Television

The Los Angeles Times has a recurring insert called The Envelope, which is include with the paper around the season of the various award ceremonies. In addition to For Your Consideration (FYC) ads, it will include articles about whatever can be reasonably related to the awards currently being considered.

The current one, from yesterday, is for the Emmy Awards. The cover is of Andy Samberg, Golden Globe winner for Brooklyn Nine Nine. The back is an FYC for Alpha House,  Amazon's other original programming hope. Inside cover are for True Detective (HBO) and Downton Abbey (PBS). Prominent full pages from FX for American Horror Story: Coven, Louie, Fargo, and The Americans.  A full center layout for a dozen from Showtime, including Homeland and Dexter. Veep (HBO) and Vikings (History) rounds out the full page ads, and leaves only one from Warner Brothers for three of their broadcast shows.

And except for that PBS show, it's the only ad with broadcast shows - everything else being FYCed is cable. The ads don't include really huge shows, either: Alpha House is no House of Cards when it comes to viewership,  Fargo has decent reviews but is just starting out, Homeland is a big deal sharing space with 11 other series from Showtime. No Game of Thrones, no Modern Family, no Must-See-TV. Which probably means studios and channels are being efficient with their dollars, and trying to push for those unnoticed shows that might be considered  -- if the nominators remember to look.

The starting point for this, however, was how much good television is available. And that's because of one interpretation of Fahrenheit 451, that it's about how television was dumbing down culture (at least as of 1953, when published) :

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radio and televisors, but are not.

Author Ray Bradbury had extra derision for televised fare such as the aforementioned "families" that replace actual human interaction, quiz shows focusing on facts over reflection, and disposable humor  such as the "White Clown." Granting that the entertainment-industrial complex still causes plenty of  problems,   Bradbury's specific concerns appear to be in relatively short supply.  It seems that the medium has moved past them.

Unless those concerns were already misplaced. It was the First, after all, and that's always  a time to be afraid of what might have been missed during the Crisis.