By Greg Beato
It’s not HBO, it’s YouTube
Hillary Clinton could use a visit from the Botox fairy. Tony Soprano, too. Puffy, wrinkled, spent, their faces perfectly illustrate the national mood. These were supposed to be the good years, the golden years, with Paulie Walnuts and Osama bin Laden kicking up profits and playing by the rules we set down for them, but it hasn't worked out like that, has it? And now we're tired. Our would-be leaders are tired. But there are bosses to replace, destinies to fulfill, and so the grind continues. First a gang war, then a campaign...
If you're a presidential candidate these days, it helps to have a Kevlar ego. Any stupid remark you utter, any goofy expression your tired mug spasms into for a nanosecond, will get thrown to the masses for ridicule. Earlier this month, Matt Drudge, no doubt tired himself after waging war against syntax, style, and the other insurgents of verbal communication for more than a decade, established a YouTube account, and he wasted no time putting up his first clip: Hillary Clinton hacking and wheezing her way through a commencement address at Dillard University in New Orleans.
Substituting campaign platitudes for the usual graduation-day pieties, Clinton touches on health care at the very moment she sounds like an emphysema patient sprinting through an asbestos tornado. And really that's all it takes for a YouTube hit -- a little gasping, a few ironic croaks. Interspersed with the raw footage of the speech are unflattering images of frumpy Hillary, haggard Hillary, health care-loving witchy Hillary.
Drudge presented the clip as news, but essentially it plays like an attack ad designed by third-graders -- which, of course, suggests that he had some help with it. Drudge, after all, can barely splice two sentences together, much less video. But if someone helped him on it, who? And should he be disclosing their identity?
Meanwhile, as Drudge joins the YouTube revolution, can HBO survive it? “The Sopranos” is eliminating favorites even faster than “American Idol” as it lurches toward its big finale, and when they're all dead and buried and it's finally over after 10 years and eighty-something episodes, what then? Not watching TV used to be shorthand for establishing your intellectual bona fides -- now it just means you're too stupid to follow the plotlines of “Lost” and “24.” But as ad dollars and viewers continue to shift to the Web, what will happen to ambitious series that lure viewers in with violence, nudity, and rococo swearing, then assault them with more characters, sub-plots, allusions, and back-stories than a dozen Russian novels contain?
Goodbye Tony! Goodbye Silvio, Paulie, Christopher, Carmela! You helped turn TV into our era's most highbrow medium, which means, alas, you may have killed it. How many of us have time anymore -- or the patience -- to watch shows that require homework? And from a producer's perspective, why even bother with Howie Mandel and a suitcase of cash, much less superbly crafted dramas like "The Sopranos" when thirty seconds of Hillary's bad throat day can pull them in viewers just as easily? "The best is over," Tony Soprano told Dr. Melfi in 1998, in "The Sopranos'" first scene. "Many Americans feel that way," she replied.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]