That Can't be History; They're Telling a Story! - David Loftus

On one of the Internet discussion lists to which I subscribe, someone recently complained about the public television series “History Detectives.” The hosts pretend they’re meeting the subjects of the show at the door for the first time, he wrote, and it just goes on from there: that is “soooo fake”!

Several more sensible members pointed out that most television shows are contrived; that the stars of “History Detectives” are just that -- stars, who don’t do the actual research and writing of the show themselves; and that the area(s) in which this particular list specializes as fans, students, and collectors also involve storylines and scripts. Others listmembers said that viewers are perfectly aware of how contrived the show’s presentation is, though the historic and cultural content are often fascinating and solid.

These comments were both right and wrong. The show is rather contrived (but for fairly valid reasons, as I’ll explain in a moment), and though the demographic it attracts is undoubtedly higher in income and intellect than it must be for the most popular shows on TV, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some viewers and fans aren’t aware of its tricks.

When I was a full-time newspaper reporter, we regularly got comments and complaints from readers who didn’t grasp the difference between news and analysis, between an article and an opinion piece; and who cheered for a satire as if it were straight and sincere commentary. After I published a mocking essay about Jimmy Swaggart’s sexual escapades, a reader wrote in to state that after reading it, David Loftus “earned all of my respect. What a shock to read such a fair, unbiased, not one-sided, unphony report that wasn’t trying to destroy someone.” I only wish I’d been there when his buddies enlightened him.

I saw a few episodes of “History Detectives” early in its run, and I found it a fairly interesting show. Yes, I was irritated by its misuse of Elvis Costello for its theme, but there have been far worse examples (such as Nike’s use of John Lennon’s “Revolution” to introduce a new line of shoes). I was amused at all the self-grooming by Elyse Luray, the requisite pretty blonde, who repeatedly pulled her hair from her face on camera -- one of those classic subconscious expressions of self-consciousness that one expects to see only in teenage girls . . . although I was equally entertained to see Naomi Wolf do “the flip” many times with her brunette mane during a bookstore appearance in the mid 1990s. It seemed an ironic reflex from the feminist author of The Beauty Myth. Perhaps Ms. Luray’s video crew has cleaned up her act in more recent shows.

But to get back to the complaints about the show’s “fakiness.” Every program on TV has to have a story arc. All programs, from a taut drama like “24” to the documentaries on the History Channel and Animal Planet, have one. If “History Detectives” presented only the bald facts, in chronological order of discovery by the researchers of the show, then it wouldn’t hold half the audience it has. Also, when you have to crank out new content every week for a season, a formula eases the pressure. It may be an extremely obvious and repetitive formula, such as those employed by the TNT caper series “Leverage,” which stars Tim Hutton and has plot holes you could drive a truck through, but which I watch for its charming lead characters and witty dialogue (and because it’s shot here in Portland, so I often see actor friends of mine in walk-on roles), or it can be much more subtle. But it’s guaranteed to be there.

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I learned that a classmate in English with me was changing his major to history. I asked him why. Well, English literature is so subjective, he explained; you can write almost anything and it works. With history, you’re dealing with facts.

There must be plenty of good reasons to switch from English to History, I told him, but that does not strike me as one of them. Inevitably, history involves storytelling by its scholars, no less than literature. Not all the desirable facts and data survive for you to retrieve them, and you have to pick and choose between the ones you’ve got and build a case -- a plotline -- to persuade your colleagues and readers that this is what “really happened.” But even eyewitnesses couldn’t necessarily give you the whole picture, or agree with one another about what happened.

People today haven't come to a satisfactory conclusion about what happened on a late November afternoon in Dallas in 1963. One of the biggest ongoing debates among scholars of early U.S history involves two written documents: Is the Constitution a codification of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, or more of a conservative betrayal of those ideals? Historians steadily debate which is the case.

So don’t berate “History Detectives” (or any other report, on television or elsewhere) for being “contrived.” Everything is contrived in the sense of being a honed artifact with a mission, to a lesser or greater extent, whether its purpose is to persuade, enlighten, entertain, or more likely, all three.