Get serious
Network TV finally applies itself
by Robert David Sullivan
The West Wing
|
It's no wonder that television executives are fond of shows about
underachieving high-school students: both groups like to put off any real work
until the last possible minute. After several seasons of uninspired mediocrity
that have sent viewers fleeing to cable, the big three networks are finally
improving their grade-point averages (i.e., Nielsen ratings). In the
first few weeks of the season, the average audience for free TV is down by only
a point or two (after years of hemorrhaging worse than anything seen on
ER), and there are 10 new series that can be called hits. That's an
unusually high number, but even more surprising is that all of the early
successes are hour-long dramas. The sit-com genre is all but dead, for a
variety of reasons: the best drama series on right now are far wittier than the
likes of Two Guys and a Girl; fans of sexual innuendo and gross-out
humor are turning to cable offerings like Sex in the City and movies
like Austin Powers; and viewers are sick of laugh tracks and the
networks' habit of following a decently written sit-com (Friends,
Frasier) with a piece of junk (Jesse, Stark Raving Mad).
So the funniest new show of the season, Fox's Action, is a flop,
even though it dispenses with a laugh track and goes farther than any other
network show in its raw language and sexual situations. Maybe that's because
its protagonist (an egomaniacal film producer played with gusto by Jay Mohr) is
so contemptible, but it's also possible that viewers are just tired of
Hollywood's satires of itself. With so many theatrical films mining the same
territory -- Albert Brooks's The Muse being a recent example -- it's
hard to argue that we're going to miss out on much if Action doesn't
survive into the spring.
The other new sit-coms have met with indifference from both critics and
viewers, and even established comedies are getting pushed aside by the swirling
cameras and swelling soundtracks of such dramas as The West Wing
(beating The Drew Carey Show in the ratings) and Third Watch
(topping The Simpsons). Not all dramas are doing well, though: in a
gratifying display of good taste, viewers have rejected all of the vapid soap
operas about pretty people with no discernible ethnicity who spend way too much
time regurgitating pop culture. Wasteland, Get
Real, Cold Feet, Popular, and Jack
& Jill have attracted smaller audiences than you'd find at a good
cockfight. Unfortunately, none of the producers of these shows thought to
follow the lead of South Park by selecting the actor who looks most like
Brad Pitt and killing him in every episode.
We should all be proud of our brutal rejection of these newcomers to our
electronic playground, but it's too bad that one of the best new shows of the
season, NBC's poorly named Freaks and Geeks, has to suffer with
them. Freaks, which focuses on the uncool kids at a Michigan high school
in 1980, is funny and charming -- so far, it's The Wonder Years without
the cloying narration. The second episode, in which a brother and sister are
left alone for a weekend and throw a "keg party" that gets just a bit out of
control, had a deftness that most new shows take months to develop. For the
time being, Freaks is on Saturdays at 8 p.m.; if you don't set up your
VCR for it soon, you may never get the chance.
What about all those hits? For the most part, they're not bad. CBS's pair of
courtroom dramas, Family Law and Judging Amy, are
soft-focus versions of Ally McBeal and Providence -- diverting
but not appointment shows. NBC's all-rescues all-the-time Third
Watch is at least more intelligent than Emergency or
Cops. If the continuing plotlines aren't worth following, you can just
check in from time to time to brush up on your cop jargon. (A "waffle" is what
you give a troublesome suspect by slamming on the brakes of your patrol car so
that his face hits the wire barrier between the front and back seats.) The WB's
new sci-fi series, Angel and Roswell, survived the
backlash against teen dramas by focusing on strong central characters with good
reasons to be angst-ridden (being a vampire and trying to figure out what
planet you're from both qualify in my book). The other five winners include
four that are worth following and one predictable bore:
The West Wing. Back in the '60s and '70s, when Americans seemed
to care about politics, several TV series about elected officials were quick
failures. Now that governing is seen as just another job, one having more to do
with public relations and customer service than with changing the world, we
have two popular shows set in the executive branch: Spin City, set in
New York's City Hall, and The West Wing, which is all about the various
career crises in the White House. Even more unusual, The West Wing
explicitly identifies its central figure, President Josiah Bartlet, as a
Democrat. Since few people see much difference between the parties any more,
NBC apparently feels that choosing sides won't turn off many viewers. And
Bartlet seems to fit the safe mold of a Clinton-like centrist: he's a former
New Hampshire governor, so we know he's not big on taxes, and his almost
all-white staff leads one to suspect that he's not an ally of Jesse Jackson.
The West Wing is glib, as one would expect of a series created by Aaron
Sorkin (Sports Night), but so is a political scene dominated by the
likes of George W. Bush and Jesse Ventura. The first few episodes have felt
authentic to just about anyone who's worked in the White House or on Capitol
Hill. There are the extreme swings between complete inactivity and frenzied
action; there's the weird dynamic of catering to the every whim of a person
who's supposed to be a humble servant of the people. (Staff members resemble
meteorologists in their nervous tracking of the president's mood swings.)
President Bartlet is played magnificently by Martin Sheen, whose late entrance
in the pilot episode was an instantly classic moment: he bursts into a meeting
on crutches and shouts, "I am the Lord thy God . . . Thou shalt
have no other gods before me," correcting a smarmy right-wing leader who has
just mangled the Ten Commandments.
Rob Lowe is also effective as the White House aide with a tenuous grasp of
White House history (though his relationship with a hooker borders on
silliness); other cast standouts include Allison Janney as a press secretary
trying to cultivate the image of someone so on top of things that she doesn't
need to act like a control freak to do her job. (Occasionally, she has to blow
her cover.) The West Wing has steered clear of really controversial
subjects so far, but that could change if its ratings remain strong. After all,
politicians rarely take risks unless they have a safe seat.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. This is a perfect example
of why true TV fans don't need to follow sports. This spinoff of the 10-season
Law & Order is loaded with actors who have been traded from other
championship prime-time teams, including Chris Meloni and Dean Winters, both of
Oz, and Richard Belzer, continuing his John Munch character from
Homicide: Life on the Street. All of these series crackle with regular
and guest performances from a repertory company of mostly stage-trained actors.
In earlier eras, they might have made the rounds of big-budget variety hours or
the classic sit-coms of the 1970s. Their constant presence on these
intelligent, mostly gunshot-free crime dramas demonstrates how strong the genre
has become. (Meanwhile, today's sit-coms are populated by supermodels and
veterans of soft-drink commercials.) Go to just about any Broadway show and
you'll notice that half the bios in the playbill include Law & Order
credits. L&O producer Dick Wolf is apparently going after the other
half with Special Victims Unit; among the early guest stars was Tony
winner Bebe Neuwirth (Chicago).
Special Victims Unit is really just another edition of Law &
Order, like another edition of Dateline NBC. The idea is that all of
the crimes here are sex-related, but so far the cases could as easily have
shown up on the original series. The MO is the same: bizarre murder, numerous
red herrings to drag out the police investigation, obnoxious defense attorneys
and creative prosecutors who hammer out some kind of resolution to the story.
Special Victims Unit drops the courtroom scenes in favor of glimpses
into the private lives of the detectives, as when Meloni, while investigating
the murder of a waifish model, suspects that his daughter has an eating
disorder. The first few episodes are on a par with L&O, which
probably ensures a loyal audience for the spinoff. I have my doubts that there
will be enough good stories to feed both shows, but who would have guessed that
there'd be a decade's worth of murders for Jerry Orbach and company?
Snoops. This high-tech gumshoe series was obviously not inspired
by Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. It's producer/writer David
E. Kelley at his shallowest, and he's getting pretty shallow these days.
Snoops -- and, increasingly, The Practice -- is depressingly
claustrophobic, with few exterior scenes and almost no relief from the grim
storylines. The new series is about four young detectives (three of them
attractive women) at a ridiculously well-equipped agency in Los Angeles. They
make fun of one another's looks (yawn) but seem totally unaffected by their
cases. (If this were a Dick Wolf or Tom Fontana series, some of the best
moments would probably be the conversations between two detectives trying to
kill time on a stakeout.) The newly minted detective questioning the ethics of
her profession (Paula Jai Parker) is a weak copy of Lisa Gay Hamilton's
appealing character on The Practice. Besides sharing character types,
both Kelley shows are full of totally unbelievable serial killers and sexual
fetishists. After these two hours, watching the sexual deviants on Law &
Order: Special Victims Unit is like taking a refreshingly cool shower.
Once and Again. ABC's sleeper hit about two divorced parents
falling in love with each other and disrupting their respective families is a
sweet and believable comedy-drama. Sela Ward and Billy Campbell are fine in the
leads, but the show is being stolen by Julia Whelan as Ward's smart but
insecure teenage daughter. Once and Again does what innumerable sit-coms
and dramas have failed to do in recent years, which is to introduce an element
of suspense to the courtship between two likable people (without making them
cops or lawyers). The biggest danger is that the show will become too smug in
its championing of divorcee rights. Its depiction of married moms as
narrow-minded gossips is funny, but the noble single mother is such a
cliché on prime-time TV that Once and Again is hardly
breaking new ground here.
Now and Again. Essentially an intelligent remake of The Six
Million Dollar Man, this sci-fi series follows the exploits of a superhuman
government agent (Eric Close) who has been outfitted with the brain of a
recently deceased insurance executive. (One hitch: the brain wants to go back
to the insurance exec's wife and daughter.) The most surprising thing about
Now and Again is how funny and playful it is, as when the Frank Sinatra
song "Fly Me to the Moon" is played over a scene in which Close learns to use a
Spider-Man-type climbing device. The same episode opened with a dizzying
sequence set to "Tonight," from West Side Story, that brought first-time
viewers up to speed on the complicated plot.
The premise is absurd, but so is the idea that fussy old CBS, long known as a
purveyor of sappy dramas for the geriatric set, could finally come up with a
hit science-fiction series. Next thing you know, Saturday Night Live
will become funny again.