On Speaking of Faith this week, TV and Parables of Our Time. Krista Tippet says shows like Lost, The Wire, and Battlestar Galactica are “engaging grand themes of ethics and humanity and helping a new generation tell the story of our time.”
Her guest, Diane Winston, a journalist and scholar of media and religion at USC, says we’re in a Golden Age of television:
And it’s partly a result of the media breakthroughs. Because of digitization we have so many options and more stations can do niche programming so you don’t have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. You can do a program that gets two million people and it can be like, Damages or Battlestar… But also, HBO did raise the bar and I think it also has to do with the times we live in. I think we live in very difficult times and 2001 crystallized that for a lot of people. And I think hard times brings out our need for stories and writers respond to that. And, interestingly, as I’ve been teaching this class on religion and TV, a lot of TV writers say, “We don’t want to work in film anymore. We want to work in television, because that’s where we can really tell our stories.”
For most of my adult life I ignored prime time television. Recently, aided by TiVo and streaming Netflix, I’ve purposefully put TV back in my life. Perhaps I’ve picked the wrong shows — Weeds, Mad Men and Heroes — but I’m feeling more engaged with friends who watch those same shows than by any grand themes of our time.