Don't kill your television

Today's TV shows are also far more willing to keep the viewer in the dark about what's going on in a certain scene, or to include allusions to other art forms, or previous years' episodes. Medical jargon has been written into just about every scene on "ER" specifically to keep you on your toes about what's happening. "Nearly every extended sequence in 'Seinfeld' or 'The Simpsons' ... will contain a joke that only makes sense if the viewer fills in supplementary information -- information that is deliberately withheld from the viewer," Johnson writes. "If you've never seen the 'Mulva' episode, or the name 'Art Vandelay' means nothing to you, then the subsequent references -- many of them occurring years after their original appearance -- will pass on by unappreciated." What all this amounts to, Johnson says, is work for your brain. Watching TV is not a passive exercise. When you're watching one of today's popular shows, even something as nominally silly as "Desperate Housewives," you're exercising your brain -- you're learning how to make sense of a complex narrative, you're learning how to navigate social networks, you're learning (through reality TV) about the intricacies of social intelligence, and a great deal more.

What I wonder, though, is, Doesn't everyone know that today's TV is better than yesterday's TV? It's here that I think Johnson's too focused on straw men. Like most Americans, I've spent enough time watching television to have earned several advanced degrees in the subject. Yes, TV today is clogged with more sex and violence than TV of yesterday, but for all that, is there anyone in America who doesn't believe that on average, what we've seen on TV in the last decade has been more intricate, more complex and just plain smarter than the shows of the 1980s or the 1970s? Of course, there are exceptions; everyone can think of a great show from the 1970s that beats a middling show of today. ("The Jeffersons" kicks "According to Jim's" ass.) But I'm talking about apples-to-apples comparisons: Is there anyone who prefers "Hill Street Blues," which as Johnson points out was one of the best dramas of the 1980s, to "The West Wing" or "ER" or "The Sopranos"? I imagine only the very nostalgic would say they do.

In the same way, I don't know how anyone couldn't see that "Seinfeld" is smarter than "Cheers," or that "Survivor" is more arresting than "Family Feud," or that "American Idol" clobbers "Star Search." When I say that the new shows are better, I mean in the same ways that Johnson argues -- not based on content, but on brain work. Today's shows tease your brain in ways that the old shows do not, and you are aware of the difference. We may not have plotted out the shows' mechanism as well as Johnson has -- we can't say precisely why "ER" is completely different from "St. Elsewhere" -- but to me, at least, the difference is clear enough that Johnson's Sleeper Curve is unsurprising.

As I see it, then, the most interesting question about Johnson's theory is not whether it's accurate. It's why it's happening -- why is media getting smarter, and why are we flocking to media that actually makes us smarter? Johnson examines the question at some length, and he fingers two usual suspects: technology (the VCR, TiVo, DVDs, ever more powerful game systems) and economics (the increasing importance of the syndication market). But I like the third part of his answer best -- our media's getting smarter, he says, because the brain craves intelligent programming.

The dynamic is that of a feedback loop: Today's media is smarter because yesterday's media made us smart to begin with. "Dragnet" prepares you for "Starsky and Hutch," which prepares you for "Hill Street Blues," which begets "ER," "The West Wing" and "The Sopranos." If we'd seen "The West Wing" in the 1980s, we wouldn't have known what to do with it. Indeed, many people didn't know what to do with "Hill Street Blues" when it debuted, in the same way that all path-breaking media confound viewers at first. Few people understood the early years of "Seinfeld," and, today, only a small crew can appreciate the genius of "Arrested Development."

The amazing thing -- and the most hopeful thing in Johnson's book, and about culture in general -- is that the mind challenges itself to understand what's just out of its reach. After three years of watching "Seinfeld" the nation more or less collectively began to understand the thing. In no time, then, the show lodged itself into the cultural landscape. No longer, after that, could you remark on someone's sexuality without adding, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

And, whatever else you may have heard, this tells us, once and for all, that we are not stupid.

• View blog reactions