☝ WE, THE JURY
The O.J. VERDICT—specifically, those few minutes when the jury emerged, the verdict was read, and the various players reacted—stood out as the McLuhanesque event of the year. Carried on pretty much every station on the tube (as well as on the dial), these enormously intense few moments of television provided a creepy voyeuristic tension not unlike watching a real-life game of Russian roulette. In this age of decentered media and info overload, it made us a global village again, or at least an American community, pulling in the largest TV audience in several years.
Honorable Mentions: DUCKMAN on the USA network—I suggest taping an episode of this show about a fast-talking, amoral, loser, baby boomer-age male duck and playing it back slowly. It’s so quick that critics and viewers haven’t yet caught on to the brilliance of the writing; ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS—the vapid and debauched lifestyle parodied here is positively attractive when contrasted with the clean-and-sober conservatism of American TV; MAD TV—okay, so maybe it’s no better than Saturday Night Live and In Living Color before their great respective tailspins, but at the moment it’s fresh and subversive. Catch it before the inevitable decline.
☟ GUILTY AT LARGE
Is there anybody alive who’s been able to sit through an entire SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE this year? Won’t somebody please kill this thing?
R. U. Sirius is a cofounder of Mondo 2000 magazine and author of Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fake Book.
