TV Gets It Wrong

Amusing "Critic's Notebook" piece on page 1 of the New York Times Arts section today. Virginia Heffernan uses an analysis of the Christine Lahti character on the TV series "Jack & Bobby" to skewer the ridiculous way in which "intellectuals" are depicted in the MSM. Money quote:

Oh, why are television's humanities professors so banal? . . . The book-learning on display in "Jack & Bobby" appears to come mostly from a single book: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Professor McCallister [the Lahti character] . . . is meant to be a great contrarian, but she's incongruously reverential about canonical writers. A professor of history at the fictional Plains University in Missouri, Grace has two Ph.D.'s, both inexplicably in history; still, her addresses to the undergraduates of the plains recall Miss Jean Brodie's exhortations to Scottish schoolgirls. Only less intelligent.

Good one, Virginia! Now for another of my pet peeves (peeves make excellent pets, so loyal and reliable): the way my own industry, book publishing, is depicted on TV.

Like college professors, book editors are generally portrayed as dim-witted but pretentious pseudo-intellectuals. They work in vast offices decorated with costly modern furniture and flooded with light from expansive windows with a view of the New York skyline. (If you're an actual book editor, you are shaking your head in rueful disgust about now.) And perhaps most annoying of all, the book manuscripts they are supposed to be reading always appear to be about a hundred pages long--one fifth to one tenth the size of most real book manuscripts, but just about the length of a typical movie script (which apparently is the closest thing to a book that most Hollywood set dressers have ever seen).

(Ingrid, am I using the term "set dresser" correctly? Please advise.)

Interestingly, the TV series that came closest to depicting a book publisher accurately was Seinfeld, where Elaine's office at Pendant Publishing was a tiny, ratty closet piled high with books, papers, and junk. (Was there a refugee from publishing at work on the Seinfeld staff?) Guess you have to turn to farce if you want to find realism on television.