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TV's dramatic turn
Boston Globe - October 24, 1999
By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff
After 'Seinfeld,' the sitcom yields to the hourlong show as prime time's big event
If this is a leaden year of the sitcom, a post-"Seinfeld" depression of hollow half-hours, it is also a golden year of TV drama. With a combination of superior returnees like "The
Practice" and "Law & Order," and a slate of spiffy newcomers like "The West Wing" and "Once and Again," this fall season is turning out to have some darn
good drama karma. There are eras when sitcoms define series television - the mid-1960s of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," for instance, or the early 1970s of "All in the Family,"
"M*A*S*H," and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." But as we roll into the new century, a time in which our attention spans are expected to move at a megahertz pace, the most notable
and popular TV genre turns out to be the one that requires ample amounts of concentration, consideration, and devotion.
Doomsayers might want to note the fact, as the TV pendulum swings in the least expected direction of all. Looks as if the American viewing public may not be too busy multitasking or channel
surfing or watching MTV to focus on a serious hour of TV, and to follow ongoing story lines as they stretch from year to year in a manner that might make serialists like Dickens green. While
viewers and critics alike are happy to slag the current sitcoms, most of which are aimless and forgettable, many of us seem to be endlessly hungry for the emotional engagement and intellectual
gamesmanship of dramatic storytelling. It wasn't long after NBC lost "Seinfeld" that it found its next hot ticket: "Providence."
You could feel the shift in the air at this year's Emmy ceremony in September. None of the buzz hovered around the comedy nominations, and as tired winners Helen Hunt and John Lithgow made their
acceptance speeches you could almost hear a collective "whatever" from the audience. No one much cares about the poorly rated "Third Rock From the Sun," after all, and
"Mad About You" left the air after an irritatingly bad final season. No, the impassioned Emmy curiosity revolved around the drama categories, as "The Sopranos" faced off
against the innovative "The Practice," the revitalized "NYPD Blue," the top-rated "ER," and the steadfast "Law & Order."
And that Emmycast has been followed up by a season in which five new dramas have already visited the Nielsen Top 20: "Judging Amy," "Family Law," "Third Watch,"
"The West Wing," and "Once and Again." The most popular is "Judging Amy," with Amy Brenneman as a divorcing mother and judge who lives with her social-worker
mother, Tyne Daly. The show, like "Providence" but with fewer Hallmark moments, has reached No. 10, not far behind old favorites "Touched by an Angel" and "Law &
Order." It has indirectly ignited the controversy of the season, when ABC announced it might move "NYPD Blue" out of its Tuesday slot to keep the female audience for "Once and
Again" from defecting to "Judging Amy." The subtext of the debate: Is it possible to have too many successful dramas? Meanwhile, only one new sitcom has broken the Nielsen Top 20 -
"Stark Raving Mad," a flat half-hour riding on the coattails of "Frasier" and "ER."
"If you tell a good story, they will come," says Robert Thompson, head of the Center for Popular Television at Syracuse University. After a decade exploring new technologies and the
options of the cable universe, he says, TV viewers are more ready to put down the clicker and enjoy the narrative form they've turned to for thousands of years. "The audience is settling in
to what they liked in the first place: characters and plots with beginnings, middles, and ends. There is still a lot more life in the old-fashioned way of telling a story. In the end, it's all
about software."
It helps when the "software" of TV storytelling is being developed by ambitious producers like Steven Bochco, Tom Fontana, Marshall Herskovitz, Edward Zwick, John Wells, David E. Kelley,
Glenn Gordon Caron, and Aaron Sorkin. The expansion of the genre went full force in 1981 with Bochco's "Hill Street Blues," as it ushered the real world, with its grit and moral
ambiguity, into the TV world. Through continuing story lines and hand-held camerawork, the landmark cop drama brought a deepened understanding of heroism to the small screen. Without "Hill
Street," this year's most celebrated drama, "The Sopranos," couldn't have transformed its ruthless made man into a sympathetic Fred Flintstone type. "Thirtysomething,"
too, expanded the boundaries of drama in the 1980s, infusing its scripts with the sort of acute honesty usually reserved for foreign melodramas. And "Moonlighting," along with shows like
"Northern Exposure," helped break down barriers between comedy and drama, making room for the "dramedy" of "Ally McBeal" and "Now and Again."
"Through the '80s and '90s," says Thompson, "people have learned how to watch good television." He suggests comparing newer shows like "The Practice," "Law &
Order," "Judging Amy," "Providence," "Now and Again," "Chicago Hope," and "Ally McBeal" to their pre-1981 counterparts. "The
state-of-the-art drama was `CHiPs.' It was a different aesthetic universe then. A bad episode of `ER' is better than `Trapper John, M.D.' any day."
Teen tales
The teening of America has also brought new twists to TV drama. The world of "lawyers, guns, and money," as Warren Zevon put it, will always provide opportunities for dynamic
entertainment, as will "Once and Again"-style adult relationships. But the 1990s have seen a sharp rise in dramatic exploration of the teen years and the early 20s, the coming-of-age
realm whose conflicts involve the search for identity, the awkwardness of early romance, and anxiety about the future. Thanks to the success of shows like "Beverly Hills 90210" and
"Party of Five," we now have better specimens like "Freaks and Geeks," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Felicity," "Roswell," and "Dawson's
Creek." These dramas aren't for everyone; they are specifically targeted to younger consumers. But the best of them are extraordinarily insightful and well written, and the blackly comic
"Buffy," in particular, is sure to prove increasingly influential in years to come.
Meanwhile, the sitcom languishes, ruined by the show that redefined it: "Seinfeld." Where can a genre go, after all, once it has become terminally mean-spirited, emotionally arrested,
and steely with urban irony? When the paean to neurosis and triviality wrapped up, in 1998, it left us not only with a few painful ancestors - "Caroline in the City," to cite the worst -
but also with a legacy of nihilistic humor that can ultimately only exhaust itself. Yes, "Seinfeld" pushed the TV-comedy envelope, but alas, that envelope was sealed with poison.
Aside from two or three well-written fillips, including "Will & Grace" and "Friends," this season's sitcoms range from the uneven goofing of "Just Shoot Me" and
the horny-hubby redundancies of "Everybody Loves Raymond" to the generic tedium of "Work With Me," "Ladies Man," and "Love & Money." And it's not the
reliance on sexual jokes that's bogging them down; it's the absence of any fresh subject matter at all, the creeping sense that TV writers are simply abandoning us in a room with an ensemble of
cynical, fearful, pop-savvy stand-ups.
The prevalence of so-called hammock series - lousy shows that thrive because they hang between two hits - has also eroded the sitcom landscape. The two half-hours that surrounded "Seinfeld,"
and now "Frasier," have created a string of unforgivably unfunny shows that nonetheless made it into the Nielsen Top 10. From "Suddenly Susan," "Veronica's Closet,"
"The Single Guy," and "Fired Up," to "Jesse" and "Stark Raving Mad," they have all been little more than slot warmers. Once they move elsewhere in the week,
of course, they drop to the very bottom of the Nielsens, where they belong - but only after they have lowered the bar on their genre.
And when the best of the batch deteriorates - "Frasier" being the case in point - it's especially hard not to despair of the form. Seven years on, the "Frasier" writers are
nearly out of ideas, although we should be thankful they have saved David Hyde Pierce from having to moon over Daphne so far this season. Not that the sitcom will ever disappear, says Thompson,
despite its current dip in popularity. "We are going to have silly, amusing sitcoms forever. They are the basic unit of American TV."
Copyright © 1999 Boston Globe. All rights reserved.
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