Sitcom stock plots that disappeared

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 4:24 PM - 0 Comments

Speaking of sitcoms: I was thinking about stock sitcom plots the other day. (Actually I was thinking about the stock plots that either originated on The Dick Van Dyke Show or were, as TVTropes would say, codified there. Western dream sequences, pool-hustler episodes, and accidental-hypnosis episodes didn’t start with that show, but the sitcoms that followed sometimes seemed to be aping TDVDs with their versions of those stories.) And one thing I started thinking about was that while most standby plots never really go away (wedding after wedding after wedding…) there are some stock plots that are very big for years, even decades, and then vanish.

Think of the boxing episode. Up until sometime in the ’90s, getting a character into the boxing ring was almost guaranteed if a sitcom ran long enough. Boxing fits into a sitcom for many reasons: it allows characters to fight without rousing the TV violence police; it looks good in the promos; it pulls in male viewers; and there are tons of boxing gags that go back to the silent days. But mostly, if a sitcom wants to do a sports-themed episode, boxing is just about the easiest sport to do on a soundstage. All you need is a ring; you don’t even need to show the fans if you make the “arena” dark enough. So everybody did a boxing episode. TVTropes lists a bunch of them. You’ll notice that when sitcoms do a boxing episode, it’s usually about the lead character having to get into the ring with a big tough guy for some contrived reason or another; when dramas do it, the boxer is usually a guest character, and often a murder victim.

So you’ll notice that on that list, most of the sitcom examples are from before 1997 or so. Then in recent years, most shows have stopped doing it. Not all; kids’ sitcoms (always willing to raid the old stock stories) have done their versions, and Mr. D is apparently about to do one. But boxing episodes certainly are not the towering force they once were, whereas bowling episodes are still going strong. What happened? A friend suggested it’s because boxing got less popular, but that hasn’t stopped mystery shows from presenting us with dead boxers. It might just be that with sitcoms more free to go out of the studio, there are other sports they can do for their obligatory sports episode. And also, back when more people had military experience, more people had personal experience with boxing – it’s not as easy to identify with as it once was.

What are some other stock sitcom plots that were huge for a long time, and then vanished? I’m sure there are others, but stock plots are hard to kill. Even changes in technology have not completely wiped out the “I sent someone a message and I have to get it back before they read it” plot.

The NBC sitcom counter-backlash

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 3:54 PM - 0 Comments

I see that Salon’s Willa Paskin has written an article about how Whitney has improved, thereby saving me from fearing I was going crazy. I had been telling people that it was one of the better new comedies of the season – a very backhanded compliment, admittedly, given what this season has been like – and getting genuinely horrified reactions.

Not that Whitney is a first-rate show; it is not. Paskin’s problem with it is that it’s not funny enough; my problem is a combination of that, its still-weak supporting characters, and its slow pacing. (The fact that NBC/Universal has not done this type of show in some years seems very evident. The same network’s Are You There, Chelsea?, produced by Warner Brothers, is a much worse show, but it has a surface slickness and speed. Whitney actually gets a certain odd charm from the fact that it doesn’t have that kind of slickness, but it also has a lot of oddly paced scenes.) But what it’s always had going for it is Chris D’Elia, who has turned in the best performance on a new comedy show. His delivery is refreshingly un-hammy; he gets the most out of everything he’s given and still resembles an actual person. (I also have to give some credit to the writers for that; actors can’t create a convincing character alone. Beth Behrs was very good casting on 2 Broke Girls, but the writing after the pilot has been so bad that whenever I see it, she’s hamming it up, unable to put together a convincing character out of the lines she’s been given.) Cummings is not the natural actor D’Elia is, and from what I’ve seen the show has had problems figuring her out: it seemed to start with the assumption that we would all love her because she was a tell-it-like-it-is person, and has had to adjust to the fact that neither she nor the character are terribly likable.

But it did adjust, and the relationship between Cummings and D’Elia’s characters feels, there’s that word again, real. They’re a convincing couple, two people who get on each other’s (and sometimes our) nerves but really do seem to be together because they enjoy each other’s company. In a season where most new comedies have been unable to create characters and relationships that seem remotely real – instead giving us Zooey Deschanel or the ham-it-up brigade on 2 Broke Girls – I have to consider it one of the more enjoyable shows, even though I cringe at some moments. (There were two new comedies this season that seem to me like they really know what they’re doing: Suburgatory, and Last Man Standing. Everything else seemed to range from strange combinations of good and bad, to outright amateurish shows.) I feel like it’s the sort of show that would benefit from a great big re-tool, since the premise they have set up is simply not strong enough to spin off a lot of stories. (Cummings’ character would work better if she were taken down a peg more often, but because the premise has her as the Alpha Dog among a group of pathetic friends, this can’t happen that often. It needs what one writer has called a “contrary character,” someone who we can root against instead of rooting against the lead.) It won’t happen, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it get a chance to try.

I don’t quite get why this show became the most-hated in a comedy season that wasn’t much good all the way around. It inspired quite passionate hatred in some circles; on the iMDB message board for it, there’s at least two people who seem to spend all their time writing post after post rooting for its cancellation and hating anyone who likes it. My theory about why this is (apart from the obvious answer – “because it really is terrible”) would be that it was a combination of the obnoxious over-saturated marketing campaign and its presence on the Thursday night lineup, where it was considered an evil interloper. Once it was moved to Wednesdays, it was no longer hated as much, and its ratings were only a little bit lower (because the post-Office slot, though still theoretically the best comedy slot NBC has, isn’t really that good a slot any more; it’s not helping Up All Night much either). Not that I think it’s wrong to dislike it; you have to be in an indulgent mood to forgive its weaknesses. But I do think it got more intense hate than it deserved, and that might be a sign that NBC’s marketing campaign backfired. If it’s renewed for a second season, a 50/50 shot at this point, the network had better promote it as a comedy about a couple rather than the one-woman show it seemed to be in the original marketing.

Recapping Our Top Story

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 12:04 AM - 0 Comments

In this post by Rich Juzwiak at Gawker, called “Tune In, Recap, Drop Out”, he explains why he’s gotten fed up with writing TV episode recaps: “I want to be a normal person who’s watching TV, not some frantic note-taking instant replayer.” He also provides a sort of potted history of TV recap culture on the internet, and explains how it evolved to its current state, where readers expect TV episodes to be reviewed almost as soon as they air.

There’s a lot of argument over what constitutes a “recap” versus a “review,” though in practice these terms are very flexible – most recaps include some element of reviewing the quality of the episode. (In fact, many of my favourite TV episode reviews are, formally, recaps. The writer recounts the events of the episode step by step, but from his or her own perspective, enabling us to see the virtues of the storytelling or laugh at its now-obvious flaws.) Pure recaps, just telling us what happened, only work for reality shows and soap operas, genres where you need to follow the ongoing storyline but don’t necessarily have to watch every episode.

I have nothing to say against same-day reviews, or the practice of reviewing every episode of a TV series. I don’t do that, and so I’m grateful to and impressed by people who do. Finding something fresh and interesting to say about an episode, without just being snarky or rehashing the plot, is a really impressive achievement. I do get the impression that the glut of episode-by-episode reviews has created – not a backlash exactly, just a new awareness of the form’s limitations: it can sometimes diminish both a serialized show (by trying to evaluate it before the direction of the season has become clear) and an episodic show (because there’s only so much to be said about any given episode; since the episodes are all somewhat similar, reviewing each one inevitably makes it seem like the show is repeating itself endlessly, even if it isn’t). This is the normal process of give and take, and it doesn’t really say anything bad about the future of the recap/review format; when a form proliferates, its limits become clearer, but eventually it finds its proper place in the scheme of things. The episode-by-episode review format has plenty of life left in it.

But what has occurred to me is that the purpose of the episodic review is going through a bit of a transitional phase, related to the transitional phase in TV viewing. When the idea of episodic reviewing Continue…

Unlucky “Luck”

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 7:30 PM - 0 Comments

HBO’s Luck had so many problems that it almost seemed like the title was supposed to be ironic (or at least provide set-ups for subject headings like this one). The rumoured conflicts between creator David Milch and creator Michael Mann; the low ratings. What finally did it in, though, was the controversy over its treatment of animals: two horses were hurt and had to be euthanized during the first season, and another one died during production on the second season. That third death was apparently the last straw; the show has been canceled.

Since the cancellation announcement was only made a few minutes ago, it’s too soon to know the whole story behind the end of the show – let alone why it was unable to fix its safety problems after two deaths had already occurred. (Some have argued that this is inherent to horse-racing, rather than inherent to the production style of the show; that may be so, but a show needs to maintain more stringent safety standards than real life or even real sports.) But it’s hard not to speculate that the negative coverage was a nightmare for HBO. Luck is one of those shows, like Treme and Enlightened, that HBO picks up despite the ratings: demonstrating that they support an ambitious show, and that the ratings are not the only things that matter, is what the network calls a “brand enhancer.” (And it helps that on a pay channel, ratings are not, in fact, the only things that matter; overall prestige helps get you subscribers.) But that only works if the show is actually enhancing the network’s brand, not dragging it down. The show itself was divisive but had some compelling supporting characters, and Matt Seitz for one felt it had developed into “a great series” midway through its first and only season (which will finish airing on March 25).

But HBO can live with a show that inspires divisive reactions among viewers; a show that makes them look bad in real life, for the treatment of real-life animals, is another thing. If the show really couldn’t go on without safer treatment of horses, as HBO implies in the press release, then it obviously had to go. What we don’t know yet is whether that is the reason or just an excuse. In other words, maybe they could have continued the show with fewer racing scenes, or racing scenes shot differently; maybe not (only the network and producers really know that). But it’s possible that even if they could have continued it without killing horses, the very fact that it happened – and continued to happen after they’d been warned – may have brought Luck to an end as a brand enhancer for HBO, and therefore as a show.

No laugh track, for real

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 9, 2012 at 4:42 PM - 0 Comments

You always see “no laugh track” clips on YouTube, but the problem with them is that they just remove the laughter of an audience, screwing up the timing and ultimately making no point about the material. So here’s the only reason why I would embed a clip of the 1994-5 ABC sitcom On Our Own: I noticed that this version literally has no laugh track. The show appears to have been shot without an audience, but this airing leaves out the laugh track that would presumably have appeared on the original airing. The only laughs you can hear are laughs from the crew members; otherwise, there’s just the dialogue, the studio ambience, and the occasional sound effect. It’s especially creepy in the scene that starts at 2:37, where a not-funny joke about falling out of a chair is accompanied by the sound of one or two people chuckling.

(Some shows deliberately use crew laughter in place of an audience – it’s more common overseas, and The Soup does it – but I’m guessing this show did not air this way on ABC. If it did, it must have been an ominous-sounding half hour for the TGIF audience.)

About the show I know almost nothing, except that it was created by the people who did Family Matters and that Greg Garcia (My Name is Earl, Raising Hope) got his first job on it. And, of course, there was a massive retool midway through the season, with some characters dropped and others added, because what else would you expect from this team? But really, the sound of a totally “unsweetened” soundtrack is the only point of interest here.

Owning movies

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 9, 2012 at 3:05 PM - 0 Comments

I’ve said a few times that I think the decline of the past in popular culture – our decreasing familiarity with work made before a certain time – may just be a reversion to the natural order of things. There was a period when TV stations needed old movies, TV shows and cartoons as cheap filler programming, so young people could grow up with Bugs Bunny cartoons as part of their lives even though Bugs Bunny cartoons hadn’t been produced regularly since 1964. But that wasn’t normal, historically. Francis Coppola recently gave his historical take on the idea of artists making money off their creations, pointing out that some of the ways artists expect to make money are relatively new, and might not last:

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

Another thing that may have been even more of a historical outlier was the idea of owning movies. The Hollywood studios are still reeling from the end of the DVD sales boom, and a lot of people are talking about the value of owning movies in physical media. I sympathize with that personally, because I still enjoy DVDs. (For one thing, streaming isn’t all the way there yet in terms of quality; for another thing, those of us without will power sometimes feel a need to get off the internet for a couple of hours, which means it helps to have some entertainment that doesn’t require an internet connection.) But of course the idea of owning your own copy of a movie, as a mainstream mass phenomenon, was incredibly short-lived. Owning your own copy of a film on actual film was always a hobby for a few collectors. The arrival of home video in the ’80s was more about renting than owning. Thanks to the pricing of DVDs, the bad decisions of Blockbuster, and a bunch of other interlocking events, there were a few years in the last decade when owning movies really took off beyond collectors. But it couldn’t last. Most movies or TV episodes are watched only once. People naturally gravitate to formats where they will only have to pay to see them once: theatre, renting, streaming.

Physical books may or may not survive the rise of new online forms, but they do have the advantage that no matter what technological changes occur, a paper book will be usable. This doesn’t apply to DVDs (or music formats, for that matter). Besides, books always had that cachet of looking good on your shelf. To a certain extent vinyl records did too. With a few exceptions, like Criterion discs and HBO box sets, DVDs and Blu-Rays never quite made it to the level of status symbols. Like CDs, they caught on because they provided a mix of quality and convenience in their delivery of something popular (music, film), but there wasn’t any special cachet attached to owning them, and there wasn’t any special reason why people would hang onto them if something even more convenient came along. Owning a film probably wasn’t meant to be a common thing; streaming is probably closer to the norm of how we experience film.

Cheese, art and TV

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 9:38 AM - 0 Comments

A lot of ink was spilled (if bandwidth counts as ink) over Ryan McGee’s post “Did The Sopranos Do More Harm Than Good?”, where he raises the question of whether heavily-serialized, “novelistic” TV has become such an all-pervasive standard that it can lead to weak individual episodes and half-baked serial stories that don’t go anywhere. (Or, as I sometimes put it: after the writers of Nash Bridges went off and did Lost, even the shows that would be better off being Nash Bridges tried to be Lost.)

Like others who have responded, I don’t think The Sopranos is the show to blame for this, if “blame” is the right word, and it probably isn’t. The Sopranos arrived on TV in a time when broadcast network drama had already become very serialized — as John Wells explained in a 1995 article that may have introduced the term “showrunner” to the public, the modern showrunner role in drama came about because TV dramas were too complex to be written by freelancers. And both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under were more reliant on standalone episode stories than almost any subsequent HBO drama.

I’ve worried about the decline of the standalone episode in TV drama. (Not to mention the fact that shows often seem to announce in advance that they’re only doing standalone episodes because they think that’ll pull in some newbie viewers; you don’t get good episodes that way, you get them because you like them and the writers pitched some great stories, like they did on The X-Files.) But I would not blame one particular show or group of shows, and again, “blame” is the wrong word. And it’s Continue…

The Real Thing

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 4:52 PM - 0 Comments

Emily Yoshida argues that The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills became a very compelling and powerful show as it faced up to Russell Armstrong’s death:

Genre, network, editing, intention, manipulation, and undeniable exploitation notwithstanding, season two of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills was one of the most important, morally complex, thought-provoking bodies of work I’ve ever seen on television, and even if I’m not necessarily “glad” it exists, I think it had to.

She also links to some other articles making the same argument, including this piece by Kate Aurthur. Both pieces inspire a lot of arguments in comments about whether there is any value in such an exploitative piece of work – in other words, if the show leaves you riveted, or makes you re-examine our relationship to TV and celebrity culture, does that mean it’s actually doing good work?

Without having watched much of the second season, I can’t personally answer that, though I do think that it’s part of the strange power of television that insight can be found in the strangest places. Also, since we know reality TV is very carefully assembled and produced to create the effects the producers want to get, it’s not far-fetched to say that it can be as compelling as a scripted show. Or a serious documentary. But the insight into television or life would have to be incredibly compelling to justify the exploitation. Otherwise it could be just the same old story of presenting horrible things and all but ordering us to feel bad about them.

Americans Like Our Shows… Eventually

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

Marsha Lederman has an article on Chris Haddock, who created Da Vinci’s Inquest and Intelligence for the CBC, and how the belated U.S. following of those shows wound up getting him his current job on Boardwalk Empire. It turns out that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan was an admirer of Da Vinci’s Inquest, and mentioned this after he sat on a panel being moderated by Haddock; Haddock sent copies of Intelligence to Gilligan and Treme‘s Eric Overmeyer, and the two of them started talking the show up in Los Angeles.

Gilligan, it turns out, was a fan of Da Vinci’s Inquest, having come across it back home while channel surfing. “I was really struck by the writing and the pacing,” Gilligan says. “I thought it just seemed like a more grown-up procedural than I was used to seeing. The characters in it just seemed like real people … not over-baked and overblown like we sometimes see on American TV.”

Gilligan didn’t know anything about Intelligence, though. So after that first meeting, Haddock sent Gilligan and Overmyer some DVDs. Gilligan liked Intelligence even more than Da Vinci. “It’s just a tremendously written show,” Gilligan says. “It’s wonderful storytelling, very intricately plotted.” He says he mentioned Intelligence to a “bunch of writers” in Los Angeles, and to his own agent, who signed Haddock.

Last September, Haddock met with HBO in L.A. They batted around ideas for new series, but within an hour after the meeting, Haddock got a call: Would he consider working on somebody else’s show? “I said it depended on what it was, and they said ‘Well it’s Boardwalk Empire,’ and I said ‘Yeah I think I’d probably consider that.’” Haddock says that with a laugh. By the end of the month, Haddock had relocated to Brooklyn Heights, his new apartment a one-stop ferry ride up the East River to the show’s offices at Steiner Studios.

Intelligence also seems to be getting more intention in America in general. It’s one of the shows that gets recommended to people after they’ve watched The Wire and want something similar.

The cancellation of Intelligence was a sad moment in Canadian TV, but it’s hard to argue that it was anyone’s fault (unless you put a lot of stock in the rumours Continue…

Roseanne and the Cosby Gambit

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:21 AM - 0 Comments

I mentioned this on a message board the other day, but I thought it was worth a quick post as well, if only because it’s the latest chapter in the strange history of the NBC network. to understand what’s going on with NBC trying to reunite Roseanne Barr and John Goodman, we may have to look back to an era when Roseanne was still on the air, and another network was trying to pick its ratings up out of the basement. In the mid-’90s, Leslie Moonves took over CBS, which had been floundering pretty much since M*A*S*H went off the air; it had a few hits in the ’80s, but few huge ones, and by the ’90s most of its mid-level hits were gone. Just before Moonves came in, the network management attempted to revamp the network’s whole image by adding a lot of young, sexy shows in the mold of the hits on NBC and Fox (most notoriously, a soap created by Melrose Place and 90210 mastermind Darren Star), but they all failed.

Moonves’s strategy for turning CBS around was built around doing what other networks had done, but in a different way: he signed up NBC’s former superstar, Bill Cosby, to do a CBS sitcom. And after some cast replacements, Phylicia Rashad wound up playing his wife again. According to Bill Carter’s Desperate Networks, this was part of a Moonves plan of “signing up stars who had had hits on NBC and ABC when they were younger. As they hit their forties or fifties, Moonves would bring them into CBS.” Some of Continue…

King of the Hill Revisited: “The Unbearable Blindness…”, “Meet the Manger Babies”

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:17 AM - 0 Comments

“The Unbearable Blindness of Laying” (airdate: December 21, 1997)
Written by Paul Lieberstein
Directed by Cyndi Tang

People sure do go blind easily on TV. We’ve seen people go temporarily blind from explosions, from being hit on the head with a tray, and in this episode, by seeing an unpleasant sight. Hank walks in on his mother (Tammy Wynette) having sex with her boyfriend (Carl Reiner) and suffers hysterical blindness, which can only be cured if he faces up to what’s bothering him. Of course, Hank would rather stay blind than face up to any emotions, so his friends are free to mock him and play “blind” jokes on him for a large portion of the episode.

This was the episode that was covered in a 1997 article about the writing process of a King of the Hill show; it started with that basic idea – Hank goes blind when he walks in on his mother and her lover – and went through lots of late-night rewrites before the table read, nothing unusual for a weekly TV series. The article said that
Continue…

How Whitney Houston changed MTV

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 10:11 AM - 0 Comments

Race in popular culture is still a touchy subject, but Whitney Houston may be one of the people who made it a little less touchy: according to Tris McCall of the New Jersey Star-Ledger, she and Michael Jackson played a crucial role “in the desegregation of MTV.”

The music video channel took over pop culture at a time when racial divisions were particularly acute in pop music, after the ferocious backlash against crossover forms like disco. It was often alleged that MTV was not a hospitable place for black performers, initially reluctant even to play Michael Jackson. “There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t used on MTV,” David Bowie said in 1983, to which MTV host Mark Goodman dismissively replied “we have to play music we think an entire country is going to like.”

Whitney Houston was one of the artists who proved Goodman wrong. In the mid-to-late ’80s, when Jackson and Prince weren’t making as many videos, it was Houston who became one of the signature artists on MTV: in a 1987 book on MTV culture, author E. Ann Kaplan wrote that “until the recent advent of Whitney Houston, Tina Turner was the only female black singer featured regularly, and even so, her videos were few and far between.” Houston’s famously eclectic, broadly-appealing style ruled out any attempts to pigeonhole her as appropriate for only one segment of the audience or one type of time slot. Like Jackson, she helped to erode the disco-era bias against dance music and its ability to appeal to white suburban viewers on MTV. Continue…

Blogs as Mean as You’ve Ever Seen

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 4:43 PM - 0 Comments

I sometimes defend the idea of the TWoP-style snarky TV recap, but I have to admit I’ve lost interest in snarky recaps to a certain extent. The reason is that anything can be discussed in a snarkily dismissive tone: it doesn’t even matter how good or bad something is, all you have to do is refuse to engage with it, and recap the plot in a disbelieving or nit-picky way. Any story sounds ridiculous if you want to make it sound ridiculous. So for snark-caps to get my attention, they have to have a point of view that goes beyond a detached cataloguing of plot holes and bad hair.

“Full House Reviewed” is such a site. The concept is simple. The creator of the site decided he would watch an episode of Full House every week, from the beginning, and review it. He’s done half the series, with the other half still to come. He loathes the show, loathes the characters (interestingly, he considers Joey the worst character in the history of television; Joey’s bad, but I always remember people hating Michelle more) and loathes himself for watching, and every word of every review is filled with rage against these idiot characters and their sense of entitlement. Some of it is just plot-hole-picking, like getting mad because guest characters are there for one week and never mentioned again. But overall, it has a theme that goes deeper than that: he hates Full House because he hates the characters as human beings, and he sees the full house as a monstrous entity full of evil people, who behave abominably to everyone and think they’re the nicest people on earth. The anger, plus the meta-theme of a man slowly going crazy as he watches episode after episode of people he dislikes, is what makes it work better than most snark-blogs: it can’t be accused of detachment.

Apart from the lines I laughed at, and there were a lot of them, I also like his point that in the full house, the cheesy music seems to have strange powers: characters who have been fighting for 20 minutes will suddenly be forced to make up and hug, not by anything that happens, but just by the synth music.

DJ stops her from storming out of the house and the music comes on, which abruptly changes the tone of their interaction. It’s weird how sometimes the music itself seems to be the cause of conflict resolution. I guess that when you are having a conflict in the full house you know it’s time to resolve things when you hear the music come on.

As you might expect, he thinks Kimmy Gibbler is the only person we can truly identify with, because she has a personality and the Tanners all think she’s weird for daring to have a personality. Also as you might expect, he’s not too fond of the catchphrases.

The switch between Jesse and the motorcycle stuntman in this scene is as obvious and inorganic as possible, even though they have a dub of Jesse exclaiming “have mercy” over the footage. Golly, does this guy have to say his lame catch-phrase anytime he does anything or what?

The End of 2004-5

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

The significance of House going off the air is that this is going to be the end of a television era, one that started in the 2004-5 season. That is generally considered one of the best seasons for TV drama, and maybe the last great season for broadcast network TV drama. House started that season, so did Desperate Housewives, so did Lost, and so did Grey’s Anatomy. Along with cult favourites like Veronica Mars and flawed-but-fun new shows like Boston Legal, it was a very strong season, which seemed to prove that broadcast networks were going to be fine up against the onslaught of cable. It completely turned around the ABC network, and gave Fox a new flagship scripted drama in House (which they followed up the year after with Bones, also created by a Canadian). Since then, basic cable has become a bigger player in drama, the broadcast networks have had trouble developing new drama hits, and the explosion of 2004-5 seems less like a new golden age and more like the last flowering of a previous era: the last big burst of big hit mass-audience drama. We may never see its like again.

Update: I forgot to add that many of the shows from 2004-5 were not only traditional network dramas – in the sense of being broadly-appealing shows that had a point of view within the limitations of a 22-episode season and a major network – they were built into hits in traditional ways. The ABC shows were mostly explosive out-of-the box hits, shows that opened much bigger than anyone (including network executives) expected. House wasn’t as big a hit from the beginning, but Fox built it into a hit through the power of a lead-in, American Idol. Most of these were also shows that were considered risky propositions when they began; Desperate Housewives was famously turned down by a lot of networks, and NBC, which produces House, could probably have had it for its own network. The era of the surprise drama hit is not over: arguably Once Upon a Time qualifies. But the magic moments described in Bill Carter’s book Desperate Networks, where executives wake up to discover that a drama has gotten bigger than it was ever supposed to be, seem to happen more often with reality (think The Voice) or cable drama (think The Walking Dead). It may simply be that there are so many hour-long dramas now that it’s hard for any broadcast network drama to create a sense of being an event.

Of this batch of shows, House was arguably the most conventional in form, a medical mystery show that famously hit a lot of the same notes from week to week, and the most successful attempt by another network to emulate CBS’s success with the CSI franchise. In its prime, though, it was an intelligent and gripping show that worked the way good mystery drama is supposed to – using the formula, and our knowledge of it, as a given, it then tried to deal with interesting ideas or give us a deeper look into the title character. The show ran out of gas in recent years, but at its peak it was pretty much an ideal example of what a procedural can be.

Not a lot needs to be said about why the show worked in its good years, because the reasons it worked – as with many shows – are fairly simple: interesting, well-executed premise, interesting, well-cast character. (Exploitable premise + good casting is almost the baseline formula for a workable television series.) The show demonstrated something about the concept of relatability: is shows do need to be relatable, but not necessarily by presenting situations and lives that resemble our own. House was a relatable character not because he reminded us of us, but because he gets away with things we might sometimes like to do (but don’t, because we’re not geniuses and/or sociopaths). And the whole show was built on a very relatable idea: when you get sick and go to the hospital, your secrets are stripped away. The vulnerability of a person in hospital has to do with more than illness; it has to do with the fact that the doctor has to know everything about you – anything you’ve ever done might suddenly turn out to be relevant.

Most medical shows play on this idea sometimes, but House put it right at the centre a lot of the time. This led to a lot of jokes about the formula of the show (“A patient has a secret” is House‘s version of “Gilligan screws up”). But it helped to make the guest characters interesting, something that a lot of procedurals have trouble with. And I felt like that was at the centre of the show’s relatability. If you’ve ever been embarrassed answering a doctor’s questions, or if you’ve just been placed in a position where you have to answer questions about your life to a total stranger, then the typical House episode had some meaning.

Dickens and Me

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 5:34 PM - 0 Comments

I love today’s 200th birthday boy, Charles Dickens. I read him a lot in high school, and my favourite things of his were the big, long, rambling novels – I started with The Pickwick Papers, which is barely a novel at all for much of its length, and went on from there. I think I blame Dickens more than anyone else for my decision to become an English major. His novels can be tedious if you’re forced to read them, but if you pick one at the right time, and are in the right mood for it, they can enthrall you. I think the sense of detail is part of what accounts for Dickens’ power. A lot of novels either skimp on detail, or make the details very dry (dutifully cutting and pasting in all the research the author has done). Dickens not only describes everything, he puts his own personal spin on everything he describes. Every minor character has his or her own distinguishing details, catchphrases, and tics. Every place he takes us to is filtered through his unique perspective, his combination of realism and fantasy, so that you never see anything in a conventional way. It can be exhausting, but it can also teach you to see the world differently and not take anything for granted. And as a picture of life from another time – and most of his novels were period pieces, even at the time – it’s more vivid than a straightforward historical portrait.

You do have to be in the right mood for it, though. And one of the things you have to be in the mood for is a willingness to forgive, or to take the good with the bad. Almost any Dickens novel has good patches and bad patches all through, not just the inevitable falling-off at the end. (Most long novels lose steam towards the end, and Continue…

The Scary Ad that Sold Out Dirty Harry

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 1:05 PM - 0 Comments

The latest manufactured controversy in the world of punditry is over this ad, which ran during the Super Bowl to tell viewers that U.S. auto companies have recovered and that everything’s going to be fine. Clint Eastwood, a Republican, has said that he had no thought of this being a political ad, yet it’s been attacked all over conservative media as being an Obama campaign ad in disguise; Karl Rove said that this was another example of “political patronage” and, of course, “Chicago-style politics.” (That one must be one of the most popular new catchphrases of our time, along with “Alinsky.”)

How did this turn into a political controversy? One way to understand it is the u-word: unions. Much of the opposition to the bailout of the auto companies in the U.S. has portrayed it as a sop to unions, as the Obama administration’s attempt to keep the auto industry from becoming de-unionized. Rush Limbaugh has, as usual, been very skilful at weaving different themes into a unified whole: he says repeatedly that the whole bailout was a sop to “union bosses,” that it involves the government telling companies how to make their cars, and that the ultimate goal is to force people to buy “green” cars they don’t want or like.

I’ll tell you what’s headed down the road, you’re going to see union members on the board of directors, you’re going to see green wacko environmentalists on the board of directors, and General Motors is going to be designing and building cars, selling cars that satisfy Obama’s desire for green, environmental friendly cars, blah, blah, blah, blah — that’s what you’re going to see coming down the road. Plus, everybody in the auto industry has to make concessions here except the unions. This is also payback for the unions.

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, explains what conservatives would have liked to see happen in Detroit:

What Chrysler and GM desperately needed in their extremity was to go through Chapter 11 reorganization to pare down wages and benefits, shed uneconomical dealerships, and ditch unnecessary brands. When the government got its hooks in them, it politicized this process and threw some $80 billion at the companies. Since we’ll never get an estimated $23 billion back, we all must be “pulling together” behind Detroit still.

From this point of view, whether the bailouts “worked” is something of a false issue: the government shouldn’t have gotten involved, and the best thing in the long term is for companies to cut salaries and downsize. To celebrate the bailouts is to take an ideological stand on the extent of government involvement in business, and on whether or not the auto industry should have cut the unions loose.

That’s what Eastwood didn’t seem to realize; he thought he was lending his voice and craggy face to a bit of feel-good apolitical puffery. He wasn’t, because it really has become a political, ideological issue – and maybe it should be, since these ideological differences are real and serious. Besides, this is the way the game is going to be played this year: because Obama likes to portray himself as a moderate technocrat who chooses the solutions that “bring people together” (I am not saying he is those things; that’s how he portrays himself), an ad that also hits those themes is going to be scrutinized as a possible Obama endorsement.

People Who Think About Televisual Entertainmentation

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 4:33 PM - 0 Comments

Two links to people doing some smart thinking about television programs:

- Robert David Sullivan, whose work I’ve been reading and enjoying ever since I read his 1997 survey on the most influential U.S. television programs (this was before TV criticism was nearly as big online as it later became, and it’s still a great guide to milestones in TV before the Sopranos revolution), has been doing a blog series on “The 100 Greatest Sitcom episodes of all time,” covering half-hour comedy episodes from the U.S. and the UK.

With each episode, he not only tells us why it’s great, but makes some larger point about the whole half-hour comedy form, what it tells us about us or the way we see ourselves, and how the style of a show becomes part of its storytelling. In doing so, he manages to make every review interesting even if it’s not an episode or a show you yourself would have put on such a list. I’m not a great fan of “Designing Women,” but in writing about the episode “Big Haas and Little Haas,” he also writes about one of the most common sitcom plots – people trying to change their appearance – and the most common of all TV themes, be happy with who you are (which is of course high on the list of things showbiz people don’t actually believe). Starting at #100, he’s now up to #86, and I look forward to every one of the 85 posts to come.

- Chandler Levack pays tribute to Being Erica and how it did some of its best work as a sort of “novelization of ’90s Toronto,” that examined the ambiguous relationship Torontonians have to their city, and implied that Toronto “was a secondary character that had enforced its own psychological pain on Erica’s subconscious.”

- No one can ever get enough of mixed reviews of Smash, just like no one can get enough Smash promos. So here’s a review from Matt Seitz, who basically likes it but finds it a bit cautious.

You can’t do that on TV, but you can do that

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

So you may have heard that there was a brief flash of the middle finger on the Super Bowl last night. Will this change TV? That’s not an idle question, even if the controversy is silly. The Janet Jackson incident really did change television, setting back years of censorship relaxation and returning broadcast TV almost to early ’80s standards of censorship – on some things. You could say that it’s because of Janet Jackson that broadcast TV in the U.S. has its current bizarre mishmash of standards, where extreme violence and sadism is fine (as Jon Stewart pointed out in a memorable montage recently), and sexual innuendo goes beyond anything that was previously allowed, but nudity and onscreen sex are strictly self-policed. Continue…

Musical Addendum

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Watching Smash, and thinking about untold stories about the making of a musical, reminded me that I recently enjoyed reading William Goldman’s book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. He saw and wrote about every Broadway show in the 1967-8 season, incorporating his own opinions about what was wrong with Broadway as well as interviews with many insiders (some anonymous, some not, all with axes to grind). I recommend the book both as a snapshot of the attitudes of the time and as a repository of Broadway gossip. It includes at least two fascinating stories of how highly anticipated musicals, The Happy Time and Golden Rainbow (hopefully you haven’t heard of them; they weren’t very successful) arrived on Broadway with their original stories distorted completely beyond recognition by the “Muscle” of the production, the person with the power to shape the show: a powerful director-choreographer in the first case, a powerful star in the other case.

But I thought this would be as good a place as any to present Goldman’s list of reasons why a song might bomb in front of an audience. Goldman, who had already written a Broadway musical with his brother James, was Continue…

Quick Thoughts on “Smash”

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

The thing about Smash that was most striking to me, almost from the first non-musical scene, is that it is one of the best-directed shows I’ve seen in a long time. Michael Mayer, who has done mostly Broadway shows like Spring Awakening, was chosen to direct the pilot and the first two episodes, and he was an exceptional choice (NBC must be pleased, as they’ve just signed him to do another drama pilot for them). The musical scenes are not cut to pieces and usually give you a clear idea of where everyone is – essential for a show where most of the numbers take place in a real space. The dialogue scenes avoid hamminess and aren’t artificially pumped up: Mayer isn’t afraid to keep the camera steady or hold a shot for a few extra seconds, and the whole thing feels almost like a classical movie in its un-fussy style. That style goes a long way toward making this show work. A more obviously interventionist director would just wind up making the thing look glitzier or grittier than the subject can bear. Continue…

Simon Cowell Fires Everybody

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 1:49 PM - 0 Comments

I don’t really know what to say about the X Factor fire-pocalypse, with everyone except Simon Cowell being booted off the show as Cowell attempts to fix the U.S. version. I guess if you’re going to retool, you should retool this way, because it guarantees a lot of media coverage, a lot of stories, and a whole round of new stories when they roll out the new hosts and judges. Firing one person, or firing all these people at different times, wouldn’t have the same impact.

The ratings of The X Factor for the first season were, let’s remember, quite good by today’s standards – better than almost anything else the network currently has. They weren’t what Fox and Cowell were apparently were hoping for, so the key issue for them is whether they move up or down in the second season: some shows start well and do better, others start well and then do worse. If The X Factor stays at its current level or builds, it’ll be fine, but if it drops, it could be in trouble. So the retool is an attempt to make it go up, rather than down.

Will it work? It sometimes works. Throwing out a lot of the weak points and revamping a show while ratings are still good is sometimes a viable strategy. Especially when it’s clear that the show doesn’t offer anything in particular that people really love. (With a bigger hit show, a retool faces the risk of throwing out the stuff viewers like; they can toss out the weak elements, only to discover that those were actually a bigger part of the show’s popularity than they realized. But The X Factor doesn’t inspire strong feelings. It’s mostly coasting on American Idol‘s brand name. So the number of people turning away because Steve Jones is gone may be even less than the number of angry Brian Dunkleman fans.) However, most retools don’t really help; they just move pieces around and end up with the same problems as before, just with different names. Since The X Factor in any version is pretty much the same show as American Idol, it can’t really change all that much. So it may be that the best it can do is make a lot of noise about personnel changes, get itself into the gossip magazines a lot, and hope that that draws people in to what is fundamentally the same show.

Romney and safety nets

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 11:34 AM - 0 Comments

Mitt Romney on CNN this morning made a classic “Kinsley gaffe,” a case of a politician accidentally saying what he thinks. The quote, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” is going to be ripped out of context and bounced around the news all day today. It’ll also be a good opportunity for conservative pundits, who have mostly been lukewarm on Romney, to come to his defense now that he’s clearly going to be the nominee: because the quote is being taken out of context, the Fox and talk radio pundits will be able to push back against the coverage with a fairly clear conscience.

In context, what Romney was saying is that very poor people have a safety net to protect them; leaving aside the question of whether that safety net is enough or whether the language is insensitive, he’s saying that the issue that is foremost in our time is the issue of people who have too much money to be covered by the safety net, but not enough to get by.

I’m not concerned about the very poor. Continue…

Feel My Skills, Donkey Donkey Donkey Donkey

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 5:01 PM - 0 Comments

NBC just can’t catch a break, and by “can’t catch a break” I mean that they bring all their problems on themselves. The latest news is that the network’s re-launch of Fear Factor, one of the few things that has even come close to working for them this season, has canceled an entire episode due to complaints about one of the scenes, where contestants were forced to drink the Precious Bodily Fluids of donkeys. Now the episode will be replaced with a rerun, which means that it hasn’t had a new episode since January 9 – and a month off the air is never good for a show’s momentum.

Some reports have implied that Robert Greenblatt, the president of NBC, may have jumped on this controversy as a way of getting rid of Fear Factor. He’s the one who put out the press release saying he had pulled the episode because it was “a segment we should not air,” and Deadline claims that it “clashed with his mantra for rebuilding NBC with upscale shows.”

Greenblatt has been at NBC less than a year, and it’s unfair to judge his tenure this early, but having come from Showtime (where he helped build that network into a major player, though most of the shows he picked up weren’t anything spectacular) he seems almost notstalgic for the atmosphere of pay cable, where you don’t have to pull so many stunts to get ratings. During the TCA he expressed his disappointment over the failure of his pet NBC project, Prime Suspect, arguing that on cable, he’d have declared it a hit and it would have run for years. Which is probably true, but it sounds uncomfortably like the philosophy that has helped drag down NBC: cable is better, and networks should be more like cable.

The other three networks are all, in their different ways and with different types of shows, trying to maximize their share of the shrinking audience; NBC spent years playing for the day when the broadcast audience converges with the online and cable audience. Now it’s in the position of knowing it needs to be “mainstream” but not really knowing how to go about it, which explains shows from the Fear Factor revival to Are You There, Chelsea? (a sort of feeble Chuck Lorre imitation, written by people who used to work with him on Dharma & Greg) to The Playboy Club – shows that seem to be based on a sort of vague idea of “what people like” these days. Its reality division does seem to have a better idea than most of what will catch on – hence The Voice and the decent ratings for the return of Fear Factor – but reality can’t prop up an entire broadcast network, and NBC probably wouldn’t want it to anyway. But that’s the fun of watching NBC make behind-the-scenes moves; it seems torn between the need to get back in the game and the knowledge that getting back in the game would require some pandering.

If you want to see this as history repeating itself, you could get some backup from this 1984 interview with Grant Tinker, when he had been running NBC for three years and still hadn’t been able to turn it around. He claims that the network is just about to turn things around, and for once, he’s right, and . But you can see how the problems NBC had then are similar to the ones they’ve been having lately: they had some great shows that appealed to a young, affluent audience but didn’t get great ratings across the board (Cheers is cited in the article) and to get back some mainstream appeal, they spent the 1983-4 season launching truly terrible shows that had contempt for the audience (I don’t mean The A-Team, which didn’t have contempt for us; I mean Manimal, Mr. Smith, Jennifer Slept Here). Shows that were thrown at the audience with an air of anger, as if to say “if you want crap, we’ll give you crap.” But as I’ve noted before, hits are rarely made with contempt. NBC turned itself around when it was able to come up with a show that satisfied Tinker’s quality-TV mantra and the populist instincts of Brandon Tartikoff. NBC is going to have a much tougher time turning itself around today, because if it was getting harder to launch a hit in 1984, it’s much harder now. But the network’s fortunes will probably turn around with a show that Greenblatt likes and has broader appeal than a cable show. If I knew what that show was going to be, I’d be there pitching it right now.

Takin’ a Train

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 3:43 PM - 0 Comments

A long time ago, I used to joke that all of Canadian politics could be explained in terms of “Jem” songs. Then “Jem” got popular again, and it no longer seemed an obscure enough reference, so I retired it. But when I read Rob Ford’s instant-classic interview, where he repeats “it’s all about subways” an infinite number of times. And I was reminded of this song, which is also about taking a train. Taking a train. Taking a train.

I’m not that up on “Jem” fandom, but I’ve heard that this is often voted the worst song in the show’s canon of original songs, because it mostly consists of those three words repeated over and over. But I think Jem makes a good case for rail transportation.