From David Milch, creator/writer of "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood":
I think the war in Iraq has more to do with the media's abdication of its responsibilities than the deficiencies of our president. Through lack of informing vision, the media has infantilized the audience. The surrogate existence provided by television has come to supplant the emotional life of the populace. I've stopped doing series set in the present because the assault on the collective sensibility after 9/11 gave the populace so much fear, that they could only be placated with a three-week miniseries designed to tell them that they didn't need to fear danger here, because we were taking the war over there. The motivations for that war had nothing to do with WMD and everything to do with the habituation of the viewing public to the shaping of human experience in distorted forms, for which the media is responsible. For the first three weeks, the Iraq miniseries received enormous public approval, because it was the series we wanted to see. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. The current disaffection has nothing to do with the Iraqi people and everything to do with the fact that the series is over, and we don't want to see it anymore. It was a war undertaken for the wrong reasons, and responded to for reasons the public doesn't understand.
I think the war in Iraq has more to do with the media's abdication of its responsibilities than the deficiencies of our president. Through lack of informing vision, the media has infantilized the audience. The surrogate existence provided by television has come to supplant the emotional life of the populace. I've stopped doing series set in the present because the assault on the collective sensibility after 9/11 gave the populace so much fear, that they could only be placated with a three-week miniseries designed to tell them that they didn't need to fear danger here, because we were taking the war over there. The motivations for that war had nothing to do with WMD and everything to do with the habituation of the viewing public to the shaping of human experience in distorted forms, for which the media is responsible. For the first three weeks, the Iraq miniseries received enormous public approval, because it was the series we wanted to see. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. The current disaffection has nothing to do with the Iraqi people and everything to do with the fact that the series is over, and we don't want to see it anymore. It was a war undertaken for the wrong reasons, and responded to for reasons the public doesn't understand.
