The Myths of Peak TV, A Personal Retrospective: Part 1: Introduction and What Everyone Gets Wrong About 'Content'

 

At this point the world knows the story of the Golden Age of TV to the point its practically gospel.

For almost the entirety of TV’s existence, with the exception of a patch in the 1950s and the mid70s and 1980s, television was in truth a vast wasteland, the destroyer of intellect, the corrupter of art. Then in 1999 The Sopranos debuted on HBO and television magically became a world of greatness, where every TV show was a work of art, where you could be proud to be discussing TV with your colleagues instead of ashamed of it, where creativity reigned and economics were not a factor. Now it has passed and television is heading into a darkness far greater than before, where creativity will be rare if it ever comes again.

That is what I’ve been hearing from critics and fans and so many other educated people for more than twenty years. And for a long time I believed it myself. But events of the last few years along with my own observations over more than twenty years of critically watching television and personally writing about it for more than a decade have made me aware of so many of the flaws in the construct of this argument.

Now I agree with much of the fundamental argument about The Sopranos, the vast array of art fans like myself have been a part of for twenty five years and that there has been perhaps a greater amount of artistic television in the first two decades of the 21^st century then perhaps all of the 20^th century. But where I now fundamentally disagree with my fellow critics and indeed so many of the people who work in television over this period and are now doomcrying are several realities that were very apparent to me when I was watching TV entirely as a fan and were still clear when I was reviewing it for my blog. And perhaps the biggest flaw in this argument is the one that has dogged all critics in every medium perhaps since the beginning of criticism.

 And that’s that money has nothing to do with the work that is produced. It was just as true during the era of Peak TV as it was before and as it is now. That somehow for the last twenty-five years television just stopped being a business and was only about producing art for the critics and the masses wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny or even what was happening at the time. Yet that is the gospel that critics have been preaching for as long as I’ve been reading about television and are now bemoaning as the cause of its downfall.

What I intend to try to do in this series is make an argument that so much of what writers have been telling you about Peak TV is a one-sided story, one that focuses entirely on the artistic side and had nothing to do with the dollars and cents. I don’t entirely blame critics for this; they’re not economists. But it’s now more than obvious that for more than twenty years that even the best TV critics have, like every other critic, been only talking about the artistic merits of what they watch and never considering the economic realities of it.

So in this series I intend to use my experience as both a critic, an observer and a fan of television to puncture holes in the stories we’ve been told about the myths of Peak TV over the past twenty years: why it suddenly appeared that television has become a purveyor of art, where that art fit into the reality of the public consciousness and why critics frequently celebrated the art of the fracturing landscape while ignoring the possibility of how and why it might lead to problems.

Let’s start with a word you’ve been hearing a lot by so many artists and critics the last few years: content.  I’ve seen this word used in a derogatory fashion both by critics and creators more than half a dozen times over the past few months. It’s usually used in reference to the streaming services, sometimes its extended to cable. But it’s always used in  a variation of the same way: “The studios used to care about art; now all they care about is content.”

Everyone who tells you this is, to be as euphemistic as possible, is disingenuous. All studios, all networks, all cable channels, all streaming services, only care about content. And much as the artists and critics want to have you believe otherwise, the bosses and producers have always and only been interesting in creating content. If art gets created that’s just a coincidence.

You’d think the writers, directors and actors could at least acknowledge the reality of this fact and occasionally a Gus Van Sant or David Chase will acknowledge they did a project only for the money. But as I’ve argued repeatedly  Hollywood is a business first. It’s about getting asses in seats and eyeballs on the screens. The artists might argue that the bosses are grinding them down into producing crap rather than what they want to produce. They never acknowledge everyone in Hollywood is following the market. If everybody was watching documentaries about Mongolian sheepherders,  every studio would be doing one. Hard as it may be for the average critic to believe, I think there are some executives really tired of having to keep making different superhero movies or action franchise or version of Star Wars. But they’re slaves to the dollar as much as the artist is. Hollywood doesn’t lead, it follows, and it only follows the dollar. At some level, everyone knows this but no one can say it out loud.

Critics by contrast have never accepted that. I’ve read so many film reviews over the past twenty years essentially arguing that the only movies that should be released are the ones that the critics like even if the audience hates them. There’s always been something of a contrarian in so many of the critics I’ve read over the years: if something is loved by the masses, it must de facto have no artistic value. And because critics are at least self-aware enough to know that they can’t blame the masses for this, they choose to blame the messenger – or in this case, the creators.

One of my favorite lines about society came from Chris Rock. “In a class of thirty-five students, you’ve got five A’s, five F’s and the rest of us are in the middle. B and C students.” I’ve always thought that this is a much fairer assessment of television than Sturgeon’s dictum that ninety percent of everything is crap. And for the sake of this piece, I’d like to use the argument of what was until The Sopranos debuted in 1999, what was the standard of television until that point: the fall season.

Usually you’d get somewhere between 30 and 35 shows at the start of September. Basically five of them would be A’s,, five of them would be F’s and the rest were in the middle: B’s and C’s. Every year a critic would watch pilots of all these shows, tell you which were A’s, B’s and so on. In the world of the TV critic, the viewer would watch only the A’s, the F’s would flunk out of side on their own, and the B’s and C’s would either disappear or only exist to make the A’s look good by comparison. The critics job, after all, is not unlike a teacher: he has favorite shows that he wants people to see, shows he loathes with every fiber of his being, and other shows he has no problem with but doesn’t really care about.

The problem is television is a business and a business grades on a different scale then a critic. In the eyes of a business, the A student is the one that is watched by more people and the F student is the one that no one watches. More often then not in the era of network television, what the critic considered an F – or to be more honest, the B or C – would be popular beyond anyone’s dreams and the A student  - like so many are in real life – would be unloved and eventually flunk out – or in other words, be cancelled by the network. The network executive might secretly think the A student is better entertainment than the B and C student but he has a different obligation then that of the critic.

That may be the reason so many critics bemoaned television when it was just the business of the three networks: what they and the viewer considered quality almost never aligned. And because they couldn’t say that the average viewer was a moron or an ingrate, they did the next best thing and blamed the networks, the executives and the producers. And because the creative talent always hates being put out of work, they were more than willing to tell the critics that they were right, share all the horror stories of behind the scenes battles with the producers and censors and make it seem like television stifled if not stomped out creativity.

Let me use two dramas that debuted in the 1992-1993 season as an example of how the dichotomy between the critical perception of television and the audience perception was. I should mention upfront I viewed both shows constantly in my early years, both when they were on the air and in syndication.

In the fall of 1992 Fox debuted what was a spin-off of Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place. Both shows were the creation of Aaron Spelling and Darren Star and the early episodes of Melrose linked to 90210. The series was originally closer to a more grown-up version of 90210 but the ratings were not very good. Halfway through the first season, the show introduced Heather Locklear as Amanda Woodward, a new character and the show moved drastically away from reality into pure and utter soap opera. The show became a huge ratings hit and was one of the major factors in Fox moving from something of a joke of network television to effectively a powerhouse in its own right.

In January of 1993 NBC gave the new series Homicide: Life on The Street the slot after that year’s Super Bowl, then a decision given to new programming the network wanted to link. Written by Tom Fontana and inspired  by the true crime book of David Simon, the series looked at the Homicide unit of the Baltimore Police force. Shot in dim lighting with constant camera motion, and with a cast that was more minority heavy then almost any network show to date, the series quickly became one of the most critically acclaimed shows of 1993. That year the show would win two Emmys and receive a nomination for a Peabody.

Melrose Place and Homicide were contemporaries, debuting within months of each other and ending after seven years, practically within a week of each other. When it comes to which was an A student and which was, at best, a C-, in the eyes of critics there’s no argument as to which was which and having watching every episode of both shows (don’t judge) I won’t debate it. Homicide was a series of urban decay and darkness; Melrose Place took place in a Los Angeles without a single African-American person. The dialogue and direction on Homicide crackled; the writing on Melrose Place was so cheesy camp would be too good for it. Melrose Place killed off more of its regulars in a season than Homicide did in its lifetime, in car crashes, building explosion and in one case, a drunken woman slipping and drowning in the building swimming pool while nobody watched. No one pretended Melrose Place took place in the real world. Homicide was so real it hurt.

But while Melrose Place at its peak averaged 20 to 25 million viewers a year on a network that was still struggling for respectability, Homicide could barely get nine to ten million viewers an episode on the number one network everywhere else. On more than one occasion TV Guide labeled Homicide ‘The Best Show You’re Not Watching’. I’m not sure Melrose Place would even enter the ‘so bad its good’ level of the discussion. Melrose Place waltzed to a renewal every year it was up for it and I’m sure when it came to an end, there were executives who were pulling for another season. With the exception of a two-year renewal at the end of the 1995-1996 season, Homicide had to fight for its life every year it was on the air and no one was left to fight for it by the end .

Melrose Place, it’s worth noting, inspired countless imitators when it was on the air, as well as a short-lived spinoff Models Inc which testified to the popularity it had on the landscape. While Homicide would serve as the foundation of the careers of so many forcing working in Peak Tv to this  day, including Fontana and Simon, no one has even tried anything close to a network show like that, either while it was on the air or all the years after.

As someone who began his career writing about Homicide, who was stunned every year that it never got the requisite amount of love it deserved from the Emmys, who was infuriated  by its cancellation and is overjoyed its finally appearing on streaming, this frustrated me immensely at the time and still does. I was taking the view of both a critic and  a fan. But even the books I read about the show at the time made it very clear how real the struggles for Homicide’s survival were at the time.

Homicide’s survival of seven seasons in the 1990s is nothing short of miraculous. It didn’t survive the way so many critically acclaimed shows do now, because of a loyal fan base or a lot of awards. It’s survival was in part twofold: there were executives who believed in it and were willing to let it survive, and just as importantly during the 1990s NBC was entering its era of ‘Must See TV’. Seinfeld and Frasier were dominating the ratings, ER and Law & Order were critical and ratings hits and the network was number one for seven straight years. Because of this the network was willing to indulge a creative success like Homicide even if it wasn’t drawing in ratings.

And the fact that millions of Americans, most of them young, were watching Melrose Place and almost no one was watching Homicide must have dug in the craw of every single TV critic during the decade. I don’t remember anyone saying akin to it during the period (I wasn’t reading TV journals at the time) but it must have been the fact that these kind of trashy soaps were drawing in millions of viewers and quality shows like Homicide were being ignored must have enraged so many critics of the era. In their minds the smart A student was being overshadowed by a more attractive but shallow C- student. And because they couldn’t blame the fact that millions of people preferred the company of the C- to the A, they decided to blame the system that allowed it to happen.

There has always been a divide between the viewer and critic of television and the business model. In the mind of the former, their preferences should drive the narrative even if the shows they are watching are not profitable or popular. This came up over and over when I was growing up and its still a subject of immense derision more than thirty years later. What network executive in their right mind could cancel such quality shows as My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks; what idiots kept shows like According to Jim and so many other brainless sitcoms on instead? And from a creative standpoint and the standpoint of the fans, it was a moronic decision. But network presidents and executives have to make decisions on a financial level. There was a devoted fanbase for each of the former shows, but it wasn’t a large enough fanbase to keep it on the air. Creatively, it was stupid. Economically, it was logical.

This is the fundamental divide between creativity, critics and the people who provide the funding. For the critics, money should never be a consideration for art. For the executives it’s the only decision that matters. The creative forces are willing to play both sides; they’re more than willing to say their purveyors of a fine art – until they think they’re being cheated by the bosses, in which case they’re all about being exploited by management. That became very clear during the strike this summer.

I think the arrival of The Sopranos on HBO was something that mattered more to critics than anyone else – not fans of TV, not the people behind it, not even HBO. The most important thing The Sopranos did in the eyes of critics was redefine what a popular hit was. And once you can redefine the metric for what a hit is, then its easy to redefine the narrative of everything that follows.

In the next entry in this series, I’m going to deal with what I as a viewer was watching when the first season of The Sopranos premiered in January of 1999. The answer speaks volumes to what television was like back then and why it matters now.