so this would be television selling itself as selling a dream of a socially progressive america in the context of which advertisements that sell you commodities as gateways to entire fantasy lifestyles get strung like little beads. different levels of dreaming correspond to different types of shows correspond to different demographics. and you can take them two ways: a show about a crisis unit features one imagined america and so you can say either crisis brings "us" together or you can say that the fact that "we" are together is a crisis and the show just confirms it by showing you crisis after crisis. either way, you sit through the episode segments and between get a series of important commerical announcements that enable you to adjust the fantasy you live through by filling out your fantasy of commodity acquisition so that you can begin the inward preparations for a potential future acquisition of a huge metal cube of a sports utility vehicle, seeing in it something on the order of getting a mullet without the committment--stodgy and paranoid by day while secretly driving over patches of desert and, less often, across the tops of mesas, so that driving becomes performing a interior life of a kind of trans-continental walter mitty, which could be you, yes it could.
i'm still a little thrown by "blue planet"---i think that while i was watching the "deep sea" episode, the announcer told me that i had just discovered a new species in the mariana trench
while sitting on my sofa in chicago
this was coupled with sequences of taken from a second bathysphere looking back at the camera crew sitting in the first bathysphere. no-one mentioned the second bathysphere, but it was implied in a way by the fact that i was sitting on my couch in chicago as i discovered the new species in the mariana trench. there's something suspect about all this.