Boardwalk Empire

This isn't a review of the TV show. If you're wondering if you'll like it, well, here you go: It's well-directed, well-scripted, the sets and costumes are fabulous, the actors know their way around a camera. Watch the pilot if nothing else, you'll either like it or you won't.

This post is trying to answer a question, is television good? More to the point, is television better?

I remember television in the eighties, growing up. Endless 'couch comedies' (a term coined by Jerry Lewis - they all took place on a couch) with their tired, predictable rhythms and monotonous moralising. Cop dramas that preached just how dangerous those damn drugs were. Game shows which seemed deliberately designed to damage your brain. A recent study implies that TV can shorten your life by watching it, and if you had shown me this article in the eighties, I'd believe it.

We now live in what's been called the "HBO revolution". TV isn't simply your fix of moving images to kill time between the period between your return home from work and bed. There are shows which are challenging, mesmerising and rewarding. My personal favourites are Battlestar Galactica (compare it to its eighties father and tell me which is the better), Arrested Development and The Sopranos, but if I surveyed this modern period there probably wouldn't be enough room on the internet for all the good television to watch today.

Boardwalk is the latest example, from the creator of The Sopranos. But now that I am about to sing its praises, I wonder is it truly better than TV in the olden days? Boardwalk is great because it doesn't focus only on the actors, the scenery is part of the show too. Yet couldn't the same be said of the old Western series, like Bonanza or Gunsmoke? Wasn't there a sort of mise en scene to 21 Jump Street?

Boardwalk is great because it cares about its characters. Yet didn't Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere, Cagney and Lacey, even Moonlighting do this, too? Boardwalk has an excellent script. Did no show until the HBO revolution have an excellent script? Really?

Has TV simply become more better? I mean, we have lots more good shows? Well, some growing up in the HBO revolution would point to reality shows (really another name for the modern game show) and point out, correctly, how terrible they are. And they seem to be pervasive. Complicating matters is the rehabilitation of shows in the past which have been rehabilitated. The A-Team had much to say about racial relations in America. To dismiss Dynasty et al as empty melodrama is to miss the point. The eighties Battlestar Galactica was the better show and here's why.

I'm left wondering if I'm committing anti-nostalgia (to coin a clunky phrase) on modern television. Instead of denouncing it as 'not as good as in the ol' days', I'm instead insisting it's so much better by looking at the past through a tainted prism. I can't say, memory is such a treacherous thing and I haven't the means to do a full survey of the shows I grew up with, or even a full survey of modern television. All I can say is that I'm glad I lived long enough for the HBO revolution.