MUST SEE TV

It was the summer of 2001. Will & Grace had just taken over the coveted Thursday night 9pm slot on television and NBC was at the top of its game. In fact, NBC was downright cocky! I was amazed by their slick promos, where an actor would step into the frame and be required to articulate their character in a simple 10 second gesture – the grand and mighty peacock logo swelling behind like an eager penis. Where that giant cock went after the promo ended is anyone’s guess.

This summer of 2001 was also my last session at Bard College for my MFA. I just completed some pretty heavy-handed projects like the Real Video Trilogy and was working on Certain Women. I wanted to do something more fun, so I thought back to those haunting NBC promos and wondered if I could recreate them in my studio.

You might recognize some of the cast, Jessica Watson from Certain Women, Paul Chan, Alina Grumiller and Abby Williams. I asked each one of them to come into my studio and communicate their personalities in this quick gesture. Would it be easy? Would it take minutes? Hours? Weeks? I had plenty tape stock and a steady tripod to put it to the test.

Abby was up first and after a while became frustrated with the challenge. I would be too. How do you flatten yourself into a gesture that lasts more than 1 frame but less than 10 seconds? The camera was running and the tense pose-a-thon was heated, when in comes Jessica - who struck a brilliant promo pose. The success was infectious.

In the end, the video serves as a quasi-documentary slipping between the realities of the filming session and the heavenly world of the giant, slick peacock. As in that last scene of the second Superman movie, where the three evil villains are forever trapped in a mirror floating through space, the cast of Must See TV seemingly becomes trapped, even assimilated, to the seductive universe of promo gloss.

I never exhibited this video. The summer of 2001 was followed by a much bigger event and I started to work on One Mile Per Minute. When I was encoding videos to put up on this site, I came across Must See TV and thought it was time for people to see it, and perhaps strike a pose.