DVR drama

Here's a problem for you: one nearly-full DVR leased from a certain satellite company, with an on-the-blink remote reception thingy. A DVR with only like 6% available space that cannot be operated with a remote control. Which means no fast-forwarding. Of commercials. No searching for titles to record. Playback is OK, operable from the receiver itself, but no pausing while playing, and NO FAST-FORWARDING OF COMMERCIALS.

Not a big problem for the boy's shows, as they are commercial-free anyway. Bigger problem for mine. I've started recording everything on the other DVR in the house, so I'm covered there. But said satellite company, finally recognizing that the problem is not with the remote but rather with the receiver/DVR is sending a new one. Current one--remember 94% full hard drive--needs to be returned to company upon receipt of new one. So what to do?

I have a LOT of hours of TV to watch and no ability to fast-forward while watching. Do I go on a watching binge, filling up commercial time with bits of work, reading, house cleaning? Or do I let go some of the backlog of shows? As a TV completist, it kills me not to see all of something that I decide to watch. I admit it will be some relief to start fresh with an empty DVR, but the mountain of shows before me (WITH commercials) makes the new DVR seem as much of a burden as an opportunity.

This is one of those moments when real life and research life oddly coincide. Early this week I spent time researching the history of Nielsen's measurement of time-shifting--the problematic inclusion of VCR recording, but not playback, in the live program ratings as well as the current C3 compromise of average commercial minute ratings based on live viewing plus 3 days' DVR playback. Because I was researching this in the context of the recent history of the soaps, I had to think about the ways in which time-shifting figures into soap viewing and also about the ways that keeping these shows viable is so dependent upon those time-shifters playing rather than fast-forwarding commercials (so that the viewing counts in the C3 ratings system--all of this only being relevant for Nielsen households, of course). Now, if I had the good fortune to be a Nielsen household (a lifelong dream, I typically tell my students) I would play, play, play those commercials on all of my shows. But, alas, Nielsen has not come knocking and thus I can imagine little more painful than sitting through the many commercial minutes of a daytime soap. I know that many viewers do, but I just don't get that. My time-shifting habits are too deeply engrained.

Damn it, I've been watching the first episode of Soapnet's Canadian import, the hockey soap MVP, as I write this (during commercials) and I like it. Means I have 3 more backlogged eps to catch up on, with commercials, before the DVR switch. Such is the burden of television.

When it comes to gender, how real is MTV keepin' it?

No, this is not going to be one of those posts about how fake The Hills is. If it bothers you that the producers set up Lauren's dates or Heidi's "job", it's not the show for you.

But this is going to be a post about the gender politics of some recent moments on The Hills, and on The Paper, MTV's new must-see reality drama, the show that allows high school newspaper editors of yesteryear to relive/shrink in horror at their glory days.

When I wrote about The Hills for the online TV studies journal Flow a couple of seasons ago, I lamented the gender politics of a MTV's new-fashioned soap, pointing out the difference between The Hills' take on heterosexual romance and that of the daytime soaps (at least the soaps as they should be, but all too often are not these days). I wrote this after the gut-punch of Lauren's decision to forgo a summer-in-Paris internship for a summer in a Malibu beach house with her abusive boyfriend Jason. I wasn't so much upset with Lauren as I was with the program's representation of Lauren's choice as the height of romance, and of Jason as just so adorably in love that he couldn't bear to be away from her.

Since then, The Hills has taken a decidedly different turn, one also indebted to the daytime soaps. Lauren's real-world break up with Jason during the Malibu beach house summer forced a storyline reboot in which Lauren became single gal unlucky in love (and wary of awful dudes like Jason) and the primary drama shifted away from boys and toward the relationships between the girls--a dynamic always present but soon heightened by the breakdown of Lauren's friendship with Heidi.

Now, the daytime soaps grapple with relationships between women as well. But the kinds of problems that place daytime's women at odds with one another tend to be of a more melodramatic nature--baby swaps, man stealing, and lies, lies, lies. The tensions between the women of The Hills are more quotidian, but also painfully close to many girls' and women's actual experiences of friendship drama. OK, maybe a sex tape is not at the center of most women's friendship tension, but the issues underlying L and H's sex tape battle are all too common -- feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of rejection.

The problem for The Hills these days is that Lauren and Heidi are seemingly splitsville forever--these two ain't gonna be friends again and Lauren, at least, seems to have little interest in engaging with Heidi at all, even to accuse and argue. So where's the new drama? It seems to be brewing between new roomies Lauren, Lo, and Audrina, as Lauren is placed in between her actual, for-real childhood pal Lo and her MTV-generated friendship with Audrina.

Granted, this totally works as relatable drama. But. It is placing Lo in the position of villainess, and this I just can't take. Lo is one of the few young women gracing the Laguna/Hills-averse that seems to have some smarts. She's witty, clever, just seems to have thoughts going on behind her sparkly blues. (I really don't mean to diss the others, especially not Lauren, who delivers some bon mots of her own from time to time.) In this latest friendship drama, Lo is being depicted as forcing Audrina out of Lauren's life while Audrina is the sad victim of Lo's actions. [Important aside: Isn't Justinbobby's transformation a-mazing?! Sobriety has made him actually really and truly attractive! He looks great, and is a sympathetic boyfriend/friend/whatever to Audrina!]

The soap villianess is a crucial character, but in the daytime soap world her villainy comes from somewhere--usually insecurity or desperation or revenge--and her challenges to patriarchal strictures of femininity are a pleasure to love (or love to hate). But Lo is so not this character. No, the brainiest girl on The Hills is cast as the bitch, for no real reason other than to stir up drama. Disappointing, again.

The Paper features another brainy girl in the role of villain. But Amanda Lorber is no existing genre's idea of the female foil. This series chronicles the experiences of the new regime of editors at a high school newspaper in Florida. Amanda is the new editor in chief, a girl unlike any we typically see on American TV. Others have described her better than I could, but suffice it to say that she is super-ambitious, super-enthusiastic, super-nerdy, yet supremely confident. Others have compared her to Election's Tracey Flick, a great teen girl character if ever there was one, but Amanda is much less cutthroat than Tracey, and also more vulnerable and more likable. Most of Amanda's underling editors are guys, also super-nerdy but so ensconced in their nerdy guy world that they don't really notice or care.

The main thrust of The Paper's story so far is the rest of the editorial staff's indignation at Amanda's appointment as in-chief. The other kids mock her, criticize her, pretty openly hate on her. At first I thought I couldn't watch the show because they were so mean to her, and she was such a comedic figure that I thought the show wanted me to side with them and laugh at her, too. But the Amanda-love I encountered online, as in feminist-leaning sites like Jezebel, encouraged me to take another look.

I'm pretty certain now that The Paper has a more complex story to tell, one in which the editorial staff (mostly straight-acting boys, but also one girl-who-hangs-with-the-boys and one seemingly gay guy) may turn into the real villains while we are invited to side with Amanda, however misguided she may seem. This became especially clear to me when it was revealed that Amanda has a past of sorts with Alex, perhaps her greatest male adversary, the paper's Managing Editor and Amanda's second in command. Alex admits to having had a crush on Amanda in 9th grade and the two clearly share a long friendship, one now somewhat fractured. In part this seems to do with their competition for the top spot at the paper, but I'm thinking it has more to do with his teen boy assholery, his need to prove his manhood by asserting his superiority to her, by aligning with his buds against her. And he is not looking good in the process. Week by week, Amanda in all her goofiness is coming off as the one to root for.

I'm still a bit uncertain as to where this will all lead, and I still worry that Amanda is too much the butt of the joke on this show to make her the sympathetic heroine I want her to be. I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that she doesn't get the Lo treatment--no room for smart girls on MTV after all. Meanwhile I'm rooting for the girl to prove her haters wrong.

Video catalog

I've been a TV time-shifter since the early 1980s, when my family purchased our first VCR. My early-adopter dad got a top-loading VCR in 1981, right around the same time my mom and I were hearing so much talk about this Luke and Laura and this General Hospital. We decided to check it out, as we could videotape the show during the day and watch it after school/in the evening. The rest of that tale is a history for another time. But I soon began to videotape and time-shift my viewing of most everything I watched, a practice that became a full-fledged part of my life when I went off to college later in the '80s. I wasn't particularly concerned with archiving most of what I taped; I time-shifted then (as now) for convenience and efficiency of viewing, and to avoid commercials (no, I am not one of those DVR users who still watches the ads). But I did begin to save tapes of some of my favorite episodes. As I began to study television more formally in college, some of this taping-and-saving was for particular uses--a paper I was writing, etc. But most of my archival practices were still fan-motivated. I kept this up during my few years between college and grad school. By this point, however, I was pretty clearly a media-scholar-to-be and so I began to get more serious abut what I saved. With graduate school, I continued to tape and save, though still selectively. Unlike at least one of my graduate school colleagues, I did not save everything I recorded. Still, over the years I built up a nice library of tapes, including some off-the-air recordings from the '80s and early '90s.

Over the last few years, I've been working on transferring all of these tapes to DVD. It is still, of course, an imperfect archival medium, but schlepping boxes and boxes of tapes from move to move was seeming more and more ridiculous with the streamlined world of DVD there for the taking. I have reluctantly disposed of the VHS tapes as I've gone along, but it is always a bit painful to let them go. The dubbing project is going somewhat slowly, in large part because I'm always doing some sort of over-the-air archiving at the same time. My biggest ongoing over-the-air effort is saving all of the Ryan's Hope episodes airing on Soapnet (the channel runs the soap's episodes from its debut in 1975 to the end of 1981. Though RH aired until 1989, I have been told that music rights issues keep Soapnet from airing the post-'81 eps). But I've been archiving lots of other soap material, as well, and have saved full or nearly full runs of various prime-time series, too.

All of this may seem somewhat futile and old-fashioned in an age of YouTube and TV-on-DVD, but so much material remains unavailable in these formats, so much of it still seems fleeting (on YouTube today, gone tomorrow), and so much of it is partial (either clips of episodes or less than full runs of series) that I remain a tenacious archivist. I seem to get more and more serious about this as I get older. Perhaps it is nostalgia for the past; perhaps it is an inherent suspicion of new technologies; perhaps it is just experience that has taught me how devalued most TV still is.

The best part of these efforts has been my simultaneous creation of a video catalog that allows me to find whatever I need quickly and easily, and that gives me a collectors' geeky pride whenever I look at it. I'm getting close to having a thousand disks (most of which have from 2 to 13 TV episodes on them) and this darn catalog is as much a point of pride for me as is my book, or my child (OK, OK, I'm pretty much kidding there, but I do love my Excel spreadsheet beyond reason). To love a thing like television is to be protective of it--little boxes on a spreadsheet and a line-up of disc carrying cases is one of the best ways I know to preserve a piece of my own connection to the tube.