Blame it on Y2K.
January’s turn of the calendar did not destroy global computing, as many experts had feared. It didn’t randomly add zeros to certain Chicago bank accounts. It didn’t even scare people away from instant messaging or Palm Pilots. But it did have impact in realms beyond bottled water and the immediate collapse of the market for millennium-themed products.
Take television, for instance. Please. Our favorite budget entertainment medium was in a yearlong state of disorder and entropy, of the center not holding and the fringes coming to the fore. I’m no scientist, but this quite possibly may have been because of TV trying, these days, to convert to digital format, that digital format having something to do with computers, those computers trying to cope with Y2K, and, well, you get the complicated technological picture.
Or maybe, in the year 2000, you didn’t get the picture.
TV2K saw the old rules stop applying, as if the motherboard had been frazzled, the circuits overjuiced. There was a general protection fault in module 000246213, as the saying goes. The year’s most sensational TV show was about a fat, naked gay guy. On an island. On videotape. Surrounded by other non-actors. Playing modified summer-camp games. With hamfisted corporate sponsorship. And a smarmy host.
That ought to have spelled failure in letters big enough to be seen from the helicopter, but instead, “Survivor” set a summertime viewing record — 51.7 million people for the finale — and blasted open a whole new mine of cheap programming for the networks to overwork. Thank goodness the almost immediate flop of “Big Brother,” American popular culture’s most painstaking exploration of boredom, helped to curb some of that zeal for sticking real people in archly fabricated situations.
This coming year will be the real test of the latest reality genre, as the “Survivor” sequel and the first boatload of “hurry-up-and-get-me-one-of-them” shows start airing.
An entire television network disappeared in 2000, and it wasn’t UPN. The Time Warner entertainment conglomerate got all mad at the Disney entertainment conglomerate — something about Mickey being two days late in paying his bill — and abruptly pulled the signal of Disney’s ABC network from Time Warner cable systems in major cities, including New York and Los Angeles. For millions of people, it was as if “The Drew Carey Show” didn’t exist. Some might call that public service, but not the fellow at home who pays his bills on time and revels in Drew’s madcap antics. Harumph, said the companies. Damn him and his pedestrian desires! There was corporate swordsmanship to be engaged in, at least until the feds stepped in to push everybody to neutral corners.
The network news departments, which people used to rely on come election night like Western settlers relied on oxen, pulled the national Conestoga as if drunk and lame. They called Florida for Gore. They called Florida for Bush. Apparently they called Florida without, you know, having called Florida. And they ushered in the five-week vote-counting mini-series that made us all too familiar with James Baker, absentee ballot law and those counties people don’t visit on Spring Break.
This network failure, conducted en masse, from hallowed CBS to upstart Fox News Channel, further eroded public confidence in the medium Americans continue, for some logically conflicted reason, to list as their primary news source. Assuming the room doesn’t explode from the concentration of egos, the expected congressional hearings into the matter should be a treat for everyone who’s ever thought Peter Jennings and Brit Hume just a touch too smug for, say, heaven.
Although a mirror placed beneath its nose might suggest otherwise, UPN didn’t die in 2000. It did get bought out by the Viacom entertainment conglomerate, which also closed its deal for CBS and bought Black Entertainment Television. These kinds of bedfellows were further proof of TV2K madness. No functioning computer would let “Touched by an Angel,” “WWF Smackdown!” and “Midnight Love” be part of the same corporate family. The transactions, alas, were completed too late to save Viacom’s mammoth Michigan Avenue store. Too bad. “Judging Amy” T-shirts and “The Parkers” lunchboxes might have been just the thing to prevent that prime real estate from turning into an Ann Taylor.
Speaking of Ann Taylor, three of the most powerful women in television struggled to make a new cable channel more than just another virtual reality programming service. In an ordinary year, when Oprah Winfrey, Geraldine Laybourne (ex of Nickelodeon) and Marcy Carsey (the Carsey Werner TV production house) join forces, the media world bows and they add a few $#@*s to the obscenity of their riches. But in 2000, their Oxygen network, despite reams of fawning introductory press, ended the year trying to find new funding and struggling to get placed on the nation’s cable systems. The tank was depleted.
Maybe they should try Katie Couric’s innovative programming stategy. Heading up the “There’s Got to Be a Better Way to Call Attention to a Dread Disease” category, Couric invited Americans, live on morning TV, into her colon. The doctor performing the colonoscopy was quite pleased, labeling it a lovely example of the species. Good for Katie, good for her digestive health, and good for all the people inspired to get their own, more private versions of the procedure. But in normal years — and not counting Pamela Anderson — America simply does not enter the nether regions of its television superstars.
There was, unfortunately, reason to be concerned about more than preventive medicine in the year 2000. Michael J. Fox, perhaps the quintessential sitcom actor, had to leave his “Spin City” series because of his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s disease. Not to wish illness on them (a plummet from public favor would be enough), but it is certainly unfair that Jay Leno, The Rock, and Dick Vitale, to name just three, got to stay, and that Charlie “Cement Looks Supple Next to Me” Sheen got to replace Fox.
David Letterman had to go away for a time because of his clogged heart, only to return triumphantly on a moving back-from-the-knife show. But the TV2K bug certainly brought on Letterman’s bad decision to lie to his audience, splicing his chief surgeon into the lineup of medical people who saved him. The year finished nicely for Letterman, though, when just about the only new series doing well for NBC, the network that had rejected him in favor of Leno, was “Ed,” the comedy-drama from Letterman’s production company.
In a year where a wire wasn’t loose, Steve Allen, the man who begat Dave and Conan and Craig and the whole late-night talk genre, would not have died.
The best comedy Emmy, in such a year, would have gone to “Everybody Loves Raymond” or “The Simpsons” instead of the good-but-not-great “Will & Grace.” (No quibbles with “West Wing” topping “Sopranos” for best drama.) More network programmers would have been fired than just Fox’s Doug Herzog and NBC’s Garth Ancier, especially the ABC fellows whose only answer is “more `Millionaire.”‘ And Carol Marin’s news experiment at WBBM-Ch. 2 would have stood a fighting chance, with a bigger budget, more new reporters and managers who didn’t bail out at the first sign of bad ratings.
In a year in which files were not corrupted, Michael Richards’ sitcom would have been a hit and Geena Davis’ a flop, and at least one of them would have been watchable. “Freaks & Geeks” and “Sports Night” would have been saved. TV-fueled catch phrases would have had to be more complicated — and less annoying, when repeated at parties — than “Wassup?” And most people, hearing the words “Darva” and “Conger,” would still think they were eavesdropping on a conversation between plumbers.
On the movie front, it wasn’t necessarily a millennium thing, but it was nevertheless screwy that people kept turning to TV for, ahem, inspiration. There was a second version of “Mission: Impossible,” or “MI-2,” as it was oafishly called. “Charlie’s Angels” were reborn as butt-kickers of the new millennium. Moose and squirrel lived again in “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.” And Spike Lee went way over the top (raise your hand if you are surprised) but struck some essential truths in satirizing TV’s treatment of African-Americans in “Bamboozled.”
The 2000 Summer Olympics from Sydney, Australia, were so off-kilter you wanted them to take a drug test, not for steroids but for hallucinogens. They took place, for instance, in autumn, late September, pushing the start of the network TV season back, confusingly, to October. They were aired here, in all of NBC’s wisdom, on thrill-sapping tape delay, but worse was the way NBC continued to insist the events were secondary stories to perusal of the athletes’ medical charts and familial psychographic profiles. If television critics covered the Olympic telecasts the way NBC covered the events, they’d all be writing about Bob Costas’ troubled cousin and painful hangnail.
That’s an appropriate term for a year like this one. Everything seems to hang. There are those overmentioned Florida chads. There’s the general hangover of a TV year in which the vaunted Barbara Walters took money from Campbell’s to sell soup, unethically working conversation about the brand into her “The View.”
And there’s the way this whole TV2K computer seems to be hanging, as if the hard disk controller has gone on holiday. Banging it on the side of the box, however satisfying, doesn’t work. It is time, as the real millennium and a whole new year of TV looms, to call in a consultant to run a debugging program. And when that doesn’t work we can just reboot, utterly unconcerned that data in currently active applications may not be saved.
