Writing this in 1958, Huxley hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
But the eerily perceptive futurist, who in 1932 published the ultimate government-through-nonviolent manipulation nightmare, Brave New World, nonetheless pegged television as the medium through which his dystopian vision would be realized in the Western world. He was right: Television for decades has been the velvet whip with which powerful social, political, and commercial forces — the so-called establishment — have relentlessly endeavored to keep us all in a conformist stupor.
Well, he would have been really ratified by this pair of new dramas debuting on television this fall. Showtime’s Homeland and CBS’s Person of Interest are nothing less than post-9/11 government propaganda wrapped in slick, modern cinematography, fronted by pretty people and delivered with supposedly “complicated” plots and characters. Think 24 3.0 — except that now, we don’t cheer the government breaking every law of war and man to bag foreign terrorists. Instead, we countenance the suspension of the Constitution as it applies to us, the American citizen, in the interest of national security (Homeland) and law & order (Person of Interest).
One might be tempted to say “Who cares?” — television is an ancient medium that must compete with the Internet and every other social-entertainment device for attention. But TV is still one of the great equalizers and the hearth of the home. It’s where most people continue to get their news, and according to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American still watches four hours of programming a day, or 28 hours a week. The average household has at least two television sets. Total annual TV hours watched in America: 260 billion.
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