Television achieves it more rarely than literature or movies, yet the prospect of being drawn into a fiction that is complete unto itself and wholly convincing continues to be my reason for watching.
I operate, however, under three restrictions: no cable, no satellite dish, no entertainment. Diversion seldom has appealed to me, so I haven’t needed 500 channels to effect it. At worst, I’ve missed movies I could get on laser disc or DVD; at best, lessons in child rearing from a flibbertigibbet. Thank you. Network television does nicely.
The last program I thought was “must-see” TV aired in the early 1980s. It was a BBC adaptation of John Le Carre’s “Smiley’s People,” starring Alec Guinness. I bought a Betamax specifically to record it. No character on television engaged me quite so much since Eric Porter’s Soames, the cuckolded man of property in “The Forsyte Saga.”
Both productions were series that permitted characters to develop and deepen, giving viewers a sense of having gotten to know them. The genre wasn’t for me even when its formula began to dominate night-time television. There were too few consequences to the characters’ actions.
Two current programs full of consequences are “Party of Five” and “NYPD Blue.” Though one is a coming-of-age drama and the other a cop show, the most affecting episodes of each have been about families, personal and professional. The dynamics within these families have been handled with a truthfulness rare on commercial TV. And when the series have dealt with, say, alcoholism or domestic abuse, the complexities of the issues were given their due at the same time the storylines dramatized them without cliche or false piety. Even when emotionally blocked or verbally challenged, the regulars express themselves in ways that are compelling.
“Felicity,” a new titillation for teens, would not seem to belong in this company. It’s designed for the crowd that pants over James van der Beek or Sarah Michelle Gellar. Yet its characterizations of college kids have a vulnerability touched by humor, and they go through situations that present them more in the round than Dawson or Buffy, certified WB icons. “Felicity” sometimes achieves a warm directness that looks back to “The Waltons,” as if the attitudinizing of “Beverly Hills 90210” never existed. It’s a nice quality in a ’90s kid’s show.
When I was a kid in the ’50s, NBC broadcast Laurence Olivier’s “Richard III” before it went into American theaters. That was a TV event. Today the pleasures are smaller and simpler.
