The TV Show is not actually a TV show, but a short little 2009 music video directed by Sugimoto Kousuke with music by Manabe Takayuki. The video lacks dialogue or lyrics, so any semblance of story is told purely through the visuals and the upbeat electronic track serving as the soundtrack.

The video rapidly jumps around between a variety of scenes, all of which have different art styles and monochromatic shading. These scenes are linked through a series of screens. Whether it's a tiny TV at a noodle shop, an advertisement at a baseball game, or a bus passenger's cell phone, each scene has some visual connection to the previous and next one, and since the screen in every scene is showing an image that's a different color from the rest of the scene, it really draws attention to the screens and makes them pop.

As the video continues through the variety of scenes through the variety of screens (I wish these two words weren't quite so similar because this review has potential to get really confusing), one begins to wonder what exactly is real and what isn't. It's a form of _mise en abyme_ where the "true" image is not exactly clear. While an animation studio watching part of the show they're creating or the police watching surveillance footage of a robbery in progress both have a clear connection, those two don't have any connection to each other--until, of course, the scenes start interacting with each other directly.

The aforementioned police begin chasing the robber through all these scenes in quick succession, and as they interact with each scene, the barriers between these realities begin to blur even further, with different characters in different colors and different artstyles beginning to collide in ways that shouldn't be possible if some of these scenes are fictions and others are reality.

So what exactly does this little video mean? Well, it could be a commentary on how television and broadcasting technology are able to make the world a smaller place, connecting us in ways we never thought possible. Or perhaps, it's a statement about the fall of television and the rise of social media. After all, it was created in 2009, right as social media was really starting to bloom and enter public consciousness in full force. By 2009, most people had Facebook. Twitter was making a name for itself. YouTube was on its way to becoming the video sharing site. Suddenly, foreign places seemed much less foreign, because instead of having to rely on the skewed perspective of a broadcasting company to know what was going on in the world, everyone had that ability to broadcast. We began to interact with people we'd never been able to interact with before. Someone in Alabama could become close friends with someone in Nevada. A person living in France could communicate with a Korean at any time, so long as they could speak a common language. Television was a fantastic tool for understanding the world around us, just as the first part of The TV Show is interesting to watch. However, social media was able to free it from those restrictions, just as the latter half of The TV Show, when all the different realities blur together, becomes something magical.

I could be way off, though. This video is dense, with tons of things constantly happening in every scene. This is the sort of thing that you almost have to pick apart frame-by-frame, not necessarily because every frame is packed with some hidden meaning, but because it's packed with details that fly by so quickly. It took me actually watching it after initially writing up this review to catch that all the different colors are the colors in the "off air" image. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just reaching for possible meaning where there is none, so that I have more to put in my review than "I thought The TV Show looked pretty nifty."

Maybe I'm looking for meaning in something where there is none. If the message of The TV Show is nothing more than "here's a catchy song and a video that looks cool," that's great too. Because the song is catchy, and the video does look cool. Where there's not any meaning to the visuals, they're absolutely packed with so many little details it's easy to miss on the first viewing and it's so visually dynamic that you'll want to watch it again and again. And really, that's about all a video of this length really needs. Four stars.