Owen Wilson has a great bit in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums where, playing a cartoon of a pompous and self-aggrandizing novelist, he lays out the premise of his latest work of historical fiction. "Well everyone knows Custer died at Little Big Horn," Wilson's Eli Cash begins. "What this book presupposes is … maybe he didn't?" That phrasing, that lilting counterintuitive presupposition has evolved into a kind of conversational meme. Tagging purposefully hounding opinions, "hot takes," and just straight-up crappy ideas, "… maybe he didn't?" has come to signify a pose of knowing, provocative sophistry.
It's the kind of thing that immediately came to mind reading Michael Wolff's Television Is The New Television. Because everyone knows that digital media is outpacing and overtaking traditional media (newspapers, network TV, watching movies in movie houses, reading pornography by candlelight, etc.). But what Michael Wolff's new book presupposes is … maybe it isn't?
Anyone unfamiliar with journalist Michael Wolff can get a crash course reading the back jacket of his new book. New York magazine calls him "a media provocateur." The New Republic blasts him as "possibly the bitchiest media bigfoot writing today." Basically: plenty of people see Wolff as a troll.
He feuded with the late New York Times media critic David Carr, and hauled off GQ columns grumbling about getting a good restaurant reservation in New York ("For many years, I had a safe berth and an enviable table in the front room at Michael's, on West 55th Street, among the most hotly contested pieces of turf in Manhattan among media people," he moans, in what you pray is parody). He even placed on Gawker's index of "The Top 20 Trollings In Modern History," where "Michael Wolff's Career" appeared alongside such other famous provocations as Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast and Time magazine naming Adolf Hitler "Man of the Year" in 1938. That Wolff and his publishers seem to relish his role as a particularly accommodating punching bag of digital media types makes him, of course, more infuriating by measures of degree. But what choice does a pariah have, really? Better for Wolff to dig in his heels, double down and embrace his role as, in the words of Gawker's Hamilton Nolan, "Le Trolle Extraordinaire."
All that said, it's sensible to approach Television is the New Television with caution. From Wolff's everything-old-is-new-again premise to his smarmy, know-it-all, "Look at me, the big media insider!" tone, the book's a tough proposition. The writing, while occasionally sharp – there's some tart pleasure in Wolff's barbed prose, as when he lambastes the "soft hogwash of soft-trend reporting" in the New York Times style section – is mostly baggy and digressive. (And while he commendably digs deep into Web traffic and advertising numbers, putting them up against TV ad revenue, it's not exactly the briskest reading.)
In one section, Wolff describes digital platforms such as Facebook and Google as "a connective tissue, an ecosystem, a funnel [choose metaphor], through which other business will interact with its user base." The "[choose metaphor]" parenthetical feels like an unheeded editorial note. His appraisal of digital media outlets feels glib, as when he calls Buzzfeed "one of the high peaks of millennial media." In terms of what? Quality? Web traffic? Ad revenue? Elsewhere, his facts are just plain wrong, as when he describes the origins of Vice media as "originally a skateboard-focused magazine in Toronto." Vice was founded in Montreal, and though it could be loosely connected with what a 1,000-year-old person might call "skateboard culture," this was never the magazine's "focus," any more than sex or casual drug use or hard-core punk or sneakers could be said to be its focus .
Part of the problem is Wolff's willy-nilly use of the word "television," which alternatively connotes the medium of TV (that is, TV shows such as Mad Men or the Super Bowl or Guy's Grocery Games) and the distribution model (that is, networks, cable bundles, and so on). The Web, for Wolff, is becoming (or already has become) TV. What appear to be digital media companies have been revealed as nothing more than digital distribution companies. Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg, tellingly, refers to his website as not even media, or a technology, but rather a "utility," like heat or running water or the Internet itself.
So while the whole "television is the new television" claim seems, at first blush, intentionally and obnoxiously counterintuitive, it eventually comes across as a no-brainer. Yes, of course, we still watch TV shows. The matter is how we watch them – whether by Netflix, HBO Go, YouTube or illegal downloading (which Wolff pays little attention to, seeming to assume that litigiousness will naturally curb the ease with which we can get basically anything for free). In the end, it's not that Le Trolle Extraordinaire's thesis is goadingly provocative or troll-y, but that it's not goadingly provocative or troll-y enough.
It's not even about the old trumping the new, but about how old and new have achieved an uneasy symbiosis. It's the sort of ambivalent equilibrium that tends to emerge when the shine of the new has faded, and the dust has been blown off the old (see also: how the rise of digital music streaming and the vinyl resurgence seem to complement each other). Maybe digital media is overtaking, or at least replacing, television. Then again … maybe it isn't.