Anti-Climacus

The Thanksgiving break and How I Met Your Mother's newfound availability on Netflix Instant prompted me to do some rewatching. I'd given up on the show at the end of last season, due both to the increasingly melodramatic nature of the plot and the creators' Lost-like inability to sustain the mythos the show was built upon. Even so I still loved the first three seasons and parts of the fourth.

After rewatching, let me tell you: the show is pretty terrible. Season one excepted, there are no other quality seasons, in which 'good' or 'great' episodes outnumber 'mediocre' or 'embarrassing.' The highs of season two were higher than the previous, but there are four or five episodes that no one should ever feel compelled to re-watch. And as for the rest: there's a painful regression in the acting as any hint of realism gets replaced by goofy overacting and actressin' ("I"m having an emotion! Look at my emphatic bodily gestures! Ignore that they're all clichés!"), and the stories increasingly have to rely on shocking twists to get any narrative frission. Also, the tendency to go to really dark places unnecessarily. It's a sitcom, people.

The defense usually offered is that the mythos is unimportant, and what really matters is the characters. Yes, this has somehow become Lost 2.0. But what interests me about this defense is not the content, but the manner in which it's carried out. In one of my younger and more vulnerable years, I was a fan of the band Phish. It being the early days of the internet and all, and my having nerdy tendencies, this meant I spent a lot of time on the rec.music.phish music board. There I came across the strangest phenomenon: people who insisted that absolutely everything Phish had ever done was excellent. Any criticism, no matter how trivial (or true) brought about a chorus of "you just have to enjoy it, man" responses, as though the only two options were total loyalty to the band and its decisions or complete disloyalty. The same thing happened with Lost: it was not quite enough for people who felt satisfied by the ending to have enjoyed their show--they strenuously insisted that if you didn't, it's because you hadn't "understood" that the show was really about the characters, or the journey, or whatever. If you objected that the characters were just stereotypes or collections of emotional tics, and so not really worthy of attention or affection either, you just didn't get it. Mutatis mutandis my favorite higher culture example of this, the people who love everything T.S. Eliot ever wrote.

My first inclination in all of this is to be frustrated: at how unwilling people are to be critical, at how thinking something to be very good makes it immune from criticism, how those criticisms that are offered are usually of the pro forma "this is a weakness that's actually a strength" variety. It does occur to me, though, that this may be unwarranted. It's one of the running contentions of this blog that the vast majority of created things are not very good, because there is little that is ever very good. I suppose the same has to be true of followers and critics: some people will have a very keen critical sense, but most will not. They'll like what they like. And in the same sort of way that the general mediocrity of art and aesthetics is no knock against it, the general mediocrity of critical and personal opinion is no knock against those opinions: one just has to understand and appreciate them for what they are.