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Lackluster pilots, slumping sophomore shows and the devolution of the serial drama. The golden age of TV suddenly looked tarnished in 2008.
By Heather Havrilesky
Read more: HBO, Lost, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, Arts & Entertainment TV Features, FX, 2008
Salon Composite/Photos courtesy FOX, NBC, FX
From left: Joshua Jackson, Anna Torv and John Noble in "Fringe," Jay Leno, and Steve Markle and Jeff Kassel in "Testees."
Dec. 28, 2008 | The golden age of television may be over just a few short years after it began. 2008 not only marked one of the worst years of TV in the last decade, but all of the momentum and promise of the past few years seemed to vanish in a haze of crappy, unoriginal new programming, lackluster sophomore shows, flaccid sitcoms and pointless cable comedies. No offense to Alan Ball, but when an amusing but uneven first season of "True Blood" is nominated for a Golden Globe award for best TV drama, you know there's something wrong with the state of the small screen.
And has there ever been a more depressing sign of TV's demise than the move by NBC to give Jay Leno, the epitome of a guy who's flatly bad at his job but continues to be promoted for reasons utterly mysterious to mortal man, a whopping five hours of prime-time real estate, thereby saving themselves from the unpleasant work of finding worthwhile programming to fill their nightly 10 p.m. slot?
The network gods must be crazy. And clearly, not all of the carnage can be blamed on the writers' strike, despite the relentless attempts by industry executives to do so. Yes, the strike delayed some of our favorite series -- "The Shield" and "24," for example -- but many more shows stumbled and fell on their faces after reasonably promising first seasons. "Lipstick Jungle" and "Pushing Daisies" were pulled this fall due to story lines that felt repetitive within weeks of their premieres and, not surprisingly, failed to pull in interested viewers over the long haul. Meanwhile, shows like Showtime's "Californication," HBO's "Entourage" and "The Life and Times of Tim," and FX's "Testees" sallied forth clumsily like unholy zombies, defining a whole new subgenre: the plotless, joke-free, cringe-inducing, testosto-moronic half-hour cable tragicomedy.
"Six Feet Under" haunted us from beyond the grave by making achingly modern nighttime soaps like "Dirty Sexy Money," "Brothers & Sisters" and "Desperate Housewives" look like charmless, ungainly also-rans, with every witty line overplayed and overdirected into the realm of leaden mainstream network fare. Likewise, "The Sopranos" made its family-crime-drama imitator, FX's "Sons of Anarchy," look like Tony Soprano's ambitious but clumsy white-trash second cousin, proving that this year's pox on the small screen wasn't limited to the networks. In fact, most of cable's best bets underwhelmed, from the outrageous self-parody of Showtime's "The L Word" to the farcical melodrama of FX's "Nip/Tuck" to the stylish but ultimately unformed void of FX's "The Riches."
Such old clunkers might've been forgivable, if the networks had anything new and worthwhile to offer us this fall. Instead, the debuting fall shows of 2008 can now safely be declared an abject failure. It's no wonder it was so hard to pry review copies out of those publicists' hands back in July and August. Despite the obvious effort to be original, above all else, few shows felt like anything more than cheap imitations of other, smarter creations, from CBS's bubbly "Sex and the City" wannabe "The Ex List" to the stale "Just Shoot Me" vibe of Fox's "Do Not Disturb" to CBS's queasily bad "Meet the Fockers" imitator, "Worst Week."
But resurrecting and reimagining old stories didn't work, either. NBC's remake of "Knight Rider" flopped, as did the network's courageous but ultimately futile effort to breathe new life into an old classic with "Crusoe." And while the writers of "90210" tried valiantly to capture the campy humor of the original, it mostly nailed its dorky, earnest tone and its tendency to arm overgrown child actors with an arsenal of perky teen lingo, giving it all of the relevance and flair of a '70s-era, moral-heavy Afterschool Special starring a particularly telegenic cast of Weimaraners in trendy teen clothes.
Two of the few new dramas that showed smarts and promise -- the CW's "Easy Money" and NBC's "My Own Worst Enemy" -- were declared dead on arrival, perhaps prematurely, while the CW's rich-rubbernecking drama "Privileged" was kept alive, destined to embarrass and depress viewers nationwide indefinitely. The fact that the only two obvious successes of the fall season were both procedural dramas -- CBS's "The Mentalist" and ABC's "Life on Mars" -- underscores the fragility of most of TV's new soapy dramedies and single-camera sitcoms.
Even the serial drama, the darling of a new TV era after the success of "24" and "Lost," seemed to utterly lose its way this year. Once heralded for opening up a whole new world of story possibilities and character-based layers to writers and viewers alike by stretching the plot of a series across an entire season, the serial stumbled on its wobbly young legs this fall, proving that the flood of failed shows from the last few fall seasons (Remember "Invasion"? "Day Break"? "Vanished"? "The Nine"?) was no fluke.
Viewers demonstrated that they weren't interested in investing time in a mystery that might never be resolved, either due to poor ratings or a frustratingly sluggish pace of story development. This fall, Fox's "Fringe" provided a highly visible demonstration of just how empty and aimless the serial formula can be when its creators are armed with little more than an arsenal of arbitrary symbols, half-baked conspiracies and pseudo-scientific dim-bulbery. In some ways, "Fringe" was a parody of the worst that the serial drama had to offer, an arbitrary conglomeration of popular elements pieced together like a clumsy, gimmick-laden Frankenstein: "Get me gorgeous lead characters with troubled pasts, procedural-like episodic plots, Smoking Man curveballs, and a season-long riddle to keep it all afloat!" network execs could almost be heard shouting to their underlings. Is it any wonder that the end result tended to play with all of the authenticity of an elaborate marketing scheme dreamed up by a gaggle of publicists with a taste for the funny pipe?
But "Fringe" only hinted at the slow unraveling occurring throughout the realm of serial TV narratives. After a lively and unpredictable first season and a strike-injured second season, NBC's "Heroes" finally tripped on its cape in earnest this fall, capturing all of the intrigue and excitement of one long, CGI-punctuated discussion between two precocious teenagers on the nature of good and evil. Fox's "Prison Break" and "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" followed suit with their own go-nowhere kerfuffles and less-than-suspenseful narrative arcs, spiced up with the empty distraction of a few pyrotechnics here and there.
And then there was "Lost," the self-proclaimed ruler of the serial universe, astounding friends and foes alike with its endless ability to send the same jackasses on creepy treks through the jungle, back and forth, over and over again, to infinity and beyond. Even with a solid bedrock of carefully fleshed-out characters and a layered, at times seemingly meaningful premise in the mix, even with the promise of rescue from the island looming like a beacon of new stories to explore, the show's writers managed to retread the same worn plots repeatedly, while adding the fresh insult of flat characters, dead-end flash-forwards, and a boat full of gun-toting thugs that make the nuanced interplay of Locke's mystical democracy and Jack's pragmatic dictatorship seem as much like relics of the distant past as those once-intriguing Dharma Initiative hatches.
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