Buona Maestra

[Autom. eng. transl.] One of the most rooted and widespread clichés, between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, wants television to be a 'bad teacher', a receptacle for the worst behavioral and condensed models of all that is ugly and aesthetically reprehensible in our culture. The television oozes trash, no doubt, and is full of stupid and senseless talk but, by dint of speaking ill of it, we hardly noticed the existence of intelligent story forms that, far from depicting the moral drift of our society, instead, useful tools for understanding are revealed. This form of 'good' television is represented by the TV series. The serial works from the United States have now become an offer of excellence not only in the restricted television environment. Now that TV series are being studied in the most prestigious universities in the world, it becomes easier to argue that good television, the much sought after 'quality television', has existed for some time. Indeed, there has never been a television so vital, intelligent, rich in metaphorical and literary resonances as the current one. It almost seems like a paradox, but often it is hard to find a modern novel or a film that is more interesting than a good TV series. Works such as "Lost", "Sex and the City", "X-Files", "CSI", "Desperate Housewives" and "Doctor House" are capable, better than traditional expressive forms, of distorting everyday reality to finally make it recognizable. Aldo Grasso, the most authoritative television scholar in our country, shows us how, along the path that goes from Alfred Hitchcock presents and "At the borders of reality" to the most recent "ER" or "The Simpsons", he has gradually come to to consolidate a spectacular genre capable of producing true works of art. A genre that hides the narrative structures, the same figurative techniques, the same stylistic procedures that can be found in the great masterpieces of the so-called high culture, behind the alleged superficiality of mass production and under the apparent ease of 'industrial' writing. The show, almost with discretion, exalts the rules of entertainment, traces passionate routes. And, day after day, he takes the viewer by the hand and transfers him by magic into that emotional dimension that compensates him for the aridity of everyday life