Remember the TV shows you liked as a kid?
They were very… pure. In that they were the distilled id of their audience.
You can almost imagine the pitch meetings where creators simply slammed ideas together until they had a hit cartoon show.
“Boys like robots! And cars! And lasers! We’ll have robots that turn into cars and shoot lasers!”
“Right! And girls like ponies and magic and pastel colours! Pastel magic ponies! Done! Let’s go for lunch!”
While this may be reductive and even sexist (why not a show with pastel ponies that turn into laser-shooting robots, I ask you?) it’s kind of true. When you’re a kid, you want to see cool wish fulfillment stuff. Adventure and friendship and magic and stuff blowing up.
Adults pretend that some of our entertainment isn’t pure wish fulfillment. But really, a lot of the time we’re just wishing for less obvious things.
Sometimes we’re still honest about wanting to see cool stuff. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Battlestar Galactica or Game of Thrones became big hits. Putting some decent writing and acting alongside spaceships, aliens, and dragons is a license to print money.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Breaking Bad, Weeds, and Dexter all came out within a brief span of time. They’re all shows about middle-class white people who are secretly up to their necks in crime and danger.
But even prestige dramas with little overt adventure are about wish fulfillment.
Sure, a show might sell itself as a searing drama about a troubled marriage or the emotional devastation of a child’s death. But the folks going through all those troubles do so in large, expensive homes. Their cars seldom break down and you almost never hear them worrying about the rent or the mortgage.
It’s a little sad that our wish fulfillment has been reduced from “cool stuff” to “financial security.”
It may make me childlike, but I still prefer the old school stuff. Money is too depressing. Give me robots in outer space, even today.
