Whatever one thinks of its artistic elegance or lack thereof - and we're not exactly talking about the Svetlana Khorkina of American network television here - the WB sure has a knack for capturing the zeitgeist in the form of perfectly haircutted and acne-zapped white teenagers. What, after all, was more emblematic of the late '90s than Kevin Williamson's hyperliterate "Dawson's Creek," whose steady progression into the depths of pomo intertextuality and self-referentia gave countless MCM concentrators an excuse to gawk at Katie Holmes?
But that was a different time, a time when cultural resonance could still be predicated on wordplay and cleverness alone. Three years after 9/11, cultural resonance and relevance requires much more.
Enter the WB's latest, "Jack and Bobby." The titular characters are brothers and, like all television siblings, polar opposites. Jack's the popular yet sensitive dreamboat; Bobby, the curious runt. This flaccid set-up contrasts sharply with the program's central conceit - that normal high school tribulations are interspersed with scenes from a 2046 documentary with first-hand testimony on a recently concluded American presidency.
You see, one of the brothers grows up to be president, and his concerns as an Everyday Teenager are echoed by those as the Most Powerful Man in the World. Co-creator Thomas Schlamme describes the device: "It allows us to talk about thematic elements that are existing in 2004 America, which is race, which is religion, which is war, and kind of get: How did these little snapshots of his life right now affect the future of the world?"
Thus, Jack and Bobby, when not disrupted by the "future", most assuredly takes place in the present; its portrayal of adolescent mores - these kids are neither wholesome prudes nor contemptible cynics - is clearly par for the 2004 television course.
So why the sledgehammer Kennedy allusion? Political aspirations aside (and really, if this were only about political relevance, shouldn't the boys be named Dubya and Jeb?), it seems the program cares little about not the adolescence of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, but about the Kennedy heyday. That is, not the 1930's and the Depression, but the '60s, '70s and Vietnam.
Unlike the brightly saturated and often hyper-kinetic visuals of most youth-marketed media (think "The Real World" or "The O.C."), Jack and Bobby is shot in the muted shadows and wide-screen of a "West Wing" or "Sopranos." The effect is at first jarring: the frivolity of youth translated to a form that seems to self-consciously call itself out as Important and Art. Yet the very pretentiousness of Jack and Bobby's visual style is a clue to the real cultural moment it's reflecting: these days, the kids are as nostalgic as their parents.
Indeed, the WB gives its audience immediate nostalgia - an immediate nostalgia marked not by the silliness of VH1's "I Love the '90's," but by a deadly seriousness. Of course, as long as there have been teenagers, there has always been the instinct to conflate the smallest of personal experiences - in TV, usually such trivialities as whether someone gets the girl or tries some illicit (but not too illicit) substance - with a matter of earth-shattering importance.
But in 2004, "Jack and Bobby" legitimizes the instinct. When Pacey lost his virginity to a teacher or Dawson entered into a lengthy monologue on some Spielberg flick, the viewer was meant to be empathetic but also dismissive; wordy irony was, after all, the crux of "Dawson's Creek" and the crux of the roaring 90's. Contrast that to 2004 - whenever one begins to dismiss something Jack or Bobby says, the program's concept intervenes: These kids will become world leaders. This is important.
It's pretty clear, then, that Jack and Bobby would never have made it to the air on Sept. 10, 2001. True, the post-9/11 death of irony has been greatly overstated, and "Jack and Bobby" makes no explicit mention of the attacks, but the program's entire reason for being seems to boil down to this: Kids Today are Living in Unprecedented Times. What Happens to Them Matters. Moreover, the show seems to argue that to live in these times, we must view the present through the sepia-tinged lens once reserved for the past; our experiences are more formative than ever before because we are living history.
Which is, of course, a myth: The junior prom doesn't mean more now that a global war on terrorism has been declared; cheating on that quiz isn't worse now that there's a Patriot Act. But myth has a way of making its effects true. And so we return to those Kennedy adolescents who are now dealing with their reactions to an earlier era of immediate nostalgia: George W. Bush, the imbecilic boor, partying away as a society changed around him. John Kerry, the careerist creep, videotaping his Vietnam experience as an instant trophy of personal history.
In 2004, then, the WB is perhaps our foremost cultural mythologist. Which only goes to prove that in history and in television, in politics and in adolescence, timing is everything.
Jonathan Liu '07 doesn't need an excuse to gawk at Katie Holmes.
