SOME SPECULATIONS ON THE ANSWER OF PRIME-TIME TELEVISION TO THE QUESTION: “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR STUDENTS ARE?”

Charles B. Rosenberg
Technical Advisor: The Practice (and,once upon a time, LA Law)
Rosenberg & Mendlin
Los Angeles
CBRosenberg@hotmail.com

STORIES
Prime-time drama is about story telling. So is prime-time comedy.

Stories are among the oldest cultural artifacts. They predate writing.

Starting about 1980, the stories told on television began a trend toward increasing sophistication - multi-layered plots, ensemble casts, dramas reaching well beyond the “twin beds for married couples” story-telling of the fifties and sixties.

Speculation #1: Today’s students, even if they’ve never read Dickens, Hawthorne, Austen or Achebe, are used to hearing sophisticated stories. The “little stories” told in many legal cases often bore them to tears, although they are not allowed to say so.

CHARACTER
The key to modern television drama (indeed, to all drama) is the development of characters about whom the audience cares. Classically, there are only three ways for someone in the audience to care about a character: via antipathy (I hate that character), sympathy (I feel sorry for that character) or empathy (I feel like that character).

In television, plot is often subordinated to character, particularly recurring characters, and the shows with the highest ratings are usually character-driven (e.g., LA Law) rather than plot-driven (e.g., Law and Order). Plot may, in the end, be subordinated to character in all literature, both “pop” and serious. Thus, we may remember literary characters long after the plots that initially illuminated them have faded from our memories. Do you remember the plots in Wonder Woman comics?

Speculation #2: The characters that run through most “legal stories” told in law school are shallow, one-dimensional and non-recurring. They fail to hold student interest because the students don’t care about them. The important characters of law school are professors and fellow students. This is recognized in the way “Paper Chase” and “Legally Blonde” are put together. Also, from a teaching point of view, the “character set” in student brains is different, at the margin, from the character set in the brains of professors who don’t watch a lot of dramatic television or movies. This has implications for the metaphors of teaching.

THE VISUAL
Television is a visual medium. The visual sophistication of television - short takes, multiple camera angles, motion in the frame, elaborate sets, etc. -- has increased to the point that it sometimes rivals film, even though television’s average cost per hour is much less than that of film (perhaps something like $2 million per hour for high quality prime-time vs. a minimum of $10 million per production hour for a high quality commercial theatrical release).

The visual sophistication of the medium is one of the things (but only one) that makes prime-time shows entertaining - that enables them to hold the attention of viewers’ eyes and brains. “Entertaining” is a word that is often used to dump on content as “low-brow,” or unintellectual. But, in truth, “entertaining” ought to mean that the material is crafted in such a way that it engages and holds the attention - both intellectual and emotional - of the viewer/reader. You could argue that being entertained, in that sense of the word, is a fundamental human right.

Speculation #3: Students’ rights to be visually entertained are regularly violated in law school classrooms (indeed, in all classrooms). The visual sophistication of many law school classrooms is still metaphorically at the “film-strip” level. Students, left to their own devices, will instead simply seek out the visual on their notebook computers (Pong, anyone?)

Afterthoughts: Are students now more “visual learners” than they used to be? Do they have in their brains a different “visual set” than their professors do?

THE EMOTIONAL
Television drama and comedy, like all drama and comedy, is an emotional medium. Writers, actors, directors and producers want not only to engage your mind, but to make you laugh or cry or gasp or squirm - “feelings” are where it is “at.”

Speculation #4: Law students, exposed to a “lifetime-before-law school” of having their emotions tapped in both television and film, are unprepared for the “leave your emotions at home” outlook in many (but not all) legal texts and classrooms. As a result, some students find law school problems and analysis “unreal.”

HIGH PRODUCTION VALUES
Commercial television, especially prime-time, has high “production values.” This means, at its most basic level, that you don’t see the producer’s feet sticking out from under the curtain. At a more sophisticated level, it means that programs are visually flawless - transitions between shots and scenes are smooth, continuity is ever present (if there’s a coke bottle on the table in one shot, it’s still there in the next shot), sound is good, sound effects work, etc. Students who grow up with this approach are used to it and expect it as a matter of course.

Speculation #5: Law students are often bored, distracted and not engaged in law school classrooms because those classrooms are the ultimate in “ low-production values.” The suffusion of print over the entire enterprise makes high production values particularly difficult to achieve in classrooms: for example, when visuals are used, the transition into and out of them is still clunky, despite the increasing presence of audio-visual equipment and net access. Indeed, the very design of most law school classrooms, which are based on looking at stage plays (“the professor’s the thing in which I’ll catch the conscience of a king”?) makes the flawless integration of the visual and netable into the classroom experience difficult. At the very least, it requires training and serious effort. And who ever heard of a textbook that is “real time” integrated with video clips?

THE CONTEMPORARY
Mass audience, prime-time television is firmly planted in the present. Sure, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel and the like exist and prosper, but the big audiences are still for prime-time “network” shows - those put on by NBC, CBS, ABC, WB, and UPN, as well as shows where cable channels have invested relatively big bucks in dramatic productions - HBO, for example. Contemporary prime-time dramas and comedies are rarely about the past. They are relentlessly contemporary and they often examine contemporary emotional issues.

Speculation #6: Students are very “present-minded.” But the paradigm of most law school instruction is to start with and explicate the past, before getting to the present. Students might be more attracted to certain law school classes if those classes drew more on the present or at least started with the present. Could a course in Contracts be taught using mostly Microsoft’s allegedly onerous agreements with its OEM’s? How about an Antitrust course? Could Torts be taught using mostly cases from the daily newspaper?

THE WORLD
Television may once have been a “vast wasteland,” as Newton Minnow famously said of it in 1961, but it is now part of a rich tapestry of information and insight into the world. People who think TV is still a wasteland haven’t watched much of it lately or simply don’t like, as a political and cultural matter, what it has to say. (For an edited version of Minnow’s speech, see http://www.janda.org/b20/News%20articles/vastwastland.htm)

When prime-time is combined with cable programs and the net, every middle-class high school and college student has, potentially, a direct pipeline to the modern world and its issues, problems and possibilities. College dorms are full of television sets and, as we all know, are connected to the net at high bandwidth. Many students take advantage of the opportunity presented and grow up “filled with the World.”

Speculation #7 (the really outrageous one): Students are more sophisticated about the world than we are, and they know it.

CAVEAT: While many argue that television and film have “caused” the phenomena I’ve mentioned and that they are bad developments, I’m agnostic about that. It seems to me equally likely that humans, through watching movies and television over the last century, have simply discovered their natural “right” to be visually and emotionally stimulated while they learn and that that is, in the end, a good thing.

I note that the phenomenon of boredom during certain kinds of presentations certainly predates moving images. People were falling asleep on juries, in classrooms and in lectures long before the first piece of celluloid passed through a projector.

A brief bibliography concerning fiction and visual images (and no, I’m not an Amazon affiliate! But this way, you can quickly see the reviews of the books):

Gardner, John, The Art of Fiction: Craft for Young Writers. If you want to know how good stories are made, and how writers create “the dream of fiction” in the minds of readers, this is a good place to start. What Gardner discusses is equally applicable to writers of visual dramas, except that they use additional tools.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679734031/qid=1007666281/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_79_1/104-7538173-0095912

Stephens, Mitchell, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word. Mitchell, a journalism professor at NYU, argues that, despite the criticism leveled at television, moving images are in some ways much better than print, creating more robust thought. He also “tours” the similar criticisms that both writing and printing endured when they first came on the scene.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195098293/qid=1007666934/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_10_1/104-7538173-0095912

Berger, John, Ways of Seeing. This is a book that is primarily about art appreciation and is, in many ways, quite ideological. But what Berger says has, I think, a lot to do with how people “see” images of all kinds. This book, written almost thirty years ago to accompany a BBC television show, is now considered a classic.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140135154/qid=1007666567/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_11_1/104-7538173-0095912