I.
I’d like to think I grow tired of saying this over and over
again, but clearly I don’t if I keep coming back to this point: if any
foreigner or future scholar wants to understand America in the post Cold War
era, all they’d have to do is watch TV. It’s not like there’s much competition:
I can and have named dozens of TV shows that have completely altered the
landscape of our culture. Many people say that we’re living in a Golden Age of
International Cinema, but are there even fifteen American movies since 1990 that
have completely shaken up the way American culture views itself in the manner
of which the best dozen-or-so episodes of The Simpsons did, or South Park, or
The Wire, or Mad Men (The Truman Show, The Social Network, WALL-E, American Beauty; and if we’re being
charitable maybe Juno, Forrest Gump, Minority Report, Pulp Fiction, There Will
Be Blood, Fight Club… The Dark Knight is ultimately British…and after that I
draw a blank)? Are there even half-a-dozen American plays since 1990 that have
changed the country (Angels in America, Oleanna, Doubt, arguably Rent and The Book of Mormon if you count music theater…nothing but blanks after
that…)? Think of how many ‘Great American Artists’ in today’s cultural world
are clearly, unambiguously, unassailably at the very peak of their careers –
artists whom most every critic and connoisseur in their field seems to agree
will not ever, cannot ever get better than the work which they’re producing
right now. Now think of how many of them are not television showrunners
(Jonathan Franzen, David Fincher, Wynton Marsalis, Kanye West, Lady Gaga if that’s your kind of
thing….blank…) With so few exceptions,
the way which American artists use movies, theater, literature, art, and music
seem to grow ever smaller and more insular with every passing year. But the manner
in which television is used seems to grow ever larger, more diverse, more ambitious, more
epic. Overall, I suppose I prefer watching a great movie to great television –
great movies suggest the ‘unfathomable depths’ in a matter of a few hours. A
two hour movie requires less time commitment but just as much artistic reward at
the end as 100-hour TV show, and utterly without the longeurs it takes to reach
the end of a series. Movies are simply more interesting.
In a country like ours, which redefined everything which the
arts can be, movies have virtually supplanted the importance of theater – often
providing a more visceral, more flexible experience than live theater was ever
capable of suggesting. But if movies are to us what theater was to Elizabethan
England (but who’s our Shakespeare?), then TV is to today’s America what The
Novel was to Czarist Russia. We could even play a kind of parlor game in which
we create equivalents for Russian novels with today’s TV shows. Perhaps The
Sopranos could stand in for Dostoevsky’s whirlpoolish psychological immediacy –
the show could easily be renamed Crime and Punishment. Or perhaps Mad Men could
stand in as a spiritual replacement for Tolstoy’s slow, critically distant
psychological burn - think of the first line of Anna Karenina and imagine
applying it to the marriages of Don Draper and Roger Sterling.
II.
Being a person with very few reasons to live, I grew up with
NBC’s Thursday night lineup as the cornerstone of my week. Growing up, my
weekends were inevitably disappointing: I didn’t much care for my friends, and
the Baltimore Symphony was too expensive to go every weekend. Thursday night
was the highlight of my week, because that was the night the new Seinfeld
premiered, and that thought was enough to get me through one week of extended suburban
ennui to the next.
With the omnipresent syndication and ubiquitous reruns (not
that they don’t mean the same thing), it’s nearly impossible to remember how
revolutionary Seinfeld seemed in the 1990’s. Seinfeld was more than a show
about nothing, it was a show about taboos. Week after week, issues which none
of us dare mention in polite company were discussed in barely concealed
euphemisms: masturbation, public urination, breast implants, oral sex, faking
orgasms, contraception, self-exposure, sexual techniques, fetishes, fears of responsibility,
commitment, marriage, immigrants, the handicapped, social and sexual
humiliation, dentistry, bullying, hygiene, the elderly, homeless people, blind
dates, being perceived as racist or homophobic, social ‘inferiors’, and the
truth. Seinfeld’s greatness came from constantly taking uncomfortable
situations in which we’ve all found ourselves, yet none of us wants to admit we
have. It then stretched those situations to the exact breaking point of
believability.
If Seinfeld now seems like a completely different show than
it did in the 90’s, it’s because all the greatest sitcoms were in fact a
variation on that exact same trope. All In The Family made bigotry charming for
white and black people alike. M*A*S*H showed people who never served in the
armed forces that the experience of war is not all sacrifice and patriotism.
Cheers allowed literate upper-middle class Yuppies to bond with loser
alcoholics. The only difference between these shows and Seinfeld is that the
latter broke taboos to an exponentially higher degree than any sitcom before
it. Seinfeld seemed like a beginning, in which every issue could be discussed on
television so long as there it’s done with sufficient cleverness; but 15 years
after the show ended, we now see that Seinfeld was an end. After Seinfeld, all
the taboos of what could be aired on television were broken, and we now live in
a nearly taboo-free society of reality TV, pay cable series, and internet
memes, where virtually any subject can be discussed openly and acceptably.
Seinfeld still seems like a great show, but it seems almost quaint and prudish,
as though it’s a show from another solar system where people have to talk in
code. It seems downright weird to use terms like ‘master of your domain’ or
‘down there’ when today’s shows can discuss absolutely any issue with utter
transparency.
III.
There were great shows before Seinfeld. Must See TV (NBC’s
term for its Thursday night lineup) is older than I am, and included fine shows
as different as Cheers, Night Court, The Cosby Show (I include that
begrudgingly), Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, A Different World, Frasier, Wings,
Mad About You, Friends (REALLY begrudgingly), ER, Just Shoot Me, Will &
Grace, Scrubs (SOOOOOO begrudgingly), My Name is Earl, The Office, 30 Rock,
Parks and Recreation, and Community (honorable mention to Andy Barker P.I., one
of two Andy Richter shows that should have been picked up past a first season).
In an era of 300 channels, NBC might have more history than
any channel save two others, but its best days are so clearly over. It’s
difficult to forget that sight-gag on Family Guy in which NBC headquarters
proclaims on its sign “We Used To Have Seinfeld, Remember?”
Like the other networks, only moreso, NBC has moved into the
world of pay cable. NBCUniversal owns CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo, Syfy, Cloo,
Chiller, and Telemundo. It has large stakes in AMC, A&E, the History Channel,
the Biography Channel, and National Geographic. This list doesn’t even include
the overseas networks which NBC manages or the fact that NBC has a large share
in TiVo.
NBC clearly understands that the name of today’s broadcasting
is ‘niche’ – and there should be a niche for every taste and every demographic.
But they still don’t understand well enough. Like any network, they are
principally committed to preserving the dominance of their once ‘august’ brand –
and will not preserve a show on their flagship network if it does not recoup a
certain amount above the expenses it takes to make the show - how very 1985.
The rumors were abounding last week that NBC is cancelling
its Thursday night lineup almost wholesale. For longer than I’ve been alive,
Thursday night’s been the lynchpin of NBC television. But there’s something
about the very idea of dominating a night of television that feels utterly old-fashioned.
Nobody wants to dominate a TV night anymore, nobody who’s living in 2012 at
least. At this point, sensible executives just want enough viewers to derive a reasonably
large demographic against 300 other competitors. Anyone executive who sets out
to make a TV show watched even by a quarter of those who watched Seinfeld every
week is a guaranteed failure. The most watched non-reality TV show of the last
year was NCIS, and it was watched by a weekly average of 11.6 million people.
Desperate Housewives, one of the highest rated shows of the
last decade, will air its final episode this Sunday, and will be considered a stunning
surprise if it rakes in anywhere near 15 million viewers. Let’s put that in a bit
of context. Nearly ten years ago, the Friends series finale attracted more than
50 million viewers. Nearly fifteen years ago, the Seinfeld series finale
attracted almost 75 million viewers (and was expected to attract a lot more
than that). Nearly twenty years ago, the Cheers series finale attracted almost
85 million viewers. Nearly thirty years ago, the M*A*S*H series finale
attracted more than 100 million viewers.
The age when any network or channel could coast on the
strength of a single show is over and will never come back. In today’s TVcology,
there is only competition – and even the highest rated shows can only appeal to
a severely limited demographic. No two people watch all the same television shows
anymore.
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