I. Background
The passing of a
familiar pillar of an old show, bringing back memories
An accident of
ability to watch TV in the ’70s led to my own idiosyncratic history (and
tendency) of watching
Even the best shows
developed a sort of “quality arc”; apart from historical changes, new rankings
show major eras have changed
The commercialism of
network TV tied to its being pitched to the young and otherwise marginalized
II. The show itself
Learning the basics
of 2 Broke Girls
An “odd couple” comprising
a drug-pig/sex-monster (with a dream) and accepted-enough rich girl (wanting
redemption)
A polyglot set of
side characters, with one played by an old SNL
pro
(The obvious
question?) Where are we going with this? How about emotional depth?
[Edits done 6/12/13. More edits, to section II, done 6/18/13. Tiny fix 9/14/13. Edit 5/16/17: This show was canceled in May 2017.]
I’m not a big TV person, and I should sketch my background
as a TV viewer, because you must understand this to see where I’m coming from
in talking about this show, which has its good and not-so-good points.
(Also, my criticism of the show may seem strong, but I think
that reflects that the universal starting point of TV criticism nowadays seems
to be an automatic assumption of rather low quality. So just adjust your
mentality to tune out some of the strength
of the negative comments.)
I. Background
The passing of a
familiar pillar of an old show, bringing back memories
When Jean Stapleton died very recently, it was
heartening to see how many people toggled off “likes” to a little Facebook
notice about her, because there are plenty of people who slop around on
Facebook and also are old enough to have seen her as Edith on All in the Family (1971-79) years
ago. But then we’re taken aback a bit on seeing she was 90 when she died, and
we appreciate that All in the Family
now seems as “ancient”—certainly to today’s young Turks—as the old radio shows
(like Fibber McGee and Molly, which, among people I closely know, is familiar to only my mother) that seemed
“old-time” back in the 1970s when Norman Lear’s shows seemed so boldly groundbreaking.
After my father died in 1970 and my three-person nuclear
family was in a sort of exurban redoubt in our little home, with my sister and
myself still in grade school and with my mother always apt to say we had not a
whole lot of money, etc., TV was a grand avenue for getting in touch with
current thinking, good-enough entertainment, etc., as it was for middle-class
Americans at large. In the 1960s and ’70s, shows on the three networks—CBS,
NBC, and ABC—were about all there was to TV. Even public television was pretty
rudimentary and limited in audience.
So when Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and
other well-drawn characters did their prerecorded thing on their allotted
nights, you were basically on the same page with your peers nationwide in being
entertained by, reacting to, and being given food for thought by these
characters, who could deal in such provocative-mouthed fashion with current
issues of concern. Recall Archie touching on issues of racism, sexual behavior,
drug use, politics (including his hero “Richard E. Nixon” [sic]), and so on.
Not atypically, my mother was uncomfortable with the
irascibility of Archie at times, because it reminded her depressingly of her
parents-in-law—which theoretically could lead me here to a discussion too
elaborate and nuanced to include yet. We still watched the show pretty
regularly.
And if today a commentator in a major newspaper notes that
it seems odd that a bigot like Archie can be “lovable,” the point that the
passage of 40+ years has allowed to get half-forgotten is that Archie Bunker
was a rather novel piece of pop culture: a bigot who was held out by the show’s
creator/producer, the liberal Norman Lear, as a target clearly meant for
scorn (for his beliefs and some of his interpersonal behaviors, not so much for
his “own self” or his soul, so to speak). For example, when he looked like he
was ready to shit a brick when a visiting Sammy Davis Jr. kissed him, we were
supposed to laugh and point fingers at Archie as “the epitome of pointless
racism,” while the show was really about skewering such attitudes. So in a
sense the show was tendentious or didactic, but it pursued this end with
comedy, almost of a black-humor sort, that was intended to lead us to scorn
racism and the like. (And yet Archie became lovable, the way an old
salty-tongued, too-much-liquor uncle can be at the dinner table, outrageous
enough for a long while, though in time he is accepted as “meaning well enough”
by those familiar with him and his good side.)
Of course, as was quickly found, Archie didn’t just prove to
be “newly liberal American’s straw man” for arguments targeting backward
thinking, but some people of a more conservative bent felt he was their hero—putting
forth the rightist sentiments that they held dear. Which of course is always a
risk when a TV producer puts out some kinds of edgy pop art, especially when you are
being pointedly didactic. Because art is not simply about putting forth, even
if in an indirect way, “the right way to think.” It isn’t simply for social
utility. Not only can it be to some other purpose, but it can also have
unintended consequences.
In any event, it ends up being a way to present an idea, a
view on life, and people will naturally respond to it, and accept it or not, in
vastly different ways, and those who don’t go along with “the artist’s intent”
aren’t necessarily stupid.
An accident of
ability to watch TV in the ’70s led to my own idiosyncratic history (and
tendency) of watching
In the 1970s, my family had a Magnavox TV/stereo/radio combination
that was housed in a big piece of furniture, a handsome cabinet including
cherry (I think) wood and incorporating some nice cloth-covered, sizable
speakers. The color TV was about 24 [?] inches diagonally, and this was a
state-of-the-art behemoth when my parents got it in about 1967. TVs being how
they were then, the TV set had problems by the mid-1970s—the horizontal hold, and
the vertical hold (not usually both at once), would go screwy at times, and
there were knobs in the back to help correct this, but turning them didn’t
always help. (The stereo record-player, on the other hand, was golden; with the
huge bass speakers, and the cheesy “tweeters” that went for treble speakers,
you could get some monstrous sound—loud, though bassy, and without too much
distortion if turned up high—when playing your favorite ’70s albums.)
By about 1976, the TV was on the fritz, and due to money, my
mother didn’t have it repaired for quite some time—maybe a year or so. By the
time it was fixed, I think the Nixon/Frost interviews were being broadcast, in
about May 1977. Then the TV maybe worked only a relatively short while (a
year-plus?) until it was permanently on the fritz by about 1979.
The bottom line is that we were able to watch TV when the
Norman Lear shows were at their height—from 1971 to about 1976, maybe. We saw
some of the early seasons of All in the
Family; we saw episodes of Maude,
and a year or two of One Day at a Time
(1975-84). And of course, the other production company that had its glory-days
shows, MTM Enterprises (or whatever its name)—Mary Tyler Moore and her husband
Grant Tinker’s company—had its Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) and its spinoffs such as Rhoda. There was also the estimable M*A*S*H (1972-83) and, though I was not a fan of it (but still watched
episodes), Happy Days (1974-84).
Even the best shows
developed a sort of “quality arc”; apart from historical changes, new rankings
show major eras have changed
Though I could not have predicted this, and in fact was a
bit disappointed in not being able to see more TV in the later 1970s, I
happened at least to have access to the great 1970s shows when they were at
their height. And funny, but though the shows have always been remembered, more
or less, as great “in the totality of their runs,” there was usually a falling
off in quality—the originality seemed to drop off, and there was a drifting
toward a sort of soap-opera quality (I hope I’m not overstating the phenomenon
here). This was where the shows could start focusing on covering, in one or two
episodes, some “serious” theme, or there was some several-episodes-crossing
development in relations among characters.
Thus, audiences looked forward, more or less, to seeing the
latest installment of a sort of multi-show saga, rather than enjoying a single
episode where you’d have an uproarious good time when, regarding one hot-button
or taboo subject, Archie showed what a benighted fool he was. This change
toward the “soap opera-ish” happened with All
in the Family, and with M*A*S*H,
and with One Day at a Time…. The only
one it didn’t happen to was the Mary
Tyler Moore show, because, rather atypically, it went out of production
when it was still at its height as a sort of moderately socially conscious but
also not-barbed comedy, as it made its various thematic points in one episode
(not as heavy-handedly as Lear’s shows).
In the succeeding decades, there were always lauded shows,
and yet my TV watching was permanently very selective, almost nonexistent, from
my college years on. I heard plenty in the print media about the Cosby show of the 1980s (which I had a
few glimpses of), and about Dallas (I
didn’t watch the latter because it was determined as soap-opera-ish from the
beginning, which I didn’t care for but which by the 1980s is what a lot of
people apparently preferred in their nighttime viewing). Among later comedies I
heard about the Seinfeld show, though,
believe it or not, I think I only watched the very last episode of that.
Recently, the Writers Guild of America (cf., e.g., a Star-Ledger article, June 5, 2013, p. 33)
came out with its list of the best-written shows, and three of the ’70s
classics were in the top 10 (though not in the very top slots), and there were
other shows I’d heard plenty of press about, but had never seen—including The Sopranos (and that has seemed like a
show I would have liked; but heck, I can catch it on DVD).
You would think I must really be an old fogey when I say the
only regular show I still watch “religiously” is CBS’s 60 Minutes, an anomaly as the longest-running show ever. I also
catch some evening news, both the local (New
York) stuff and the network stuff. The partial catering
to younger audiences even on evening newscasts is evident enough, but you can
still get stuff useful to your “prerogatives as an older stiff” on these
programs.
The commercialism of
network TV tied to its being pitched to the young and otherwise marginalized
It could be commented that TV has always aimed to the young,
or the young at heart. But alas, network TV also no longer aims at such a broad
swath of the American public as it used to. So much has grown, almost like moss
creeping all over your yard, to supplement it and, in some cases, supplant it.
Cable started making inroads in the 1980s. Videos and DVDs have eaten away at
TV viewing; there’s streaming Internet stuff. The list goes on.
Network TV is still the only source of viewing entertainment
that you can watch for free (provided you pay the electric bill that helps keep
your TV working). Of course, today network TV relies at least as much as it
ever did on advertising dollars, only more stridently so in terms of how it
assaults you with its ads. The net result is that TV caters to the only captive
audience it virtually has: the young (minors, usually); minority members of our
population with lower incomes; people in more transient, oddly disposed
situations (if at night), such as suffering to wait in waiting rooms (while a
relative is getting her periodic endoscopy, or whatever), or working the night
shift…. And while in the old days, a banner day was when nearly every waking
soul tuned in to see The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in
February 1964 (about 70 million of an audience, I think), now a show seems to
be considered worth hanging onto if it brings in an audience up to 13 million
now and then.
So network TV is about putting out fare for those youths,
minority members, and others who can’t or won’t opt for a DVD, or a streaming
whatever off the Internet, or other forms of entertainment…and what does this
mean? Of course, ads for stuff that TV still does clangorous ads for best—cars (which occasion the most
annoying kind of commercials of all, I think), medicines, common consumer
goods…. The science of getting the advertising message across, via visual and
aural means, entails that your senses will be bombarded, made to cry “uncle”….
And there is such a density of providing info on TV today,
for youths whose perceptual acuity and easily-bored nature sets up the cognitive
terms for how to insinuate a cargo of various info into their brains, that you
can see credits for the previous show zipped across only part of the screen
while a visually aided promo for another show is offered simultaneously in
another part of the screen….
And with someone like me, the networks are assaulting the
wrong person. It’s long been said that TV makes you passive, but I think this
is wrong: it forces you to be active
in your perceptual “apprehension” of information, but the cognitive means by
which you gather it is different from, say, that of reading: you open—somewhat
“passively”—your mental conduit to loading up the TV’s pell-mell puking of
info, but then—as the puke courses in—you organize and attend to it in a
different way than you do if you’re reading (whether reading print material or
a computer screen). And for me, some TV stuff—especially the car-commercial Sturm und Drang—is so offensive in its
way, that I opt to “gate out” some of the woolly stuff by having some reading
material at hand, and, with a certain mental gymnastics, alternating between (1)
reading something that doesn’t require lots of concentration and (2)
selectively glimpsing the TV stuff. (If this seems like a lot of work, in a way
it is.) I do this with some regular-news stuff too. About the only thing I pay
attention to undistractedly is most 60
Minutes stories (and 2 Broke Girls). Which I guess means (at least regarding 60 Minutes) that I must be 75 years old.
So though network TV is for kids and others who have their
own style of applying “selective attention” (see End note 1) (and who will be at all appealed to by the commercials’
clamorous entreaties to buy the latest Cadillac with the A- or B-list model waxing
lithe in the front seat), the networks still have the distinction of being
guaranteed an audience that such things as various Internet products, a lot of
movies, and other media products still can’t assume they’ll have: a
multi-million audience, all seated at once (for those not using the likes of TiVo)
in their various private locations. The size of the audience isn’t Beatles-caliber,
of course, but still large.
What gets produced, given such an expectant audience? Shows
of the quality of All in the Family,
M*A*S*H, the Cosby show, The Sopranos, or whatever else you would
vote as your smartest shows? In a way, quality is in the eye of the beholder,
but if TV-comedy executives were to try today to take advantage of a rare
opportunity, one for providing a show about young people facing the
consequences of our weird, big-historical-moment economy post-2008, what might
they do? Especially if the comedy took
advantage of a historical time where smartness could and should match the outside
social challenges, somewhat as All in the
Family’s writers saw?
Would they offer a fun look at young people making a go of
it who, in some sense, conform with Bruce Springsteen’s portrait of somewhat-deprived
kids who have to escape “a death trap, a suicide rap, we better get out while
we’re young” [possible slight paraphrase]? Or, less melodramatically, young
people saddled with huge student loans? Or those with an Occupy Wall
Street’s–eye view of where we are vexingly situated, or some other standpoint
of earnest young people starting out with less money and obvious actionable
prospects than dreams and sheer optimism?
II. The show itself
Learning the basics
of 2 Broke Girls
I think it was with this curiosity—how were the networks
handling the young’s view of their current economic predicament—that I started
watching 2 Broke Girls last
fall. And it has turned out to be the TV show I’ve watched the most seasonal
episodes of since the 1970s. Now that’s a distinction for me—but does it reflect a
healthy interest in me? Good question. So often I’ve finished watching an
episode of 2BG, even a rerun, with a
sense not unlike, “Now why did I watch that?”
The show features two unrelated young women living together
in an apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, one a “poor girl” and one a former “rich girl.”
They both “partner” in some dream of the “poor girl’s” of starting a cupcake
shop—their own small business—that will be their way of getting themselves out
of their economic doldrums, as well as simply living a dream, I suppose.
The “poor girl,” Max Black—who has allowed the “rich girl” to
share her home apartment (I never saw how this happened)—is played by Kat Dennings (real name Katherine Litwack), and the “rich girl” is Carolyn
Channing, played by Beth Behrs. Dennings, who has appeared in other TV and
film projects, has operated a blog, amid her other media-related endeavors.
Behrs, with her own, less-extensive history of getting into the big time, is
more of a neophyte actress.
The show clearly depends on how these two women perform
together and how their characters are written, including how they articulate
the not-simply-visual appeal of these characters, though there is a crew of
side performers. The actual “adventure” of their starting a cupcake shop—which in
scattered incidents has run into all sorts of diversions, snags, temporary
failure, and so on—seems almost beside the point, a relatively flimsy coat
hanger from which to hang an ongoing series of episodes. However, there seems
little other "idealistic" rationale on the basis of which these two women are apt to associate with each other,
apart from the practical necessity of sharing an apartment.
An “odd couple” comprising
a drug-pig/sex-monster (with a dream) and accepted-enough rich girl (wanting
redemption)
Max is rather the lead character. She is dressed in what
seems some kind of “goth” look, though Dennings’ redly lipsticked mouth seems like
nothing so much as a tradition of TV comediennes to be done up to accentuate a
sort of humorous, watch-the-mouth look—from Lucille Ball through Carol Burnett
and others. Dennings is not strikingly beautiful, but is attractive enough to
give some kind of elemental appeal to her female character. She is also the
more verbal character, unspooling one-liners in a classic female-comic style
that, with her slightly adenoidal, rather wry voice, seems a “nicer” version of
Penny Marshall’s Laverne from the 1970s show Laverne & Shirley. She is supposed to offer a fund of worldly
wit, not as a “negative” person but one who seems to have seen a lot, even if
it hasn’t made her fully jaded or pessimistic.
Some of her passing lines about her difficult past, with
absentee father, improvident mother, and more recent shenanigans as what I
would prudishly all a drug-pig and sex-monster, seem often like the lines a
lovable, facetious “comedian” would issue—like bits of understood fiction—tossed
out as party favors just to keep everyone on her side even when the chips are
starkly down, and when keeping up collective morale is all. I wonder if Dennings’
young fans really identify with these comments taken at face value—in the sense
that the lines aren’t offered as if they’re “just talk” but as if they really
reflect what the fictional character’s full past is.
Whether or not they do, the lines (not all of them) certainly
don’t comprise how I would present a character “from a tougher side of the
tracks,” because I think for today’s youth in today’s economy, there is a way,
even an imperative, to present a character who shows both the signs of a tough
upbringing and an embrace of getting one’s life to be productive and laudable;
and contrarily, this Max Black sometimes seems like a creation of people who
don’t know much about the world other than from TV and pulp fiction.
The “rich girl,” Carolyn, is also something of a cartoon.
Thin and neatly attired, Behrs is less verbally wry, and is not especially expressive in her face, while
her character can verbally exude vivid enough worry, enthusiasm, and other
sentiments in a sort of girlish, companionable way. She tosses off references
to having gone to Wharton; her father, as part of the backstory, had gone to
jail for running a Ponzi scheme (it seems the logic is, allude to basic-understanding
Madoffian stuff, and you lock in some audience sense that the show is plying
its populist social-relevance trade). Behrs is not the figure that Dennings’
Max cuts as a sharp character, which latter seems to me more attuned to standup
comedy; but Behrs, unlike Dennings, is more attuned to physical comedy, such as in
awkwardly using a paint roller, or articulating a little dirty dancing in a
club.
Carolyn, as rich girl, has come equipped with her own horse,
Chestnut, which sometimes puts in an appearance—in another TV staple for those
shows using it, the animal/mascot that is brought in for some mildly
sentimental entertainment value now and then. (Message to producers: Folks,
horses normally need space. How much space is there in Williamsburg for a horse? And there was even
one episode where some visiting, cartoonish Amish young men, including one
whose wooden talk was matched with an uncooperative erection he embarrassedly covered
with his wide-brimmed hat, built a “barn for Chestnut” behind the apartment, at
one of the girls’ request. Gee, that apartment setup must be expensive for the
tight-budget girls; there is even enough space on the property for a barn, if a
small one.)
As just hinted, there are sex jokes galore, which as often
happens with pop-culture sex jokes, can run the gamut from genuinely amusing to
corny to, especially embraced by a show like this, the rather tasteless. The
show’s creators are Michael Patrick King and Whitney Cummings;
occasionally King (as I’ve seen; not sure about Cummings) has written an
episode. The show’s audience may differ, but I feel the show need not go to the
lengths it does to lard up the script with often-crude sex jokes, but I
guess this criticism indicates how out of step I am with the marketing research
that was possibly executed as a seasonal (or series) preliminary (End note 2) to get advertisers their
biggest return for their bucks from the intended audience. I don’t know about
marketing shit too much, because of all the things I ever wanted to do in life or
actually did (by necessity or not), that never really was one of them.
A polyglot set of
side characters, with one played by an old SNL
pro
The side players include the actor Garrett Morris, as
Earl (a cashier), the only other one of the original, 1975-80 Saturday Night Live players than Bill
Murray who (as far as I know) is still regularly active in some form of the
media (see my review of Lost In Translation). There is Matthew Moy as Han Lee, the Korean owner of the diner
Max and Carolyn work at in their dorky uniforms for their regular day job (Moy
is only a few years older than the two female leads of this show [eludication: I said this on feeling that Lee was presented as if he was at least middle age, but one episode, concerning a diner robbery, points out that though the girls think Lee is 53, he is actually 29, which is about Moy's real age]); Jonathan Kite as Oleg, a lascivious cook who delivers his allotted boorish one-liners
as the house Eastern European joker; and TV veteran Jennifer Coolidge as Sophie, the
occasional visiting neighbor of the girls (the audience lovingly hoots when she
first appears, rather the way Henry Winkler’s Fonzie was greeted as an audience
favorite on the old Happy Days).
This show has been criticized for some of its side
characters’ being ethnic stereotypes; I’ll let others, to whom this matters,
fight this battle. Coolidge’s Sophie is a somewhat “high-concept” variation on
the phenomenon of the Polish cleaning lady (for backup on this, maybe check the
classified ads of your local newspapers, where you may see some women advertise
their services this way): Sophie runs a business of cleaning ladies, and is
corny-accented as a supposed Pole herself. (I think Eastern European ethnic
groups are easy to present funny characters from, without necessarily being
contemptuous about it; the ethnic styles can be so colorful, and today need not
connote “East Bloc sinister” qualities the way they might have during the Cold
War. The problem for anyone employing such a characterization is in being
smart, or at least somewhat smart, about it. Generally speaking, some ethnic jokes are just lame-brained,
like the old-time Polish jokes. Among some people today, any ethnically oriented jokes are outré. In any event, this show
seems to lean a bit toward the stupid with its toting in the Eastern European
accents.)
(The obvious
question?) Where are we going with this? How about emotional depth?
Why do I watch this show? I think I’m always waiting for it
to get better. Maybe that’s a hopeless proposition. It was renewed for a third
season recently, which suggests that it’s not a total failure (CBS renewed a
host of shows, apparently because it’s the number one network currently, and
whatever set of shows are doing well enough to support that status are shown
gratitude in being kept, though at roughly 12 million viewers an episode, 2 Broke Girls would not have been
considered a hit in, say, the 1970s).
But, not that I especially esteem the old phenomenon of a
favorite show turning somewhat soap-opera-ish in its old age, I think this show
could benefit from having its two main characters, Max and Carolyn, show a
little more emotional depth. It should have less of the humor and situations
that seem to appeal to the C-average high school viewer, such as Carolyn having
a fleeting boyfriend who is a handsome sort who runs (ran) a candy shop across
the corridor in the little mall the girls’ cupcake shop is (was) in—a boyfriend
who, when he casually meets up with Carolyn, plies Max, to show her courtesy,
with a complimentary sampling of candy, which Max greedily snaps up like the
pre-addict-type she is. (I include past tense because both shops have closed up
within the transience of the second season.)
If emotional depth is aimed for, both girls need not have
the stupid development of each having a boyfriend, each of whom comes on set
now and then amid a flurry of stupid sex jokes, corny situation-related
one-liners, and so on. This should not also lead to soap-opera-ish developments
like, will the boys mean that Max and Carolyn will be taken from their destiny
as cupcake-shop partners? Or will the boyfriend stories spread over separate
episodes, with ups and downs, until some weird development arises like the two
of the boys discovering they’re really homosexuals, and they go off hand in
hand, leaving the girls disillusioned and hurt? Along with yet another gibe
from Max to Han Lee about his sexual orientation.
No, I mean developments such as: Max shows she’s more than a snarky-commenting,
sex-monster/drug-pig-claiming one-liner machine. Maybe she has some emotionally
deep lessons to bring forth from her tough upbringing. Maybe she helps elderly
women in a sideline to her cupcake-shop enterprise, in a sense doing something
to atone (in a way) for what trouble she had with her improvident mother. Maybe
Max goes back to school. Maybe Carolyn has a breakdown and shows she isn’t the
Miss Perfect from Wharton that she sometimes hints she is. Maybe with Carolyn
post-breakdown, some depth and future-orientedness of a new and inspiring sort
will arise out of her….
And maybe she and Max can relate (with varying comic
divergences) along these lines, so that the show isn’t just about the cupcake-shop dream, with images of dollars in their
heads to try to pay the rent. Maybe addressing a young audience’s concerns
about the future, amid a climate of huge student loans, Occupy’s latest stand-taking,
“What comes after Obama?,” and all else, means looking at what emotional wealth they have, on the theory that providing
an emotional “red carpet” leading their way out of uncertain times, is as important as the
more material issues too. Not that there are any easy solutions, or that
emotional strength or looking at yourself more closely readily solves a wider
set of more materially involved problems so directly.
Looking at the non-material side to things means that some
things take a lot of time, too. It does this in such a way that one day, when
you’re no longer so young, you revisit a tough time of your youth and say,
“Gee, I have this to say about that now, and it’s not the same old,
bitter story. That person who did me wrong years ago—well, there’s some good I
want to draw out from him or her now. There’s a way I appreciate him or her
more. And there’s some lesson for me to offer on what forgiveness, or at least
reassessing troubles from the past, can mean.”
Can this show tone down on the sex jokes, the shortsighted
kind of world view it seems to shape itself by, and deliver something more along
these lines? It remains to be seen.
I suppose I’ll watch at least part of the third season.
Again, as I do so, I may well not have a good reason to offer why. On the other
hand, I find it does make me laugh, in a good way, unexpectedly (but not at
every joke).
One thing is, the set design is nice. That’s something that
can be pulled off without being able to write from an especially seasoned view
of things.
But if it’s just empty entertainment you want, if the show
maintains its current thematic style, you’ll find a certain solid fund of
emptiness here.
##
End note 1.
See here for a modernized presentation that
touches on what I more specifically learned about in psychology, independent of
neuroscience, 30+ years ago.
End note 2.
Or the routine weekly analysis of ratings done, with a breakdown
focusing on whatever details of viewing habits could be (empirically)
interpreted or questionnaire feedback that could be pumped for actionable
conclusions. [ahem]
