ABSTRACT
It is important to realize first that television is indeed creating a unified experience, a consistent alternative world. Even in the early days of television, before it moved so completely to Los Angeles, there was complexity and sadness. An artist for television simply never can experience the grittiness of daily life that might be experienced in any other city. Among the TV writers and producers, whenever people spoke of Los Angeles they spoke of a "fantasy land," "plastic paradise," "wonderland," "sterile concrete," "lotus land," and similar hackneyed phrases that are nevertheless accurate. No show displays a kind of life that is anything but immaculately clean and neat, in which people are anything but well-groomed and hygienic and their motivations anything but straightforward. Certainly, this has partly to do with the exigencies of a mass culture. Traditionally, the dramas of folk culture are not as complicated as those of high culture.
