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Charles Sopkin, Seven Fun-Filled Days, Seven Fun-filled Nights: One Man's Struggle to Survive a Week Watching Commercial Television in America (Simon and Schuster, 1968) By the time television had garnered wide audiences, Sopkin was already 15 years old, so it's no big surprise that the idea that TV is an alien life form pervades this nonetheless engaging experiment. A magazine and book editor, Sopkin dutifully propped himself in front of six televisions (at the time, there were only six channels to watch in New York) for an entire week for as many hours of the day (and night) as he could manage. "I naively expected that the ratio would run three to one in favor of trash," Sopkin writes. "It turned out to be closer to a hundred to one." In often humorous, droll prose, Sopkin describes his unrelenting week of pop culture. Read more than thirty years after its original publication, though, Sopkin's analysis – that mindless television programming really does represent "true America" and that there's no changing it for the better – is likely to benefit only those journalists needing to cover the history of TV or perhaps the late Sixties. Others should turn to former Miramax executive Jack Lechner's Can't Take My Eyes Off You: One Man, Seven Days, Twelve Televisions (Crown, 2000), an incisive take-off on Sopkin's experiment that is a deft analysis of current TV programming. Reviews of the book tended to snootily focus on the "bravery" of Sopkin's experiment – at the very least a telling indication that critical acceptance of television as a medium worthy of analysis has come a long way since the late Sixties. |
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