Glenn Garvin Reviews Two Books About TV Regulation and Deregulation

If we had a U.S. Portraiture Commission with the power to
investigate whether Willem De Kooning controlled too much of the
abstract impressionist market; or if Philip Roth had to worry about
losing his novelist license over those scenes in Portnoy’s
Complaint with a hooker defecating on a glass-top coffee
table; or if some agency, every few years, held hearings in which
the public was invited to comment on Oliver Stone’s qualifications
to make films-doesn’t it seem possible that painting and
literature and the cinema would be different, and probably worse,
than they are now?

For decades, no art form was more meticulously regulated by the
government than television. For decades, no art form was more
relentlessly bashed by its critics. Amazingly, nobody ever seems to
make a connection between these two facts.

What makes this blind spot about regulation’s effect on art even
more curious, notes Glenn Garvin in his review of two books about
the changing television scene, is that over the past two decades,
as TV has increasingly slipped the bit of government regulation
from its mouth, programming has dramatically improved.

View this article.