Blank stares? Isn’t this supposed to be the new “golden age” of TV? That’s what all those magazine articles said, from Vanity Fair’s glossy wet kiss to “Friends” and “ER” to The New York Times praising TV dramas as “prime time novels” worthy of Dickens and Dreiser. Cool: no more guilt for skipping the latest Philip Roth and ogling “Bay-watch” instead. The only problem is, the timing of all this TV hype is more than a little off, considering this season’s spectacular lousiness. A record 42 new series kicked off this fall, yet “Murder One” was the only hands-down critical success. But last week ABC pulled Steven Bochco’s dark courtroom serial until January because of disastrous ratings. CBS introduced 11 shows, most of them finishing at or near the bottom of their time slots. Overall network viewership is down almost 7 percent from this time last fall. The only new shows you could call hits, “Caroline in the City” and “The Single Guy,” just happen to be on NBC’s powerhouse Thursday night. You could put Shah Lewis and Lambchop on after “Seinfeld” and they’d get huge numbers.
A lot of the programs that supposedly have us basking in the cathode glow of a glorious new age have been on for years: “Roseanne,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Law & Order.” Sure they’re great. Let’s talk about this season. “The proportion of crap to good stuff is increasing,” says Disney TV president Dean Valentine. Is it ever. Where are the TV families we wish would adopt us? Where’s the riveting lifelike drama? Where’s the new TV addiction everybody talks about at the water cooler the next day? Like any armchair network exec, we think we know why the so-called golden age is looking so tinny this year.
Everyone raves about the nuanced acting of TV Oliviers like Andre Braugher of “Homicide.” It’s true that the small screen can make talented character actors into huge stars. Or transform obscure comedians into household names. But casting them isn’t easy. Looking at this season, you’d think there were only two kinds of TV actors available in Hollywood, the ones whose big-screen careers didn’t work out and the ones who are already on other sitcoms. Take “Caroline” star Lea Thompson, whose blandly pleasant demeanor landed her supporting gigs in a couple of “Back to the Future” movies. Who at NBC was sitting around saying, “If we can just get Lea Thompson her own series, all our problems will be solved”? (You could ask the same question about CBS’s two Nancys: Travis, star of “Almost Perfect,” and McKeon, of “Can’t Hurry Love.”) One of the producers behind “Caroline” is director extraordinaire and sitcom god James Burrows. So it should be a good show, with a good star. Instead, we get Lea Thompson sputtering, “I feel my uterus contracting,” while cooing over a baby. Where’s that sensitive handling of women’s issues TV is getting so much praise for? “Caroline” is dumber than a Meg Ryan movie.
This year’s genius casting move is recasting. Instead of fresh talent, we keep seeing the same familiar faces. NBC’s big sweeps stunt this month was to play musical chairs with its stars (See Chandler from “Friends” on tonight’s “Caroline”!), turning the whole Thursday-night lineup into one long, cheesy advertisement for itself. In contrast, ABC’s “Ellen” managed to think up a smarter stunt that was equally attention-getting: a cameo by Martha Stewart. Say what you will about Martha, at least she isn’t just a loaner from another sitcom.
The irony of golden series like “ER” or “Friends” having become hits is that they inspire thousands of cut-rate clones. It’s not just that the smug, charmless star of “The Single Guy,” Jonathan Silverman, delivers his awful lines with Seinfeldian inflections (“I will literally be a monkey’s uncle . . . Indeed you will”). The show is using the same jokes. Kramer gets a hot tub. Single guy’s friend gets one. Remember when that NYU student thought Jerry and George were gay? Same joke on “Single Guy.” They’re even using the same props. George has a Babe Ruth blanket on his couch. Single guy has the same blanket.
The dramas are just as derivative. “Courthouse” and “New York News” are “ER” wanna-bes. “You know everyone went in and pitched ‘“ER” in a courtroom’ or ‘“ER” in a newsroom’,” says John Tinker, executive producer of “Chicago Hope.” Patricia Wettig, the biggest star of CBS’s “Courthouse,” had the good sense to bail before getting canceled. If you were Mary Tyler Moore, how long would you stick around the stinky “New York News”-room? This is a show where reporters say things like “I need to get this on record,” even though the correct phrase is “on the record.” You can bet those detail freaks at “ER” wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.
Sometimes, the problem isn’t lame casting or old ideas: it’s execution. “Murder One” started with a fascinating concept and a forceful star in the menacing, cue-bald Daniel Benzali. But somebody must have figured the audience wouldn’t have the patience for truly serialized drama. After the pilot, the show got watered down with boring, unrelated subplots. Because of the “to be continued” nature of the main “A” story line, self-contained “B” stories were supposed to give viewers a sense of closure at the end of each week’s episode. But they only made things more confusing. Bochco also killed off the private investigator who was being so craftily played by Kevin Tighe and subbed in his old “Hill Street Blues” crony, Joe Spano. You can bet Charles Dickens, who knew a thing or two about how to serialize a novel, wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.
“Murder One” isn’t the only show lacking the courage of its convictions. “The Naked Truth” started as a brash farce behind the scenes at a supermarket tabloid, with the saucy Tea Leoni as a defrocked society gal turned paparazza. Now it’s just another sitcom about dating and bikini waxes. Fox had a series about a couple of likable losers called “Too Something.” It was no “Cheers” but had a distinctive voice that, left alone, might have bufit a following. No chance. First the network sanitized the pretext, upgrading the slacker mail-room boys into a nicer apartment. Then the show went on “hiatus,” which is to cancellation what purgatory is to hell. Not only that: it subjected “Too” to the bonus humiliation of holding a contest inviting viewers to come up with a better title! It’s as if Fox were now conducting its focus-group research on the air. So much for bold, daring programming.
Three words: “Central Park West.” Because the creator of this Manhattan dope opera was the same guy who came up with “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place,” CBS must have figured that he knew what he was doing. Oops. Darren Star created those shows under the wing of Aaron Spelling, the Yoda of nighttime soaps. Left to his own devices, Star east the lightweight Mariel Hemingway instead of a leading lady with real suds credentials like, say, Victoria Principal. He’s also responsible for page after page of banal dialogue that’s wretched even by “Melrose” standards. (“God, I love this city! It makes you feel like anything could happen any time, anywhere, with anyone.”) More than 90 percent of the viewing audience wasn’t watching, so CBS pulled the show off the air until January for “revamping.” Nobody expected “CPW” to be high art, but if this is TV’s gilded renaissance, we should at least get quality trash.
Matt Groening, who created “The Simpsons,” contends that “right now there are a lot of popular shows that aren’t aggressively moronic.” Maybe so, although a connoisseur could name half a dozen great shows from the ’70s or ’50s, even the ’80s. So far, the ’90s has been as good a decade as any. But for an allegedly golden age, the 1995-96 season has laid an awful lot of rotten eggs.
