Russian Television Reached the Peak of Its Intellectual Ability in the 1980s, and Has Been Devolving Ever Since
When the audience scolds television, it’s simultaneously wrong and right. Television can have powerful and dangerous effects. It resembles an anaconda that’s luring in a rabbit. But it is a strange type of anaconda: it both hypnotizes the rabbits and is hypnotized by them. Wherever the viewers go, television comes along. The viewers also gravitate toward wherever there is a television screen. And it is unclear which is the cause and which is the effect, just like it is unclear which came first, the chicken or the egg.
Let’s look back and remember which television show became the most important for the early Russian (late Soviet) television. Of course it was The View (Vzglyad). Pressure was put on the show’s producers from above, their show was moved further, further, further into the night, and still people kept watching, watching, and watching. In Moscow and in the villages. In Vladivostok and in Nalchik. There were no ratings back then (ratings were first monitored during the Santa Barbara soap opera). But there is no doubt that their audience share reached nearly 100 percent.
The question is, why? Was it because the anchors were so super professional, and the segments were exemplary? And the depth of the subject’s examination reached all thinkable and unthinkable heights? No. There were more experienced presenters (Vladimir Molchanov, the early Vladimir Pozner). Alexander Politkovsky’s reports were good, but they were no match for Alexandra Livanskaya’s quizzical and tender stories (does the current audience remember all these names?) The most important thing about The View was not the picture, the montage or the style. It was its uttermost honesty and the universal coverage of the situation. Confused masses of people looked for an answer to the most pressing question: what’s happening to us? Who are we, what are we leaving, where are we going? Along with the country, the show frantically searched for answers, using politics, culture, economics and history as the available material, as a cause for nationwide self-determination.
There was not one area of life, not one aspect of reality that couldn’t be covered in The View. And there was not one area, not one aspect of reality that The View would permanently fix itself upon. A sweeping view, a momentary view, a bird’s eye view. A View and something, where “something” is supposed to mean “everything.”
Then the show was banned, during the August putsch of 1991 it was filmed in the presenters’ kitchens and distributed on videotape. Following the victory in the August revolution The View came back on the wave of freedom—and it turned out that no one needed it anymore. The historical wind that used to fill The View’s sails has changed, the sails flagged, there was no more censorship but no previous interest, either. The View came on the air and looked for a new purpose, introducing new presenters of the scale of Sergey Bodrov Jr., but nothing helped. Before, it was a conceptual focus of an epoch. Afterward, it became just one of the many available formats.
What shows became the symbols of the new television era and captured everyone’s attention in the 1990s? The answer is obvious: The Outcome (Itogi) with Evgeny Kiselev and The Mirror (Zerkalo) with Nikolay Svanidze. What was at the center of attention here? Politics. That is, they didn’t talk about how the general society lives, but about how the political passions that consume it operate. It wasn’t as much about the citizens in general as about the politicians in particular. It wasn’t about what was happening to us, but about what they were doing to us. And it wasn’t the presenters’ personal choice; it was the choice of the times.
The historical energy shifted from the social milieu to the political one; where we would go from then on, how our lives would work and what would happen to us depended on who would win the scuffle, who could create a powerful intrigue, who could get access to the levers of power. This was no less intense then at the end of the 1980s, but it had a different nature and a different scale. Not a view of something, but a mental blamestorming. If sports, then only in connection to politics. If culture, then only because political interests overlapped in that sphere. The format of the shows also changed—not a kitchen talk show, but a television magazine. With all of its advantages: better prepared and professionally directed. And with all of its limitations: narrowed down by definition, concentrated solely on one particular media subject. This was the only way to the center of the television world back then.
What happened afterward? We remember it all too well. The 1990s ran out and television won the elections of 1999. And it wasn’t a television of the intellect, but a television of jokes, of the kind that Sergey Dorenko authored. He made fun of politics and used the tools of tabloids and comic books, eventually getting exactly what Boris Berezovsky needed: the party of Yuri Luzhkov—Evgeny Primakov that was doomed to win failed, while the “Unity” party that was doomed to fail –won. And if it weren’t for Vladimir Putin, who came to power on the informational bayonets and then took those bayonets away from their previous owners, lest anyone else ever repeat his success, the time of the political magazines would have run out back then, in 1999. But the fight for the media control of the world has extended the charm of the political magazine and prolonged its existence. Currents were sent to this deactivated milieu from the power generators and the battle for the freedom of speech gave new meaning to this outdated format, having the effect that botox would have on aging skin.
And then the battle ended—with the worst possible outcome. The Outcomes show moved from NTV to Channel 6, after which it immediately lost its mass audience. It appeared as though everything was still the same—the “oppositionism,” the independence from the state (and the dependence on the oligarchs), the focus on the political problems. But the viewers began slipping away, and the audience – narrowing down. The hypnosis lost its magnetic power. The same thing happened as with The View—having disappeared for a second and reappeared right away, The Outcomes was no longer in demand. The Mirror was eventually ground down to zero. Nikolai Svanidze personally remained on the screen, but his former format was dissolved in the impenetrable darkness of the shut-off television signal.
What happened afterward? The Other Day (Namedni). Despite the fact that other channels produced sturdy and important programs, it was the renewed Leonid Parfenov’s spectacle that became the central show of the new television era. It was a magazine, just like The Mirror. Among other things, there was hardcore talk of politics, like in The Outcomes. But it wasn’t about what was happening to us, or about what was being done to us. It was about what interests us at the moment. How Vladimir Potanin goes skiing in Courchevel. How Valery Gergiev holds a premiere in the Mariinsky Theater. How elderly people made a home in an old Moskvich car. How the elections are rigged in Chechnya. How a club of suicidal young men meets. What Putin says while he is being filmed for a routine report (sign interpreters can read lips). Parfenov provided the young viewer with a glamorous image of a horrible time, realizing that politics no longer sells if it is not wrapped in film. While the social topics no longer sell even when wrapped.
His The Other Day was made even more professionally, more exquisitely, more colorfully, brightly, and expensively than The Outcomes. And the range of topics became even wider. But the angle became narrower, and the audience – much better defined. He couldn’t afford the luxury (even if he wanted to) of working for everyone, the way The View’s creators did it. Or at least for the city minority per se, unlike The Mirror and The Outcomes. The country has already begun showing stratified cracks, has broken up according to age, income and ambition. And it made sense to address the central show not to everyone, but only to the center. The young, the active, the progressive. The ones who don’t care what will become of us. The ones who don’t care about what’s important, but pay attention to what’s interesting. The rest are meant to watch the high quality News (Vesti) and the poor quality Time (Vremya), the honest Week (Nedelya) with Marianna Maksimovskaya or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Aleksey Pushkov’s show.
As television moved on from The View to The Other Day, the mastery of editing, filming, the feeling for format, color and sound, all grew. The taste for discussion about who we are and where we are going was lost. All the questions were amateurish, naïve and editorial. They arouse skepticism and slight disdain. A professional cannot think of an amateur in any other way.
But the historical time has been condensed. Parfenov was on the air for only a very brief time – from 2002 to 2005. When he was fired after a scandal in the company, history repeated itself. Only yesterday the project was much in demand, but today everyone lives without it, as if it did not exist, and they are now watching something else. What are they watching?
Without giving way to judgments and personal likes and dislikes, it must be recognized that the central, and therefore best role on television after Parfenov, has been claimed by Vladimir Soloviev. Up until now Soloviev has successfully worked as an apprentice on NTV, where his program The Duel, now renamed To the Barrier (K Baryeru) was only a playful starter to the main dish. It overshadowed The Other Day and added to the Freedom of Speech show. To the Barrier was a background show with an obvious hint of parody. It softened and loosened the seriousness of Savik Shuster and added to Parfenov with its cynical coquettishness, which was the most that one could wish for. Unexpectedly, it turned out that politics could be sold in a spoof discussion forum, rather than through glossy magazines for media yuppies. The main condition for the political discussions was that they were not to be taken seriously, no matter what the subject was. Today it can be about the fate of Svetlana Bakhmina, and tomorrow about homosexuals and then about the possibility of a third term for presidency and Putin. As long as the loudness of it would not amount to much, it is fine.
After this, Soloviev launched a program called Sunday Night, which was set up as a digest of all the analytical formats on modern television channels. This included relevant interviews on the week’s main topic, a talk show for four, the polemical discourse of angry opponents, the presenter’s video commentary and even a small concert as a starter. Along with the digest of formats, a digest of meanings was achieved. Reasoning was not broadened, discussions did not evolve and all thoughts turned like pieces in a kaleidoscope, forming a freakish and irresponsible pattern, colored by mockery. The program for the rich, called Sold Out, allowed talks on any subjects, not only politics, as was once the case with The View. But here everything is accompanied by an ironic smirk, and none of it seems to be truly important. People just meet, talk and then leave.
The road had narrowed to the extreme. There was only a single step that remained – a step backwards which would lead to the very place that gave birth to The View. But it returned to this point from the inside out, from the shadowy side, from the side of clownery. This finally happened in 2009, when Channel One launched Projector Paris Hilton, where four talented comedians sum up the week’s news. They make everything into a joke, starting form the president’s (preferably the American one) speech to gas conflicts with Ukraine, Eurovision and football. The studio cites the design and the atmosphere of The View, which had run parallel to The Perestroika Projector show. The viewer receives the full picture of the events, including the correct judgments that have been cleverly concealed in the jokes. Everything here is not for real, and yet it is very serious, because everything is a parody and gives in to the aims of propaganda. Everything has become all mixed up in the house of television, everything included.
The question is: is there anywhere to move in the direction which has been set? Or has the path from the outer side to the reverse side been traveled to the end, and “everything is in the future,” as the title of the anti-Perestroika novel by Vasiliy Belov claims?
http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?pageid=Culture+%26+Living&articleid=a1244657516
