It seems like understatement, perhaps, to call a human plunge down an empty elevator passageway a wrong turn, but that, among other things, is what it was.
The year was 1991, and the makers of “L.A. Law” gave lawyer Roz Shays, literally, the shaft. The trouble was that was not only that for the hard-charging character.
People had already been growing exasperated by the veteran series’ increasingly wild contrivances. Whatever scream Shays emitted was drowned out in many a household by the sounds of umbrage from the direction of the couch. While it is not known whether her express ride to the building basement actually broke her back, it was the event that did so to a whole lot of camels.
Lawyers took “L.A. Law” off their lists of non-billable hours. TV critics made mental notes to finally write that “`L.A. Law’s Last Legs” piece they had been pondering. Casting directors pledged that from that day on, Corbin Bernsen would never again get a decent part.
There is a moment that occurs in the life of too many television series when they, very simply, go bad, like cheese left too long in the refrigerator. For whatever reason, most often hubris, panic or creative exhaustion, the executive producers bring in the cute little nephew, send the cast off to an exotic new city, try out the storyline where the lead character and God go fishing in the North Country, and the spell between show and viewer is broken.
It is the tainted moment in which the writers lose control of the careful balance between staying true to the characters and world they’ve created and also developing them. Don’t go far enough and you risk boring viewers. Go too far, violate your own set of rules as fans understand them, and not only will you turn them off but they’ll turn you off.
This season, we’ve seen Fox’s “Ally McBeal” do it. It had been gradually moving from a series about quirky people grounded in a serious situation, the law, to a series about the quirks themselves. The clincher for many fans was the storyline earlier this year focusing on a lawyer’s beloved pet frog, and that frog’s tenure in a coma.
We’ve seen “Party of Five” do it, as well, albeit with more serious subject matter. Already “PO5” taxed our patience by visiting upon its telegenic but star-crossed family most every woe short of a plague of locusts. But the moment that crossed the line was not April’s lesbian kiss, or even the guest appearance of Chicago shock jock Mancow Muller. It was, rather, the episode in which Julia’s new boyfriend hits her and this smart, secure college woman stays with him, making the same excuses that she had to have seen exposed as feeble on dozens of TV movies and Very Special Episodes of TV series.
We’ve even seen Oprah Winfrey do it. Her explicit statement, at the start of this season, that her daily talk show is now “Change Your Life TV” made some of her most loyal fans question whether she had gotten too high and mighty. Winfrey’s appeal has been based largely on her rising from the ranks; her instructions on better living have played, to many, as wisdom dispensed from on high.
“Party of Five” and “Ally McBeal” are among the shows whose wrong turns are identified in the images accompanying this piece. It is a list that could be, and will be, much longer when readers send in their own show spoilers. (See note on Page 1 for instructions.)
This is not a Nielsen-based argument. For one thing, the research would be too hard to do in the available time. More important, audience measurement is almost beside the point. Many once-popular, once-vital TV shows/comedians/newspaper columns, etc. continue to score well with audiences long past their peak simply by virtue of dull momentum or rote familiarity.
We are talking here about simple human perception, which, as the career of Shania Twain demonstrates, is often more powerful than reality. We are talking about the moment in which a good show goes too far.
“Good” is an important distinction. Just as, by definition, there can never be a bad rendition of ballpark nachos, a mediocre series cannot go astray. Was it side-splittingly ridiculous when “The Facts of Life” suggested marijuana use could lead a character to think she had written a great school paper under the drug’s influence, only to discover the next day that she had written just one word per page? Of course it was.
Did the “Love Boat” love affair between characters played by Jamie Farr and a very young Heather Locklear move beyond illogical and into stomach-turning? You and your bottle of Maalox know it.
But this is the “Facts of Life,” the featherweight, 1980s, prep-school sitcom spun off of “Diff’rent Strokes.” This is “The Love Boat,” where every plot twist leads to the Schlock Deck. A program cannot make a wrong turn unless it is on the right road to begin with.
Aha, you may be wondering. Then how did “Dallas” make the list? Granted, “Dallas” was perhaps not a good show by objective standards. But it was good for what it was trying to be, which was a big steamy melodrama. The steam in Bobby Ewing’s all-a-dream shower scene violated its own internal rules.
The same question could be raised about “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the cornpone 1960s sitcom that is clearly the “worst” show of those on the list. Nonetheless, it had a goofy, good-for-being-bad charm that has only grown as the show has also become a cultural artifact. Besides, who among you could resist the opportunity to label a grown man getting his grade-school diploma as a moment of infamy?
More interesting, perhaps, are the more subtle moments, as when the Nancy Kerrigan knee bashing and subsequent high ratings doomed us to years of Olympic coverage as bad soap opera, or when David Letterman’s unwarranted self-criticism of his Oscar hosting practically ordered people to tune out his talk show.
We thought about trying to make a similar argument for “The Ed Sullivan Show”: that the 1956 first Elvis appearance, after Sullivan had spoken against Presley, showed the host to be a mere popularity grubber, or that the cameras’ refusal to show Presley’s swiveling hips showed the series to be a prude.
But these things were not really new to “Sullivan,” which attempted always to blow with the prevailing winds. That series’ problem was not so much any ill-advised turn of its own, but rather its inability, no matter how desperately it tried, to keep up with the culture.
The most obvious wrong turn a show can take is when an important cast member leaves or is fired, and the void is too large or the replacement simply isn’t up to snuff. This happened with NBC’s just-canceled “Homicide: Life on the Street” when Andre Braugher left at the end of last season and Giancarlo Esposito could only fill one of his shoes, at best. This also happened with “The Andy Griffith Show,” when Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors) left to get his own series and Goober Pyle (George Lindsey) wasn’t half the hick (or singer) Nabors was; and again when Don Knotts left.
But because actor/character departures are so commonplace, they do not, for the purposes of this article, count. So please don’t write in about Frank Burns’ leaving “M*A*S*H,” or Diane Chambers’ leaving “Cheers.”
An added character can, however, count, as when “The Cosby Show” brought in new cute little girl Raven-Symone and the show’s essential pandering nature was exposed.
There are categories of show killers, and the cute-kid addition is one of the most prominent. Remember Oliver on “The Brady Bunch”? Adam on “Bewitched”? Chastity on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour”?
Another category is the Very Special Episode, although these tend to occur in shows already some bricks shy of a creative load. Most often preachiness from the inadequate pulpit of a television series simply goes sour, as when “Maude’s” abortion seemed forced onto the show for the purposes of politics. And a flagging “Gunsmoke” dealing with 1960s social problems in its 1873 setting suggested an old cowboy who couldn’t be persuaded it was time to dismount. But sometimes introduction of an “issue” can work wonders: The final season of “Ellen,” after the character and lead actress came out of the closet, was that series’ creative peak.
Then there is the tension-killer of relationship consummation. “Cheers” survived it (not to mention cast changes), but “Moonlighting” was never the same after Maddie succumbed to David’s entreaties. And when Lois discovered the big secret on “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” another kind of relationship had been consummated, and that tension was gone.
David E. Kelley gets his own category. Kelley, the TV producer who cut his teeth on “L.A. Law,” makes his living bringing his series (“McBeal,” “Picket Fences,” “Chicago Hope”) as close as he can to the edge of viewer turnoff, then bringing them back. Sometimes it doesn’t work, as many have found to be the case with “McBeal,” but he deserves credit for taking the chance. It is a more exciting place for a writer to go, which in turn can be more exciting for the viewer.
Although not David E. Kelley series, “Twin Peaks” and “Northern Exposure” certainly fit under the Kelley category of bizarreness taken too far. They also are among the shows where the off-putting moments are so many that it is impossible to pinpoint one.
With “Roseanne,” for instance, was it Dan’s heart attack? Was it her winning the lottery? Or was it simply an accumulation of uneven storytelling, of wild mood swings from one week to the next?
Did “Saturday Night Live’s” tainting moment occur when Anthony Michael Hall joined the cast? When the first popular character was brought back for a second, less inspired skit than the original? Or when producer Lorne Michaels returned after leaving the show? You simply can’t say.
Perhaps more fun than coming up with actual wrong turns shows have taken is coming up with ones they might have taken:
– “Leave It to Beaver,” where a maturing Beaver, anticipating “Dawson’s Creek,” slept with his teacher.
– “The Bionic Woman,” when, after hours of painful surgery, they finally extracted that pinging submarine from Jamie’s ear.
– “Mork & Mindy,” when, after shooting the pilot, the producers decided to replace that Robin Williams fellow because he wouldn’t stick to the script.
Newspaper articles, you see, can also go awry. Sometimes, believe it or not, they even veer into the realm of unfettered fantasy, the equivalent of a TV series serving up a dream sequence. And dream sequences are, almost always, wrong turns.
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Your turn. Think your examples are better? Send them to : Wrong Turn, Tempo, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Or e-mail: ctc-tempo@tribune.com
