THE REAL GOLDEN AGE IS NOW
By BRUCE HANDY
CRICCCK, CRICCCK, CRICCCK--IS that the sound of slowly grinding teeth coming from the networks' office suites? So far, this hasn't been the plummiest of fall TV seasons. Overall network viewership is down 9%; none of the record 42 new shows has really connected with audiences; three have already been canceled; and even Murder One--everybody's pick as the season's best new series--is in danger of being smothered in the cradle, having to compete first with the closing arguments of the O.J. Simpson trial and now with ER. It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for an industry that employs some of the most craven people on earth.
Still, network executives have good reasons to feel their cushy salaries are, to some extent, earned. For one thing, TV remains the nation's dominant medium--witness the fact that in these days of political and racial polarization, the only thing that holds Americans together is our common reflex to hit the remote whenever one of those Jonathan Pryce Infiniti commercials comes on. But more to the point, despite perennial complaints about TV's formulaic and lowbrow fare--and the religious right's conviction that the medium is destroying our nation's moral fiber--anyone who watches even a smattering of TV would have to agree that there are currently more first-rate programs on the air than at any time in television's nearly 50-year history: that comedies like The Simpsons and Frasier and Seinfeld more than stand up to I Love Lucy and Mary Tyler Moore and Cheers; that dramas like NYPD Blue and ER are broadening the scope of narrative art; that, heretical as it may sound, the 1990s are television's real Golden Age, the 1950s and Philco TV Playhouse and Paddy Chayefsky and Winky Dink and You notwithstanding.
Of course, one could go on and on extolling the wonders of CNN, Court TV and American Movie Classics. But discussion here should be limited to old-fashioned prime-time network TV--the fairest way, after all, to draw a comparison with TV's pre-cable Bronze Age. A list of indispensable current series, besides those already mentioned, would include the mighty, acerbic Roseanne, still potent after seven-plus seasons; newer shows now hitting their stride, like Mad About You, The X-Files, Friends, NewsRadio and the wonderful Homicide, more vivid and biting than its more illustrious rival NYPD Blue. Among the season's new shows, American Gothic, Ned and Stacey and The Bonnie Hunt Show are all odd and worth watching before they get canceled.
Superlatives are a little ridiculous applied to any art form, let alone one that boasts Sherwood Schwartz, the brain behind both Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, as an auteur. But here goes anyway. The Larry Sanders Show, with its laugh-trackless verisimilitude, is the best comedy on TV, probably the closest a sitcom will ever come to perfect pitch (yes, it's on HBO--so much for ground rules). The best drama: Party of Five, a thirtysomething for teenagers and young adults--with all the pluses (honest, abnormally well-crafted writing) and minuses (too much acoustic guitar in the soundtrack) that the thirtysomething comparison implies. And for pure cheese, Melrose Place is indisputably TV's greatest accomplishment--and that's really saying something.
None of this possibly outre boosterism is meant to imply that the current schedule is free from the dreary or the formulaic. Seen from above, prime time's present landscape might not even look all that different from its past: acres and acres of precocious kids, man-hungry neighbors and office curmudgeons with hearts of gold; police shows and lawyer shows and doctor shows proliferating like strip malls; even Mary Tyler Moore and Betty White are still hanging in there (on New York News and Maybe This Time respectively).
But within familiar genres there has been welcome evolution. Sitcoms have license to deal with more realistic and mature subject matter--not a new trend, it's true, but done with more tact and wit than ever before. Think of the famously sly Seinfeld episode about masturbation or Roseanne's matter-of-fact treatment of its comparatively many gay and lesbian characters. Shows like Roseanne, The Simpsons and Grace Under Fire also deal frankly with the economic dislocation of the middle class, a sad, mundane fact of modern life largely ignored by the movies as well as most contemporary literature. And anyone who still doesn't believe television has become more deft and less shrill in its handling of "controversial" topics need only recall an episode--any episode--of Maude.
Dramas too have more complex canvases than did their predecessors. One example: compare ER--the most popular show on television today--with precursors like Medical Center or Marcus Welby, M.D. First of all, George Clooney is both hunkier and a better actor than Chad Everett. More to the point, ER is less concerned with diagnosing the ailment of the week (when the old shows got to beriberi, you knew they were in trouble) than observing what happens to men and women who are forced to work under almost impossible conditions, how fear and exhaustion both draw them together and repel them from each other.
The current renaissance in programming comes after years of increasing anxiety within the broadcasting industry about the loss of viewers to cable and home video. Not so long ago, the very medium of network television was alleged to be in its death throes. But even with the combined viewership of ABC, CBS and NBC down to an average 57% of the nation's households (at their peak, from the mid-1950s though the mid-'70s, the Big Three were pulling in more than 90%), networks remain lucrative businesses, shabby but sturdy prewar apartment buildings in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Which would explain why Disney and Westinghouse were so eager to buy ABC and CBS this year, and why Time Warner and Viacom are attempting to jerry-build webs of their own with schedules that hark back to the desperate early days of the Fox network.
For the most part, the increased competition, the need to stand out in an electronic glut, has kept producers from complacently cranking out the kind of wan, homogenized fare that characterized TV seasons past--and can still be enjoyed on Nick at Nite if one is so inclined. (But is there honestly any reason beyond nostalgia, graduate theses in popular culture or a lingering taste for boyhood erotica for anyone to watch the painfully lame Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie?) The easygoing suburban blandness that Nick at Nite dines out on was owing to the fact that network TV was once the massiest mass medium ever invented. It still is, of course, but thanks to the increasing sophistication of audience-measuring "science," networks have learned they can profit by delivering smaller-niche audiences to advertisers. Which means that Seinfeld and Mad About You don't have to appeal to everyone in order to make money; they need only reach 18- to 49-year-olds with lots and lots of disposable income to spend on bmws and Nikes. It thus behooves producers to create shows that are intelligent and quirky because intelligent and quirky appeals to upscale audiences.
Unfortunately, there are a number of downsides to this phenomenon. One is that some audiences--primarily older folks, younger children and minorities--are being ignored. Another is that some series--the late Northern Exposure, for example--end up choking on their own quirky intelligence, crowded with characters who are less than the sum of their arbitrary tics. A third drawback is that seemingly every other character on television is now a white young professional who lives in Manhattan and goes out on unfortunate blind dates; bizarrely, all four of NBC's high-rated Thursday-night comedies (Friends, The Single Guy, Seinfeld and Caroline in the City) are in that vein. Fox at least had the wit to set Partners, one if its twentysomething shows, in San Francisco. But then again, its ratings stink.
This demographic obsession is one reason why so many shows have scenes set in coffee bars. Another, more telling explanation is that TV producers, lacking the budgets for car crashes and Bruce Willis, fill up a lot of airtime by having characters sit around and gab; talk, in production terms, is cheap. A virtue of this necessity is that it allows writers the luxury of exploring the ins and outs of characters and relationships in ways that feature films--certainly mainstream studio films--rarely do anymore.
This has helped foster an important change from TV's early days, when series characters were largely static from episode to episode, season to season. There was little shading or evolution in Darrin Stephens' nincompoopcy. And Joe Friday--not counting the occasional expression of disgust with punks and hippies--was a tragically repressed emotional cipher (which isn't to say audiences would have wanted to see Jack Webb really air it out as an actor). In essence, TV's early characters were subjected to the same drama every week, as if they were stuck in a time warp. Would Darrin stop Larry Tate from finding out that Samantha is a witch? Would Lucy come up with a scheme to subvert Ricky's wishes? Would McGarrett get to say "Book him, Danno"--or maybe, just once, "Book him, Chin Ho"?
By contrast, today's TV characters, especially those in dramas, are allowed to grow, make mistakes, find themselves--all the touchy-feely things that make real people so endearing and insufferable. Unlike Joe Friday or Barnaby Jones, Sipowicz on NYPD Blue has a love life, one he must struggle to sustain. Unlike Ricky and Lucy Ricardo's marriage, the relationship between Mad About You's Jamie and Paul Buchman deepens and goes through its rough patches. Set in worlds that evolve from week to week, the best new shows almost seem to take place in real time, accreting day-in, day-out intimacy. Viewers can feel as though they're living with these programs in the same way readers live with novels--it's soap opera, really, but soap opera of a very high order. Put another way, ER is to General Hospital what John Coltrane's My Favorite Things was to Julie Andrews' version.
What's surprising is that it took so long for creative minds to take advantage of TV's distinctive narrative attributes. Inherited from radio, soap operas were originally designed to be messily open-ended--like life, as it happens--in the utilitarian hope that viewers would keep tuning in. Films and plays, by way of contrast, are designed to compress the defining moments of a character's life into a spare and extraordinary couple of hours. Thus the first Die Hard movie might be more gripping than a given episode of NYPD Blue, but NYPD Blue is still compelling after 45 episodes, whereas the Die Hard films--like most movie series--began wheezing halfway through the opening credits of the first sequel.
TV was once Hollywood's sorry stepsibling, creatively retarded by its need to appeal to the lowest common denominator, while movie producers were free to hire David Lean and convince themselves they were making art. Today the bruising economics behind moviemaking has nearly reversed those roles. With Hollywood budgets averaging around $35 million--not including marketing and distribution costs--movies increasingly have to appeal to the broadest audience possible. "Features have turned into exploitation pictures because that's the way to survive," grumbles director Barry Levinson, who should know, having recently made Disclosure. Fortunately, he's able to find creative fulfillment as an executive producer of Homicide.
The truth is, the general run of television series in 1995 is better than the general run of movies--and not just because so many recent films have been based on old TV shows. (Since so many Broadway shows are now based on old movies, does this make television the premier dramatic art form?)
Not surprisingly, many who work in television agree. "In movies, dumb and dumber is the goal," says Betsy Borns, a writer on Friends. "When film people get snobbish and say, 'Oh...you write for TV,' as if it's a step down, I look at them and say, 'It's getting late--you probably have to go home and write your next Pauly Shore film.'"
To some extent, movies' aesthetic woes can be laid at television's door. There's the old problem of producers having to give audiences something on the big screen they can't get at home for free, which has led film away from narrative and toward sheer sensation. Levinson points out a more nefarious way in which television has undermined its former better: "Studio films are now sold to the public with 30-sec. TV spots, and those generally have to have somebody chasing somebody, somebody waving a gun, a lot of music, and then a dramatic voice that says, 'Opens Friday!' If you can't sell a movie in that 30-sec. spot, your movie won't open. It's hard to sell little, intimate moments where people are just sitting around talking." Of course, people just sitting around talking is a large part of what makes TV worth watching.
While television's current superiority to movies seems incontrovertible, its superiority over its past might to some be a more open question. What about the decade of the 1950s, which by most reckonings was TV's original Golden Age? Not only did the 1950s have brilliant comedians like Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca; the 1950s were also the heyday of serious live drama on television. Will future generations look back as fondly on the current season, which, along with Murder One and ABC's forthcoming six-hour documentary on the Beatles, will be remembered for the premiere of CBS's Bless This House, during which Andrew Clay broke comedic ground by drinking from a bidet?
One shouldn't make the mistake of romanticizing the past. "If you look at the great shows of the past, there really weren't that many," says Carl Reiner, a writer and performer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, creator of the original Dick Van Dyke Show and director of feature films such as All of Me. Reiner believes "there are many more great shows now"--though, he adds, that's probably because there are, simply, many more shows.
To be sure, not every TV veteran is as sanguine. Milton Berle--the man known as Mr. Television back in the '50s, when he would bring the nation to a halt Tuesday nights with his show on NBC--is fed up with network TV. "I know the formulas," he says, adding that he limits his viewing to PBS, politics, sports and specials. One of his favorite recent broadcasts: The Three Tenors.
Ultimately, of course, contrasting the shows of different eras is a bit of a parlor game--like arguing about who would win a fantasy matchup between 1994's 49ers and 1975's Steelers, or a kick-boxing match between Keats and Tennyson. And since parlor games are actually a lot of fun, let's take a look at the 1952-53 season, the very season when Marty, perhaps the quintessential live Golden Age drama, first aired on the Goodyear Television Playhouse. Here are that season's top 20 programs (along with the top 20 from last season):
1: I Love Lucy (Seinfeld). 2: Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts (ER). 3: Arthur Godfrey and His Friends (Home Improvement). 4: Dragnet (Grace Under Fire). 5: Texaco Star Theater (Monday Night Football). 6: The Buick Circus Hour (60 Minutes). 7: The Colgate Comedy Hour (NYPD Blue). 8: Gangbusters (Friends). 9: You Bet Your Life (Roseanne; Murder She Wrote--tie). 10: Fireside Theater.
11: The Red Buttons Show (Mad About You). 12: The Jack Benny Program (Madman of the People). 13: Life with Luigi (Ellen). 14: Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts (Hope & Gloria). 15: Goodyear Television Playhouse (Frasier). 16: The Life of Riley (Murphy Brown). 17: Mama (20/20). 18: Your Show of Shows (CBS Sunday Movie). 19: What's My Line? (NBC Monday Night Movies). 20: Strike It Rich (Dave's World).
For younger readers, much of this list will no doubt require annotation:
The Arthur Godfrey programs were variety shows centered on the folksy Godfrey, a performer known for his way with a ukulele, and once celebrated regulars like singer Julius LaRosa.
Texaco Star Theater was Milton Berle's showcase.
The Buick Circus Hour was an odd combination of drama and variety show, featuring an actual circus troupe.
Life with Luigi, The Life of Riley and Mama were somewhat politically incorrect ethnic sitcoms featuring, respectively, Italian Americans, Irish Americans and Norwegian Americans. (Amos 'n' Andy was also big that season and was pretty much the only place on television where you could see blacks.)
Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts were weekly boxing matches--along with professional wrestling, a pervasive feature of the early TV landscape.
Strike It Rich was arguably the creepiest nonpublic-access program in TV history. A quiz show, it featured contestants who were chosen for their desperate need of money: families who were about to lose their homes, the unemployed, the crippled, people with sick parents (this was before Medicare even existed, let alone needed to be "fixed"). If a Strike It Rich contestant came up empty-handed, all was not lost: the host would urge viewers to call in on the "Heart Line" and pledge money and/or medical equipment. Despite this innovative, Roman circus-like approach to charity, the New York City-based show sparked a furor when local social-service agencies complained that they were being overwhelmed by indigent would-be contestants who had been showing up in Manhattan from all over the nation with no means of returning home.
As we said, one shouldn't romanticize the past. And a closing thought: If Marty, the lovelorn butcher from Chayefsky's teleplay, and his best friend Angie were to fall through a tear in the space-time continuum and wind up in 1995, they wouldn't have to run through their memorably aimless conversation: "What do you feel like doing tonight?" "I don't know, what do you feel like doing?" Today they'd just turn on The Simpsons or Larry Sanders or NYPD Blue and enjoy the best that contemporary American entertainment has to offer. What they would make of Dennis Franz's bare butt is harder to say.
--Reported by William Tynan/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles
With reporting by WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK AND JEFFREY RESSNER/LOS ANGELES