ESPN and ABC News released a joint report this morning detailing what everyone already suspected about Junior Seau: that he was suffering from the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease caused by repetitive hits to the head that is linked to dementia and depression, when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest on May 2. Seau’s brain was examined by five brain doctors at the National Institutes of Health, who were able to examine it because the family donated his brain for research after his death.

There are plenty of things that stand out in this report, including the absurdity of the fact that Seau never reported suffering a concussion in his 20 years, or the fact that it doesn’t matter if he did. Players don’t need concussive blows to end up with CTE, they just need repetitive hits to the head. Concussions, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Mahler has argued, aren’t football’s crisis. Football is football’s crisis.

What really stood out, though, is the effect CTE and Seau’s suicide had on his kids:

“It definitely hurts a little bit because football was part of our lives, our childhood, for such a long time,” said Sydney, a freshman at USC. “And to hear that his passion for the sport inflicted and impacted our lives, it does hurt. And I wish it didn’t, because we loved it just as much as he did. And to see that this was the final outcome is really bittersweet and really sad.”

Jake, a high school junior who quit football to focus on lacrosse, added: “He lived for those games, Sunday and Monday nights, you know? And to find out that that’s possibly what could’ve killed him or caused his death is really hard.”

Many of football’s defenders argue that hand-wringing over head injuries is senseless, because professional football players know the risks and choose to play the games anyway. Even if that was true, and it surely wasn’t for players of Seau’s era, the injuries don’t just affect them. Football, the game that dominated the lives of the Seau family for two decades, the game they loved, took away a father and a husband.

The game, the fame, the money, the adrenaline — is it all worth it? For many players, it might be, and it may have been for Junior Seau too. For his son Tyler, though, the answer is no. “Is it worth it? I’m not sure,” Tyler told ESPN. “But it’s not worth it for me to not have a dad. So to me it’s not worth it.”

The good folks at GamePolitics report that a planned effort to get Connecticut residents to turn in their violent video games has been cancelled:

Last week SouthingtonSOS, a group comprised of Southington, Connecticut community organizations announced a violent videogame buyback program, where citizens could deposit violent games into what basically amounted to a trash bin for a gift certificate provided by local merchants. Those game discs would be snapped and tossed in the trash…

The idea of the program was to get parents and children to throw away their violent video games – which some in the small Connecticut town felt were a factor in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December. The program had plenty of support locally including the Southington chamber of commerce, the local YMCA, the board of education, fire department, a number of the town’s officials, the United Way and local clergy.

But in the days following the announcement of the program some experts were critical of the idea; the parenting editor at Common Sense Media likened the collection and destruction of video games to censorship, and Texas A&M International University researcher Christopher J. Ferguson wrote the group warning them that their efforts might cause more harm than good. Many editorial writers and advocates saw the buyback program as the equivalent of an old time book burning. With all that pressure, the group decided that they would not host the Buyback program after all this week.

It doesn’t surprise me that someone would propose an event to destroy video games. The idea that violent media is to blame for real-world violence in general or mass shootings in particular crops up after every spree killing, and it’s been helped along in this case by the National Rifle Association, which has throw popular culture into the debate in the hopes that it’ll be distracting chum to piranhas hungry for scapegoats but reluctant to fight difficult battles to make America safer. And there’s always someone willing to burn books, or melt down records, or snap discs in half in response to a slight.

What disappoints me more is the businesses and other organizations who threw in behind the plan. I understand that people want to do something. But there are more substantive, and creative, ways to help. How about offering those gift certificates to the families of Newtown police officers, or offering counseling, or to raise money for counseling, or offer pastoral care to the families of children were, or still are, students at Sandy Hook Elementary? Blaming the media isn’t just a dodge from meaningful policy solutions. In this case, it’s sad to think of businesses and community organizations focusing their efforts on a showy video game buyback plan instead of finding ways to be of direct service to the families and communities who were harmed by actual violence.

At the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. this week, network executives have been fielding a great number of questions about violence in the media in the wake of the Newtown shootings. This is a difficult line for critics to walk, because I don’t know anyone who’s been asking those questions who believes that there’s a causal relationship between media violence and mass killings, or who is asking those questions because they want to shift the focus from gun control efforts to media censorship. But I do think that the Newtown killings crystallized for many of us a sense of burnout we’d been feeling about a sense in American television that the only stakes that are a legitimate subject for prestige television are life-and-death ones.

This is a judgement about aesthetic monotony rather than a moral argument, or a bit of policy advocacy. And as we’ve asked those questions over the past few days, it’s been intriguing to see how the executives of different television networks have responded, and particularly whether they’ve focused on the moral implications of their content, or the creative ones.

NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt made the pitch that after the horrible events of Newtown “the best tonic for not to be glib, but for this kind of thing is go watch an episode of Parenthood as a really great example of a show about a family who love each other and grapple with all of the issues in life,” he argued. In recent years, as the intensity of television has ratcheted up, networks have often pitched their shows as a very different kind of escapism, into dangerous worlds and risky scenarios that we’d never actually confront for ourselves, as a way to put our problems in proportion. Greenblatt here was making a different argument (and an attempt to boost a critically-loved but under-watched drama on his network): that television, by going simpler, can actually help us grapple with the things that we are feeling. This is worth taking with a grain of salt, of course. NBC’s biggest scripted drama right now is the very silly sci-fi show Revolution, about a dubiously-relevant post-apocalypse. But it was still nice to hear Greenblatt muse, even self-interestedly, about what pop culture is for, and to hear a reminder that escapism can be a small journey rather than a great leap.

Both Greenblatt and Fox Entertainment chairman Kevin Reilly cited their responsibilities to the FCC in their answers, but didn’t really discuss what that responsibility consisted of. That have been an interesting turn, given the relative amounts of attention paid to networks’ bottom lines, which keep them in business, and to their community obligations, the long-ago rationale for them to get broadcasting bandwidth. The FCC’s regulation of violence has also been dramatically less rigorous than its regulation of sex, a regulatory disparity that’s obviously affected the market as well.
Read more

The headline out of Netflix’s first appearance at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena is that the streaming video service has produced 14 more episodes of the beloved cult hit Arrested Development, and will release them all in a single day on a to-be-announced day in May! But we already knew that the episodes were under production. The real news is that Netflix might have found its purpose as a creator of original programming with the Arrested Development experiment. Not resurrecting dead-but-beloved-or-even-merely-liked series, as seems to be the case every time a Terra Nova or a The Killing bites the dust. Not providing an employment program to Steven Van Zandt in between Springsteen tours. Rather, Netflix might just have found its niche in taking the logical step beyond the subject matter innovations of the Golden Age of television, and providing structural flexibility to television storytellers as well as room to tackle new subject material and in new tones.

To back up for a moment, the two most interesting things that Mitch Hurwitz, Arrested Development’s creator, explained about the Netflix episodes had nothing to do with what story they’d tell. Rather, he said first that the episodes would each focus on a different character, that they could be watched in no particular order, and that events in each episode would become clearer as viewers watched more of them. And second, he explained that some of them were different lengths, though they are all roughly thirty minutes long.

That first development is very significant. Television, for all that it’s developed beyond an episodic structure to tell long-arc narratives, is still a fundamentally linear storytelling mechanism. You may be able to marathon The Sopranos just fine, but you can’t shuffle up the order of episodes and have things make sense. A willingness to treat episodes like a series of interlinked short films that can be watched in multiple orders is something Netflix can do particularly because of its strategy of releasing all of the episodes of its shows at once, and because it doesn’t have to build and retain viewers episode to episode the way a network does to keep a reliable stream of advertising revenue flowing. And it means that Netflix could position itself as much better-suited than networks of any type to adapt not-strictly linear narratives with multiple perspectives. Before yesterday, my dream scenarios for Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad involved the HBO adaptation, and for World War Z involved a series of stand-alone movies or mini-series episodes. Now, I’m excitedly thinking about what they might look like as Netflix series, a thought that has literally never occurred to me about any material before.
Read more