Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In January 2011 TV network FX premiered an innovative new show. Lights Out starred Holt McCallany as Patrick “Lights” Leary, a former world heavyweight boxing champion who suffers from pugilistic dementia as a result of being hit in the head too many times. Because of his condition, he is forced to go to work for the mob to continue to support his family. The show was gritty and flashy. It was also the first weekly TV drama about the day-to-day life of a world champion boxer. It showcased flamboyant subject matter with delicate and complex characters.
Dozens of newspapers, entertainment magazines, and websites hailed it as one of the best television shows in years. The Hollywood Reporter loaded its review with superlatives. TV critic Tim Goodman called the show one of the most compelling dramas on TV and praised Holt McCallany, a longtime character actor, in a “‘where-did-this-guy-come-from,’ star-making, breakout role.” “In his virtuoso performance, [McCallany is] able to elevate the series and give ‘Lights’ Leary more shape and substance than anyone could have expected,” Goodman wrote. “It’s a monster performance with both subtlety and power. You can’t take your eyes off McCallany, and in turn, Lights Out has a hook that comes out of nowhere.”
More than a dozen other reviewers echoed Goodman’s sentiments, calling the series terrific and the cast outstanding and giving McCallany praise for his powerhouse performance. But the ratings went through ups and downs. So despite the show’s rave reviews and universal praise for its charismatic lead, the critically acclaimed series was canceled after just one season.
Now, a show that’s lauded by critics but fails in its first season is, unfortunately for those who worked on it, not that uncommon. But a television executive being as candid as John Landgraf, the president of FX Networks, just might be. Landgraf is known for being exceedingly honest with fans and journalists alike, and this is what he had to say about canceling a show that he green-lit and personally loved:
No matter how good the show is, the question is, are they somebody’s first choice? Are they good enough . . . I looked at the tracking data. In January and February, there are 18 new original series premiering on cable. There are another 18 returning series launching on cable and 16 new and returning series launching on broadcast networks. That’s 52 original series premiering in January and February alone. You have to think about the competitive environment on the night Lights Out premiered . . . Getting traction with something new and something different has gotten devilishly hard . . . It’s become tougher and tougher to find a slot to wiggle through if you’re trying to make something competitively excellent, and different, that isn’t just designed to be noisy and shocking.
The ratings leader on the night that Lights Out premiered was MTV’s noisy, shocking reality hit Teen Mom.
Lead actor McCallany reflects on that time, “It was a difficult moment. I knew John liked the show, he often said very complimentary things about the show, and about my performance . . . but we were failing to gather enough attention. It was especially hard because it was my first true starring role, after twenty years in the business, so I’d have done anything to see the show succeed.”
It would be hard for anyone to get such praise and still fail.
According to John Landgraf’s research department, FX Research, there were over four hundred scripted shows slated for 2015 and an estimate of close to five hundred in 2017. The number just keeps going up and up. (And it’s worth keeping in mind that the fifty-two new or original series Landgraf mentioned did not include all the reality shows, documentary series, webisodes, podcasts, and the millions of hours of instantly available videos on YouTube.)
Yet in 2018, despite this crushing setback, McCallany emerged as the star of one of Netflix’s most watched and critically praised shows of the year, Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher. This show was master director Fincher’s second television show. The director—who has directed music videos for many eminent artists as well as films including Se7en and The Social Network—had given McCallany his first major role twenty-five years earlier in Fincher’s feature film directorial debut, Alien 3.
Despite the failure of Lights Out as a series, all the press and adoration lavished upon Holt in the popular press likely imbued Fincher and the network with confidence that he could carry his own show and helped sell him to the network as a bankable leading man. The torrent of press praising McCallany’s formidable and unorthodox performance served as a powerful Block driving the now-middle-aged actor far beyond a journeyman’s career, to great heights. He is now consistently considered among Hollywood’s elite, in demand for the roles every young actor dreams about.
McCallany says about his life now, “It makes me very grateful for the success . . . on Mindhunter. I know what it’s like to have the other experience. Famed boxing trainer Teddy Atlas once said to me, ‘The most important thing is not how long it takes a man to get to his destination, the most important thing is that he gets there.’”
People are important, and what they do in their lives is important. Dilution works against us, but like McCallany, we can all rise above and succeed.
The sheer volume of noise dilutes the power of any individual message. Think of it like a chemical reaction where the power of the reaction is directly proportional to the potency of the reactive chemicals being used. Dilute the chemicals and you lessen the intensity of the reaction between the substances involved. This is what dilution does to our human experience. It makes it weaker. It lessens it. It decreases the power of who we are.
Think about Linda Stone’s concept of “continuous partial attention,” which says that as our attention is constantly divided we cease engaging deeply. We often relate to this idea in purely selfish terms, as we, ourselves, feel so constantly distracted and pulled this way and that way by mass messaging, electronic devices, and whirling choice overload. When we are overloaded with too much of something, we reject it.
What we often don’t think about is what this new way of interfacing with the world is doing to those who are trying to reach us. And, relatedly, what that means about our own ability to have a voice and be heard. If those around us are only partially paying attention, rejecting what is coming at them, then those of us trying to engage with them and get their attention are not really being heard anymore. Thus, artists, professionals, entrepreneurs, we’re all diluted, pitted against ever-increasing content, while those we are trying to reach have ever-decreasing attention. And we can feel it.
No matter our vocation in life, all of us must find our own ways to be noticed against a backdrop of constant interference, and be seen by an audience that’s constantly distracted. Again, it hasn’t always been so hard for talented people, smart ideas, or good products to stand out. Being overwhelmed by more than we can consume—for McCallany, as for most of us—has metaphorically turned the lights out and we are often left in the dark, struggling to be seen.
Even when we actively seek connection, even love, technology-driven choices bring us together while simultaneously pushing us apart. When there are simply too many options, intensity of connection is destroyed. In a 2013 New Yorker magazine article on the profound social shift toward online dating, author Ann Friedman points out how easy it is to be dismissive of the abundance of dating profiles. Dating has become more and more like shopping in a supermarket. In her article she demonstrates why users continue to scroll without ever stopping to learn more about a potential partner, ultimately turning dating into a process of sifting through “products” in a distant and detached way.
From the online dating searcher’s perspective, Friedman writes:
Ignore; ignore. I’m seeing so many men with questionable facial hair that I double-check my profile to make sure that I haven’t accidentally indicated a preference for goatees. [Unsolicited messages cause me to] scream and toss the phone to the other end of the couch, as if this action will repel the men within it. Even though I know these men can’t see my exact location, I feel cornered, overwhelmed.
Human beings start to become as interchangeable as chocolate bars in a vending machine or breakfast cereal boxes in a supermarket aisle. We stop at the first sugary snack that catches our eye and ignore the alternatives. When there is so much, we simply don’t engage in a serious way. Looking for a life partner should probably be a more focused and specific activity. But as they say, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The number of online dating profiles is staggering. If you have one of those profiles, once again, you’re being diluted. Whether you’re browsing to select a date or posting a profile in hopes someone else will select it, it’s depressing for both parties because you’re seeking a human connection in a place where finding it, at least as far as deep connection goes, seems impossible. When it is so easy to interact with others superficially, we can become lazy when bumping into people one-on-one in the physical world where we might be able to go a little deeper.
It is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit that millions of people do actually find each other online.
On some level, everyone feels like Friedman or one of those eligible bachelors: How can I connect to the right person? What’s wrong with me? We take the anxiety from these thoughts and experiences into the world with us, and the next time we are in a crowd, we think to ourselves: “Am I just another face to swipe, or box to tick, or distraction to ignore?” And when you think about how many selection processes you have to go through in a day, week, or month, on the endless list of things that we do in life, all that time adds up. Dilution = emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion.
In our current theater of too much of everything, standing out has more often to do with the ability to be seen and heard than talent, luck, or skill.