Planet Earth is an example of the medium used well I think - amazing footage of reality that would be very expensive, time consuming and difficult to observe first hand, presented with fairly light editorializing.
I personally haven't got the same value from TV fiction. Mad Men is good example - I watched it because it was widely praised and I got somewhat caught up in wanting to know what happened next but in retrospect I really don't feel I got anything much out of it and I would like those hours of my life back. I feel the same about almost everything I watched while I had a Netflix subscription.
I've got nothing against pure entertainment. I've found Game of Thrones entertaining and will likely watch the final season with my fiancé. I continue to watch the occasional popcorn movie at the cinema. There's very little TV and only a few movies that feel they rise beyond entertainment to something like literature however.
If you get value out of TV and movies I've got no problem with that. As someone who used to watch a lot of both and now feels that was largely a waste of my time though I just no longer see much value there.
I guess it's not for everyone -- to me, Mad Men was a really interesting commentary on consumer culture and suburbia; along with giving a much more realistic view of a period of time that has been extremely influential yet usually reflected in a pretty one dimensional way. If someone asked me to read an essay about the values on 1950s/1960s america, I really don't think I'd care, but by giving me interesting characters and presenting their values in concrete situations, it made learning about that time a lot more interesting and relevant. I think with fiction, when it works, you learn a lot without even realizing it. That can make it seem like it's not valuable because sometimes you don't even realized it planted a seed in your mind. I mean, how much more effective was a novel like 1984 versus someone talking about the dangers of government surveillance? I'd argue 1984 had much more impact (unfortunately, probably not enough), even though it was entirely fiction.
I'm not saying there is no value in fiction. Does Mad Men belong in the same conversation as 1984 though? I don't think so.
Does any TV show deserve to stand next to the greats of literature? I'm not convinced. The closest I can get to a TV show that felt it paid off the time investment with saying something worthwhile is probably The Wire. There's probably a handful of films that I can say the same for.
For any activity I think it can be useful to look back and ask if it was time well spent. For me personally I can answer yes for many ways I spend my time. That includes some fiction. It includes very little TV. Maybe there was actually some hidden value but I'd rather spend time on things I don't feel ambiguous about the value of.
OTOH, I often see young people on reddit asking "Was business in the sixties really like Mad Men? Did they really smoke and drink that much - even AT WORK? Were they really so sexist? Seriously?"
So I think those kids learned something that wasn't in their history books.
I personally haven't got the same value from TV fiction. Mad Men is good example - I watched it because it was widely praised and I got somewhat caught up in wanting to know what happened next but in retrospect I really don't feel I got anything much out of it and I would like those hours of my life back. I feel the same about almost everything I watched while I had a Netflix subscription.
I've got nothing against pure entertainment. I've found Game of Thrones entertaining and will likely watch the final season with my fiancé. I continue to watch the occasional popcorn movie at the cinema. There's very little TV and only a few movies that feel they rise beyond entertainment to something like literature however.
If you get value out of TV and movies I've got no problem with that. As someone who used to watch a lot of both and now feels that was largely a waste of my time though I just no longer see much value there.