Something old, new, borrowed and much less blue. The new TV season promises to be most noteworthy for what it probably won’t contain:
– Skin at the Super Bowl.
– New episodes, final or otherwise, of “The Sopranos.”
– Must-see situation comedy.
– An actual, discrete, bona fide TV season itself, clearly rolling out in fall and definitively ending in late spring.
Only one of those pronouncements is an absolute: The final season of “The Sopranos” won’t commence until 2006. As to the other three, there are qualifiers. Certainly this promises to be a season when the major networks reverse their slippery slide to cable misbehavior and pay heed to the newfound muscle of government censors. An industry renowned for low aesthetic standards has been sermonizing of late about high ones regarding prurience.
But how far will they really retrench? There is worry about heftier FCC fines, and no doubt the Super Bowl half-time show, following last season’s debacle, is likely to eschew tasteless and risque spectacle in favor of just plain tasteless spectacle. (Think marching bands and maybe an Osmond family retrospective.)
But new network series don’t promise restraint. A thirtysomething suburban matron does it with her teenage gardener (ABC’s “Desperate Housewives”); horny high school males talk frankly and exclusively about getting laid (ABC’s “life as we know it”); Joey’s sister heralds her boob job (in the first five minutes of “Joey”); and, for violent excess, decapitated murder victims are found in a volcano (“Hawaii”).
In ABC’s “Rodney,” comic Rodney Carrington struts naked through Wal-Mart to prove a bet. This, yet, from a new show otherwise clearly aimed at conservatives.
And all that’s just in a few pilots.
That’s reality
As for reality TV, a single title tells you everything you need to know about current standards: “Wife Swap.”
Clearly, the networks are doing a behind-the-scenes dance. Can they balance their rivalry with cable’s permissiveness and a widespread mood for family sensitivity? A certain defensiveness has been creeping into network remarks on the debate.
“It’s an uneven playing field, and I frankly think it’s unfair,” Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, said during July’s TV press gathering, when asked about the different yardsticks used to measure cable and network morals. After a brief spell of post-Super Bowl humble pie, the talk, once again, is turning feisty. “I don’t know that I would have said this two years ago, but everybody should be held to the same standard,” Reilly now insists.
Jeff Zucker, president of the NBC Universal television group, was more blunt last week when he said, “It’s had absolutely no impact on our schedule.”
Meanwhile, what of the actual network entertainment?
This year, genres themselves seem to be shrinking, heading the way of ebbing network audiences. If not actually dying, the sitcom is notoriously endangered, with fewer new offerings and a now up-for-grabs Thursday night medley of comedy, drama and reality. Nor is there any sign that HBO’s “Deadwood” inspired a revival of the western.
Instead, fictional offerings increasingly boil down to cops, lawyers and doctors.
A few buck the trend. Among them are “Desperate Housewives,” a sardonic comedy-drama about wives too rich to work and yet miserable nonetheless, and “Lost,” a sort of fictional “Survivor,” with echoes of “Alien” and that old Jules Verne chestnut, “Mysterious Island,” tossed in for monsterly good measure. Both are on ABC, the result, perhaps, of a creative zeal born of that network’s declining standings in the ratings in recent seasons.
Another beautifully written drama is also a novelty: the WB’s “Jack and Bobby” coats its wholesome family tale in a weird, almost kooky time-travel patina. It tells of two ordinary teen brothers in our time, one of whom is fated to become U.S. president some four decades into the future. But this is not “The West Wing” meets “Future World.” The ingeniousness of it all is that the future is only present in the form of occasional, gossamer commentary provided by the future president’s colleagues “reminiscing” sometime around 2049. Mostly, it’s a compelling contemporary story; but the occasional thoughts from the future provide, at least in the pilot, a wistful, evocative and arresting subtext.
Cops, docs, lawyers
Otherwise, dramas promise more spinoffs (“CSI: NY” and a fourth “Law & Order” due midseason); more lawyers (“Kevin Hill”); more cops (“Hawaii,” “CSI: NY”); more doctors (“House,” “Grey’s Anatomy” midseason); some doctors who act like cops (“Medical Investigation,” “dr. vegas”) and one teenager who acts like a cop (“Veronica Mars”).
When in doubt, combine genres. As for the sitcom, there’s an almost numbing reliance on family. Situation comedy was once just that, sometimes reaching for the fantastic (“Mork & Mindy”) or the idiotic (“My Mother the Car”), but coming up with an actual situation. But except for “Joey,” just a bachelor now, bereft of his “Friends” makeshift family, the new shows are all about Father Still Struggling to Know Best: John Goodman in “Center of the Universe,” Goodman again (as the lead voice) in “Father of the Pride,” Jason Alexander in “Listen Up” and Carrington in “Rodney.”
“Second Time Around” is about a childless couple, divorced and remarried, and at least it features the relatively rare sitcomic presence these days of an African-American cast.
While the death of situation comedy may have been wildly exaggerated, this year’s new crop doesn’t offer much reason for hope. It says something when the most innovative series is a cartoon (“Father of the Pride”), and early views of that one aren’t promising.
Viewers trying to sort through all this, and maintain whatever network loyalty survives in this era of cable and video games, may be befuddled most, however, in trying to discern any actual surviving TV season schedule itself. Though it has been ebbing away for some time now, the season this year does seem to herald the most scattershot fall scheduling in memory.
Some shows actually arrived in the summer: “Summerland” and “Blue Collar TV,” notably. NBC, meanwhile, to piggyback on the Olympics, is unveiling major new shows starting this week, while other networks plan debuts that reach as far as October.
Changes midseason
Meanwhile, outright failures could disappear as soon as November, making way for midseason replacements. The network schedules are more and more an unsettling echo of the unfathomable timetable afoot with such major cable hits as “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under” and “Queer as Folk,” which come on, run and reappear with no predictable regularity.
Maybe that’s no big deal. Viewers, armed with their tape machines, TiVos and Internet reminder notices of a favorite, are clearly coping. But a less well-defined season seems another blow to the concept of network identity. Once surefire marketing gimmicks such as “NBC Week” or an all-star lineup of sitcoms on a certain night are giving way to numbers on the remote, diffusing what remains of network branding potential.
Not surprisingly, the networks aren’t going gently. For all the hoopla about summer programming, CBS, which stuck with tried-and-true reruns, maintained its ratings supremacy through much of the warm weather months, and they take heart.
“We’ve heard that creating more original summer programming is a whole new way of doing business,” Leslie Moonves, co-president and co-COO of Viacom, which owns CBS, said at the Hollywood confab. “Well, we’ve seen no evidence to back up the rhetoric.”
As for cable and other technological challenges, Moonves urges a vague but rousing combination of standing firm and adapting to the times. “It’s not to say we . . . don’t realize that TiVo and DVRs are going to be part of the landscape. We’re paying attention to that. And anybody who doesn’t is stupid.
“However,” he added, “there’s no need to fold up your chairs and do a whole different system,” offering what might serve as overriding network mantra for the age: “It’s better to do an evolution, not a revolution.”
