Is there any TV worth watching?

By Jayne Spencer

Photo by Tenley Truxell

Roush

Survivor

Matt Roush says that he never tires of watching the tube and that his four years as an undergraduate in Bloomington were the least television intense of all his years.

So says IU alumnus Matt Roush (B.A., 1981), the critic for TV Guide who held court in a cyber forum hosted by Indiana Alumni magazine this month.

The WB’s 7th Heaven is the “closest thing we now have to a truly wholesome family series” and its Gilmore Girls is “the very best family series on the air.”

Is "reality TV" oxymoronic?

“So many of these shows,” responded Roush to one query, “from Survivor to the inevitable spawn of lesser clones, are so far from true ‘reality,’ so contrived in their particulars and in the way the shows are edited to heighten our responses to the individual ‘characters,’ that I often find myself unsettled watching them. The most accurate term for these, in my mind, is ‘unscripted’ TV, not ‘reality’ as in documentary reality. The reason they’re popular, I think, is in part a sense that they’re a little less predictable than the dramas and sitcoms we’ve been saturated with over the decades. The younger audience especially, having been nurtured on a diet of ‘Real World’ and ‘Road Rules’on MTV, seems fond of this sort of show, in part because they pander to the audience’s voyeuristic desire to watch ordinary people make fools out of their exhibitionistic selves on TV, and because, in an age of wall-to-wall hype, it’s hard not to swallow the tease.”

Roush reports that he never tires of watching the tube and says that his four years in Bloomington were the least television intense of all his years.

“There’s so much stimulation in a college environment that has nothing to do with the act of watching TV, that I absolutely understand the notion of limiting one’s exposure to the medium.”

Check out Roush's responses:

http://www.indiana.edu/~alumni/magtalk/may-jun01/mattroush.html