TV is Bad (part 3)

In part 1 I like tv and movies which are powerful mediums for storytelling. In part 2 tv compresses the range of our emotions and keeps us safely inside.

If stories are how we learn (without the pain of experience) and modern cinema is the most powerful story medium then you can be sure we are absorbing all sorts of information about how to live.  Particularly we learn social skills through watching people, including the people on tv. Which isn't bad in itself.  But what if characters are written (intentionally or unintentionally) unrealistically?  And what if we lack the real world experience to recognize it. We're in for a surprise when our learned social interaction doesn't get the response we were taught to expect.  (What if you got your social skills from Star Trek? Explains a lot doesn't it?) Worse, because we all watch the same tv shows the real world conversation might follow the faulty model completely and while this wouldn't cause the cognitive dissonance problem both participants are left wanting despite following the script. The magic words that get the tv character to the act break somehow miss the heart issue entirely.  I wonder if this is why so many relationships are so dysfunctional. Are we all operating under false premises and faulty social conventions? Have we gotten to the end of our lines wondering why we haven't lived happily ever after yet?

Eventually if dysfunctional behavior is widespread enough it becomes self-reinforcing.  Poor screenwriting is now true-to-life screenwriting.  The meme becomes culture and functional behavior becomes weird.  I bet you can come up with your own examples of this effect.

Screenwriters and actors have a responsibility to culture to display an accurate picture of human nature.  But we as consumers should refuse to be passive. We can learn useful social skills from tv but we have to be careful to fact check.  For instance, I know all sorts of things about being married from reading books and comics and watching movies and tv despite never having experienced it.  I know all the right and wrong things to say and I figure I would never make those rather obvious mistakes. Of course I'm in for all manner of surprises as a real relationship isn't subject to the rules of tv comedy.  On the other hand, if I ever get beamed up to an alien spaceship I'll probably say something smart alecky because that's what Col. O'Neill would do.