How to View TV in Three Easy Lessons

The great irony of television is how familiar we are with it--based on hour after hour of being in its company--yet basically muddled about its consequences.

So any attempt at defogging is welcome, notably the feisty and entertaining new PBS three-parter “Signal to Noise: Life With Television.” Premiering Thursday night, it’s from the oft-bold Independent Television Service, each hour presenting a number of stylistic segments from separate producers that are shaped by program producer-director-writer Cara Mertes into an irreverent narrative that refracts TV through many prisms.

Finding creative ways to cover mostly old turf, from the medium as a selling machine to newscasting as a choreographed disco dance, “Signal to Noise” reaffirms that TV is more layered and intricate than the “idiot box” so cavalierly dismissed by many of its detractors. It also is much less the anti-family demon box, at fault for many of society’s epic ills, than you’d think from hearing the invectives of President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and other election-season critics in both major parties.

Gore is applicable here because television is an especially fat target in election years.

Thus did he get in touch with his inner child the other day, finding lethal similarities between kids watching television and kids smoking cigarettes. “Study after study has shown that the link between viewing lots of violent imagery and being violent is becoming as well established as the linkage between smoking and lung cancer,” Gore said in Los Angeles.

Gore puffed on this hyperbole while applauding a proposal that would require TV stations to run three hours of “educational” programs for children per week, a reasonable plan given the slight regard most TV executives have shown for children in their audiences when left to their own cynical, profiteering devices.

Less reasonable was some of the vice president’s rhetoric supporting the proposal, his reference to smoking damage intended mostly, it seemed, to indirectly remind America again of presumed GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole’s controversial refusal to declare outright that cigarettes are necessarily addictive. Democrats would love to see Dole choke and wheeze on that all the way to November.

In the great tradition of politicians on the stump, meanwhile, Gore tightly knotted TV and tobacco results without citing specifics, namely those supposedly numerous violence studies he was referring to. But he did echo First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in blistering that revolting Fox series “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.” Another easy bull’s-eye.

Not that the industry’s mighty moguls are altruists, or that repetitive viewing of violence is beneficial to kids or anyone else, only that there is no definitive evidence yet--despite the tonnage of studies--assuring that TV is necessarily training a generation of junior hit men. Or even malicious teens like the Van Nuys paint-ballers sentenced to prison Monday for their destructive joy ride caught on videotape.

It is, however, training generation after generation of captive consumers, “Signal to Noise” notes repeatedly, something emphatically stressed most recently by TV’s deafening drum roll for “Independence Day.”

Although not quite a summer blockbuster and featuring as many chaotic fast cuts as the TV ads it mocks, “Signal to Noise” is a triple dose of TV literacy. As such, it will be screened in its entirety and discussed in an event sponsored by the Center for Media Literacy at 7:30 p.m. this coming Monday at Midnight Special Books in Santa Monica.

Part 1 zips through the business of TV (which regards its audience mostly as just another commodity), from selling kids McDonald’s burgers and the thundering panorama of “Power Rangers” products to the Roman numeral-inscribed Super Bowl’s arrival as a tony huckster heaven. And speaking of prime real estate for TV pitches, get ready for next week’s Summer Olympics on NBC.

The hour is strongest when defining TV from the perspectives of individual viewers, as in Sherry Millner’s clever video on the superstar and attitude of ABC’s “Roseanne,” that rare series that sometimes writes TV watching into its plots. Titled “Two Unruly Women,” the segment’s “Twilight Zone” of overlapping realities is capped by Millner, who resembles one of Roseanne’s cosmetically challenged early incarnations, getting to meet and schmooze with her now-glamorous heroine.

Part 2 of “Signal to Noise” retraces the sharp rise of TV news up the profit graph from public service to largely public disgrace, in which mayhem and entertainment share top billing. KCOP-TV Channel 13’s late, not great “Real News” is featured here, along with its then-news director, Jeff Wald, and one of its reporters, Debra Snell, who is accompanied on a crime story.

Meanwhile, we get a dose of musty ruminations about violence-inundated viewers of TV news being especially fearful, plus a tour of the Marion, Iowa, headquarters of famed Frank Magid, the alpha male of news consultants, a species of media fix-its also utilized by newspapers seeking to reinvent themselves.

Magid executive Frank Biancuzzo serves up the inevitable self-impaling sound bite while applying his expertise to a St. Louis newscast direly in need of touching up: “The anchor desktop for us was very important in this situation, in that it really did not help enhance or warm up. . . .”

Nothing enhancing or new here, but it’s interesting, as is the other segment by Louis Alvarez and Andy Kolker about a station (WKRN-TV Channel 2 in Nashville) that hired survey-driven Magid to resuscitate its gurgling news in 1994 with an approach seeking to attract more female viewers by airing stories with resolutions that convinced them Channel 2 was “on your side.”

News director Perry Boxx chastises some of his staff who appear skeptical of “on your side” news. “There are only two kinds of people in television these days,” he says later, “those that have been fired and those that will be fired.” Two months later, the segment’s narrator notes, the station fired Boxx.

A growing number of viewers are weary of “this dreck,” that bright observer, former anchor-reporter Linda Ellerbee, says in another segment about the TV news business. They’re saying, she insists, “I want a better newscast. I want to be treated with more intelligence. I want more complexity in the stories you tell me. I want you to leave something for me to do, like . . . think!”

If so, their message is not getting through. More probable, in fact, is that the longer TV’s present brand of newscasting endures, the more desensitized to it viewers will become, and the greater the likelihood that the excrement bemoaned by Ellerbee ultimately will become a standard of excellence.

Or perhaps much of the public has written off traditional means of electronic gabbing in favor of the Internet, that Holy Grail that occupies much of Part 3 along with public-access TV and an eloquent anti-Rush Limbaugh essay by Patricia Williams. The idea here is that for the moment, at least, the democratized Internet offers ordinary folks the opportunity to become, in effect, their own Rush Limbaughs by granting them a level of access denied by today’s mainstream television.

The Internet won’t be truly big-time, though, until Al Gore attacks it on the stump.

* “Signal to Noise: Life With Television” premieres Thursday at 10 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.