Poetry on the T.V.

TV shows are using poetry to give episodes a little something something.

In the last season of Breaking Bad, an episode entitled, "Ozymandias" had everybody googling the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem and what it said about kings and empires falling did not bode well for Walter White. Mad Men titled an ep after Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" to echo the show's themes of recreating oneself and rising from the dead (Don, Draper, anyone?). Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" also tent-poled an episode and thematically returned later in season 2.

  And I just finished watching a Homeland episode entitled "A Red Wheelbarrow" in which pregnant-ass Carrie got shot and Saul found Brody in Venezuela strung out on heroin; it even had a William Carlos Williams reference.  Characters tended to say "it depends" a lot.  Last week's episode was called "Gerontion" after T.S. Eliot's poem about an old man who realizes he's wasted his life.

Apparently, an M.F.A. in poetry does a body good in Hollywood writing rooms.

People watch T.V. in a different way nowadays. I've noticed I don't watch anything that I can't follow on Twitter for live-tweeting action. There's something about sharing the snark with other people who are watching that makes the experience more enjoyable. Then, I read episode recaps, listen to podcasts, and join in the hunt for the Easter eggs the writers hide in the script. So an episode named after a poem is another clue into the deeper meaning of the show that adds to my overall enjoyment of the watching.

It almost makes you curious about the poems that inspire the writers of such awesome shows. (Well, Homeland kinda sucks this season, but still.) Titling eps after poems helps me see poetry in a different light. It makes poetry seem fresher and a little more relevant to have the direct link between the poem and a fictional life I care about pointed out to me.

Huh, I'm being introduced to poems by cable television.