I'll give you quirk

Are you ready for a rant? Excellent.
(You might want to read this first.)

Michael Hirschorn is the Executive Vice President for Original Programming and Production for VH1. He came to VH1 from inside.com, a current affairs website which, under his stewardship in 2001, won a coveted Webby Award, besting the likes of CNN and the BBC. He has also written for New York magazine, Esquire and served as the editor in chief of Spin magazine. This impressive career, blazing through old and new media alike, all started with a degree from Harvard and a Masters in creative writing from Columbia. Who says English majors all end up as barristas in Borders?

Don’t let that ivy-league education fool you though, Hirschorn isn’t your typical soi-disant intellectual - far from it. This is the guy that brought us classic TV staples such as The Surreal Life, Hogan Knows Best, and Celebrity Fit Club. Sure, he likes to mock himself as a “New York snob” occasionally, but this seems more like an attempt at modesty, than serious self-criticism. Indeed, whether this humility is genuine is by the by, because Michael Hirschorn “knows media” - the way Carrie Bradshaw “knows good sex.” His musings on the media world (appearing most recently in the Atlantic) are written from an everyman perspective. However, unlike the fictional Ms. Bradshaw, he’s the arbiter of ‘all things media’ for a popular cable TV channel. It’s as if Carrie’s day-job involved flying around in a fat-suit with a quiver full of arrows, but all the while she was documenting the ups and downs of dating as an ordinary New York singleton in search of lasting love.

Despite his establishment education and his position in the upper echelons of the media world, Hirschorn’s opinions are the antithesis of ordinary, according to Hirschorn anyway. Recently, he’s bigged-up reality TV (because that’s all VH1 makes nowadays?) and slapped down social networking and Web 2.0. (It will go out with a whimper he proclaimed. Something this might contradict somewhat.) There’s a self-assured feel to his opinions that says, “hey, I’m pushing 45, but I’m still hip to the youth jive”, and yet, at the same time he seems to have convinced himself that he’s still a young maverick, sticking it to the man. If his columns were a starter in a SoHo eatery they’d sound great on the menu - a rich intellectual stock, accented with fresh, out-of-the-box thinking, and a tantalizing hint of insider knowledge – but when it arrived you’d realize you’ve just paid 15 bucks for plain old chicken soup (for the 40 something soul). His style is solid, and at times his pieces are persuasive, but in the end it’s clear that Hirschorn is tired (where he tries to be fresh), uncool (but he wants so badly to be trendy) and staid (there’s no railing against the media elite when you’re so much a part of it).

It’s probably about this point (if not quite a bit earlier) when you’ll begin wondering just what Hirschorn did to make me pen this lengthy screed. Well I’ll tell you – he dismissed a number of excellent (in my opinion) movies, directors, writers, radio programs, TV series and websites with a single irksome word – quirky. Let’s ignore, for a moment, that the examples he chooses make pretty strange bed fellows; while some could be considered quirky, several seem to have been selected more because of his personal dislike than their cultivation of oddity for the sake of it (For example Arrested Development). Also, let’s put aside the animus he clearly has against Ira Glass (which is almost as transparent as my own antipathy towards Hirschorn here). For all his dancing around the point, the thrust of his argument is that we are inundated with quirkiness. Try as we might, it's inescapable. Ya think Mikey? I hadn’t noticed it so much. Now, if you’d said we’re being deluged with talentless tween pop drivel, 18 minute TV shows edited for the ADD, celebrity crotch shots, or reality TV – then I might agree, but no. Apparently, we’re "drowning in quirk." A handful of low budget movies, public radio programs and TV shows (that were cancelled) are ruining the American cultural soul.

To illustrate his point Hirschorn selects three examples. The first, Garden State, is a stretch to say the least. Epoch defining as it might be, Zach Braff's soundtrack vehicle of a movie is many things before it is quirky. Hirschorn's second example of the ubiquity of Quirk, This American Life, is on the face of it more valid. The stock and trade of TAL is the not-so-everyday life in these United States, although contrary to Hirschorn's assertions, TAL is rich with stories spanning cultural and socio-economic divides. While some of the links between chapters in a given show may seem tenuous, one never senses that the stories themselves are shoe-horned into something they aren't. After all, the most compelling feature of TAL - the first person narrative - precludes such editorialising. If Hirschorn detects some level of coercion, or leading, on the part of the producers of TAL, perhaps it might be cautiously suggested that his own experience with production - such as the "partially scripted" Hogan Knows Best - is clouding his judgement. Moreover, his characterisation of TAL as formulaic is simply flat wrong. Again, one suspects his own preconceptions are to blame. Has he has spent to long thinking up "creative" takes on the well-worn "reality" format, which is his channel's bread and butter, and not enough time listening to the subject of his critique? The greatest strength of TAL is surely the lack of form and rhythm - the hallmarks of production - an order that we seek, but so often fail to impose, on our lives. On the contrary, TAL presents life in the rough, and perhaps this, and the contrast cast by it on VH1's more formulaic version of "reality", is the root of Hirschorn's unease here. His third example, Wes Anderson, is the most reasonable. But ultimately, can we not concede that there is room (somewhere?) for the obtuse, the unusual - alright the quirky - in American cinema?

Most galling of all, it seems that Hirschorn wants to assert that we "ordinary" folk aren’t individual, idiosyncratic or interesting at all really. We only seem like that if we put on our indie specs (thick-rimmed and vaguely retro?) and peer at the world through our (rose) hip tinted lenses. No, according to him, we’re simply automatons that need more failed celebrities getting humiliated, more scripted “reality” docu-dramas and definitely more know-it-alls, like Hirschorn, to tell us why everything they don’t like should be bundled into a hold-all, and thrown out on the curb.

- Mr. Ed