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we’d forgotten about the earlier sequence introducing the undercover plot. But in that case, the missing information got lost somewhere between our perceptual systems and our short-term data storage. The show gave us a clear vista on to the narrative events; if that view fogged over, we had only our memory to blame. Sorkin’s shows, on the other hand, are the narrative equivalent of fog machines. You’re supposed to be in the dark. Anyone who has watched more than a handful of West Wing episodes closely will know the feeling: scene after scene refers to some clearly crucial piece of information—the cast members will ask each other if they saw “the interview” last night, or they’ll make enigmatic allusions to the McCarver case—and after the sixth reference, you’ll find yourself wishing you could rewind the tape to figure out what they’re talking about, assuming you’ve missed something. And then you realize that you’re supposed to be confused.
    The clarity of Hill Street comes from the show’s subtle integration of flashing arrows, while West Wing ’s murkiness comes from Sorkin’s cunning refusal to supply them. The roll call sequence that began every Hill Street episode is most famous for the catchphrase “Hey, let’s be careful out there.” But that opening address from Sergeant Esterhaus (and in later seasons, Sergeant Jablonski) performed a crucial function, introducing some of the primary threads and providing helpful contextual explanations for them. Critics at the time remarked on the disorienting, documentary-style handheld camerawork used in the opening sequence, but the roll call was ultimately a comforting device for the show, training wheels for the new complexity of multithreading.
    Viewers of The West Wing or Lost or The Sopranos no longer require those training wheels, because twenty-five years of increasingly complex television has honed their analytic skills. Like those video games that force you to learn the rules while playing, part of the pleasure in these modern television narratives comes from the cognitive labor you’re forced to do filling in the details. If the writers suddenly dropped a hoard of flashing arrows onto the set, the show would seem plodding and simplistic. The extra information would take the fun out of watching.
    This deliberate lack of handholding extends down to the micro level of dialogue as well. Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues—whether they are the intricacies of passing legislation, or performing a heart bypass, or operating a particle accelerator—conventionally switches between two modes of information in dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince the viewer that they’re watching Actual Doctors At Work; substance is the material planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs to make sense of the plot.
    Ironically, the role of texture is sometimes to be directly irrelevant to the concerns of the underlying narrative, the more irrelevant the better. Roland Barthes wrote a short essay in the sixties that discussed a literary device he called the “reality effect,” citing a description of a barometer from Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Heart.” In Barthes’s description, reality effects are designed to create the aura of real life through their sheer meaninglessness: the barometer doesn’t play a role in the narrative, and it doesn’t symbolize anything. It’s just there for background texture, to create the illusion of a world cluttered with objects that have no narrative or symbolic meaning. The technical banter that proliferates on shows like The West Wing or ER has a comparable function; you don’t need to know what it means when the surgeons start shouting about OPCAB and saphenous veins as they perform a bypass on ER ; the arcana is there to create the