comments like that made me so mad when previously, although I didn’t really love the show, I’d never considered myself as disliking The Big Bang Theory.

Hell, I even have season one on dvd, it’s sitting right between Battlestar Galactica and Bored To Death in my alphabetised collection.

And here, I think, is where my problem with The Big Bang Theory lies…

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It’s an odd and elusive thing, knowing what you want to do with your life, knowing exactly what you want to become, what you want to contribute to the world. For me, when I was a kid, I never knew for sure what I wanted to do when I grew up. Every decision I had to make - what to study at school, what to do my A Levels in, what degree to do at uni - was tinged with uncertainty, with doubt, with the feeling that at some point I’d regret it, I’d have some sort of epiphany half way through my three year course and realise all the work, all my qualifications were worthless. Almost like I’d suddenly realise I wanted to be an astronaut or a surgeon and the majority of my academic life would have been for nothing.

This fear was not entirely unfounded. I regret not studying Media earlier. I regret half-heartedly attempting A Level Art. I regret not noticing earlier, that the happiest moments of my life have been in front of a television, or at the movies. And I regret doubting that I’d be good enough to create those moments for someone else.

I know now, where I want to be when I notice that I’m content with my life. I know what I want to do for a job but more than that - I know who I want to be. What’s difficult is remembering that when things are up against you.

Showbusiness is a big word. When you tell people you want to make television it’s kind of weighted, it comes with a lot of connotations, most of which probably don’t apply. I’ve lived in Lincoln my entire life. It’s a small city, there isn’t much here besides the university and the cathedral and it’s easy to feel overlooked. Basically Lincoln, England is a long way away from Los Angeles so when your dream is there and you’re stuck here it’s easy to get discouraged.

When you say you want to make television, people ask you what your back-up is. It seems such a long way off. It seems like a pipe dream. I tell them I don’t have a back-up. I tell them I’ll keep trying. I tell them that working four jobs to pay my rent and writing in the small hours of the morning is good enough for me because at least I’d be there. At least I’d be trying. I say it’s got to happen to someone. I say why not me.

The thing is, for me television isn’t just something you put on in the background, a fun way to waste time or relax before you do something more important. For me it’s the main event. It speaks to that little girl who never knew what she wanted to do when she grew up and says not just that she can do anything, but that she can do everything. It says that every Monday you can be in Chicago, at County General’s ER saving lives alongside Kerry Weaver and John Carter, that every Tuesday you can slay vampires with Buffy and cast spells with Willow and save the world over and over again. It says that you can spend the morning fighting the Scorvians on Moya with Aeryn Sun and Crichton and the evening battling the Cylons on Galactica with Starbuck and Apollo. People laugh when I say that television is an art form. They think I’m joking, or at least just self-aggrandising. I think they’re clearly just not paying attention.

I don’t believe in God. I never have. As I understand it, for people who do:  God created the world, s/he created everyone in it and knows or decides what happens to them. I used to joke that Joss Whedon is the closest thing I have to a God. I know now that was misguided of me.  Because if that’s what a God is, then showrunners are exactly that. A showrunner creates a world, s/he creates everyone in it and decides where their lives take them. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I want to be.

I want to be a God.

“Unfortunately awards don’t tend to equal ratings on TV” – Syfy on Twitter in response to the question “Now that SGU has won some awards, will you bring it back from stasis?”

There is something seriously wrong with that statement: “Unfortunately awards don’t tend to equal ratings on TV”. Something so wrong that it cannot be distilled into 140 characters, so instead of replying to the poor guy who runs the SyFy channel’s twitter account and getting some stock answer about ad sales in return, I thought I’d take to Tumblr which is where pretty much all my rants go nowadays.

Isn’t that an awful picture of today’s society, that not enough people watch award winning television to keep it on the air? For one thing, this shows how outnumbered we viewers with actual taste are by the casual viewing majority. There are more people out there in the world who regularly watch reality television about the lives of the daughters of the guy who defended OJ Simpson than who watch award winning scripted television. People, on the whole would rather watch Jersey Shore or American Idol over Community or Fringe and that is sickening.

But the thing is, it’s easy to complain about people with bad taste, it’s easy to blame the casual TV viewer, who sits down at the end of the day and watches crap because they don’t really care what they’re watching. It’s easy because we’ve been trained to do it. We’ve been told, year after year by all the major networks that our shows have been cancelled because of low ratings, because not enough people watch them. And we blame the people, we blame the networks too of course but on the whole it just pisses us off that no one else cares enough to watch good TV. We bemoan every new reality show, every talent show, every new series of Two and a Half Men. Why should they be given airtime when my programme was so clearly better? Why do the ignorant masses get what they want, when I’m stuck with only half a season of Firefly? But it’s not their fault, the idiots watching crap TV. It’s not the fault of the people who make the crap TV either. It’s not even the Kardashians’ fault, although I’d like it to be.

It’s the system. The system is broken.

Yes, we’ve all known that the Neilson rating system is shit for a while now. Not only does it only take into account a relatively small, random sample of people but it also completely ignores anyone watching online and DVD sales. Now, considering that a hell of a lot of people watch the majority of their television online, that ignores a rather large portion of a show’s actual audience. However, the Neilson system isn’t designed to show how many people are watching a certain programme, it’s designed to tell networks how many people are watching the adverts. NBC doesn’t care if anyone is watching Community, they care if you’re seeing the adverts that they get paid to show whilst Community is on. That’s why they use the Neilson system. It’s about adverts and it’s about money. Watching a show online, even legally – say on NBC’s own website, doesn’t generate ad sales and neither does buying the DVD. Online viewing and DVD sales only tell the networks that you like the programme and they don’t give a shit whether you like the programme. They just want you there, every Friday night at 8:30 watching their channel, so they can make Coca Cola pay more for advertising. So when SyFy tells you that Stargate Universe was cancelled because it didn’t get enough ratings, they’re not saying not enough people watched SGU, they’re saying that they couldn’t charge more for commercial airtime, that Coca Cola wouldn’t give them enough money to show their advert in the breaks of a show that wasn’t pulling as high numbers as Jersey Shore.

And yes, of course television is a business. Networks need money to make programmes and the bulk of that money comes from ad sales. I know that, I understand that. But surely there’s a problem when the way you fund your product becomes the priority. Surely there’s something broken, something inherently wrong, when you discard a good end product in favour of mediocrity. Surely advertisers should want their client’s name attached to a good product. But of course, it doesn’t work like that. We’ve become a society who favours profitable mediocrity over niche quality. We choose money over art again and again, and that’s why good television gets cancelled.

I’m calling for a revolution. People probably won’t listen, hell people probably won’t even see this post, but I’m calling anyway. To borrow a phrase from Aaron Sorkin and his new show The Newsroom – “ratings shouldn’t drive content, content should drive ratings”. We need a complete overhaul of how networks do business. We need to start putting value on quality again. We need to keep making good television and trust that people will catch on, that people aren’t all idiots who’d rather watch crappy reality TV. Take a chance on a good idea for once, and if people aren’t watching, actually advertise it. Don’t cancel something after half a season without even trying to get a wider audience’s attention. Make a good product and let people know that it’s good and then trust that quality will win out in the end. Networks need to grow their souls back, they need to actually stand for something again, and stop selling out their principles to the highest bidder. They need to side with the passionate minority once in a while. They need to realise that maybe sometimes it’s better to have 30% of the audience who love a show, who’ll watch it every single week, who’ll buy the DVDs, the BluRays, the merchandise – than 70% who couldn’t care less, who don’t even know who makes the thing they’re watching and who wouldn’t care if you told them. They need to start valuing loyalty, they need to recognise that the people watching Community every week who sang NBC’s praises every year they renewed were a much more valuable audience than the guy who gets home from work and leaves the TV on the same channel all night because he can’t be arsed to look for the remote. They need to see fans as important again, they need to recognise that the people watching their channel at 8:30 on a Friday, aren’t going to be there if they cancel their favourite show and they are far less likely to come back for something new. Networks need to value quality over profit margins. They need to realise that they’re not just making stuff to fill in the breaks between the ads. They’re making art. Or at least they’re supposed to be.   

They need to realise that “awards don’t tend to equal ratings” just isn’t good enough, that it just won’t cut it, that if they want to have any chance of competing with online content, with streaming and webseries, that if they want any chance of still existing in twenty years’ time – they’re gonna have to change the way they do things, they’re gonna have to change the system, they’re gonna have to start trusting in good TV again. Or else their audiences, their ratings are just not going to be there anymore.