I Tried to Write A TV Blog and Here's What Happened...

Suddenly, I had nothing to say.

I chose TV for several reasons – I’m passionate about it and believe it’s a rich cultural text that’s largely critically unexamined by “serious” intellectuals, it’s popular and as a writer I would have a built-in audience, and it’s the topic (other than sex, dating and relationships) that most often comes up in conversation with friends and acquaintances that almost everyone has something to say about.

My first order of business was to create a social media presence and that was relatively easy. Tedious – have you ever tried to follow the entire cast of every major network show on Twitter?? Ugh, don’t. – but easy.

Then came the watching. Also easy. Well, sort of.

TV has changed. And while I commend the bloggers that have the diligence to watch every day and enjoy shows one episode at a time, the moment I tried to do that was the moment I had almost nothing to say about what I was watching. The way TV is scripted and produced now, the insights that can be gained from reading it as a cultural text can really only be garnered through “binge watching.” Otherwise it feels disjointed, overwhelming and unanchored. The patterns and progressions that emerge from a 12-episode season of genius writing and acting are drastically diluted if they are enjoyed over 12 weeks.

So suddenly, here I am supposed to be writing and…NOTHING. Nothing to write about. Nothing to say.

So I’m admitting something that I hate to admit, that I’ve done something I hate to do – I’ve failed. This attempt was a failure. A failure to be passionate about summarizing hours of television, a failure to sacrifice the way I prefer to consume television, and a failure to deliver to my audience what I promised to give them.

TV was a lazy choice. The truth is that I was trying to convert one of my favorite recreational activities into a job so that I wouldn’t have to sacrifice my leisure time. That’s purely lazy, and symptomatic of what is probably my biggest professional hurdle – laziness.

But, more importantly, it was a way for me to avoid what I’ve always avoided – writing about anything that is intimate and personal and private. Intellectually, I know that avoiding the personal and the intimate in writing is a fool’s errand. Writing is inherently personal and private; it is literally the physical realization of your private thoughts, the making of ideas into things, an actual thing, words on paper or a screen that makes them tangible. And if I’m being honest, which this exercise in my blog attempt has somehow forced me to be, I don’t like that part of it.

The discomfort that I have with relinquishing control over my ideas by putting them in the world is perhaps not my biggest professional block but it is the more important one. If I’m every going to be successful at this I have to stop worrying about people knowing what my most frightening day was, or how I had my heart broken most recently, and what I really think about my Dad dying and start finding a way to making sharing that day and that heartbreak and that death an enlightening experience for others.

So yes, I failed to make myself into a TV writer overnight. But that failure may be my first success as a Writer writer. Because this is personal, me telling you that I failed. This is personal, me telling you that I’m lazy. And this is personal, me telling you I don’t want to tell you. And that is honest and authentic and real. It is the first thing I’ve had the inclination to write and the discipline to actually write in a long time.

I always intended for the name LeighDTV to be a bit of a double entendre. It was meant to indicate that blog was about TV but, more importantly, it signified that you’d be reading things through my lens. And maybe I won’t be writing about only TV anymore, but I will be writing. Honestly, personally, and hopefully often.

After all, why wait when you can binge-write? Let’s hope it’s not a whole week before the next episode.