When it comes to art, the rule of “don’t be boring” is essential. From beginning to end, the least we want is not to be bored. Most art is pretty bad, including paintings, sculpture, literature, and music. However, some of it will be brilliant, and the bad stuff falls away. For every painting that hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are thousands of useless amateur paintings. It is unusual for other people to bother about them unless the work has something that merits the attention and the consideration of an audience or observer.
In film and television, bad stuff has not had the chance to drop away, so we assume it’s uniquely bad. Fortunately, there is a little bit of genuinely good stuff, which is enough to change your life and make it worth engaging all of the art. People always say, “why don’t they make good movies like they used to in the 30s and the 40s?” The truth is that there were a lot of lousy ones, and we just don’t remember them. In the future, they’ll be saying, “why don’t they make good movies like they did back in the early new millennium?” because people will have forgotten them.
The very least we want from a work of art is not to be boring. If that’s what you do, that’s an incredible achievement, but again, that’s the bottom. The top is that we want our lives to be changed completely, the way great art does. We want it turned upside down and transmogrified. We want to be transported. That’s what Breaking Bad and The Sopranos did to people. Their lives were different, and they constantly changed because of their exposure to that great art. That’s what great art should do at the top end. It should change your life forever.