It used to be that the new television year began with a bang. It was all mixed up with back to school and new cars and the arrival of football. At the stroke of midnight on Labor Day, the race was on.
That's the way that we over-30 paleoliths remember television: with only three or four channels (counting public TV), maybe five for urbanites. These days the cable-wired (slight) majority of American households numbers its TV options in the dozens, and the new TV "season" is an increasingly slippery construct. Beginning sometime in August (although Fox has taken to debuting some shows in mid-summer), the slow trickle of new product continues until Halloween, or sometime after the World Series, whichever comes last.
By the time this column is read, the process will just be completed; some of the first shows on will have been long since cancelled. The new TV year demonstrates with certainty the hegemony of the half-hour situation comedy as the staple of the broadcast television diet, with dozens of new ones, most old ones returning, and a couple of hundred more waiting in the wings as mid-season replacements. As a corollary, the hour-long dramatic series continues its march to oblivion.
And, speaking of memory lane: There was a time when AM radio meant music--pop, country, R&B, whatever; it was all spread out there on the big dial from 540 to 1600. Sometime around the turn of the '70s, due to some complicated legal and technical changes, the FM spectrum, with its low interference and superior sound quality, became more accessible and saleable to the listening public and advertisers. Within a few years, most music programming had jumped to the FM side, and now in most places the AM dial is occupied solely by talk radio and foreign language stations.
Something similar may be happening with cable and broadcast television. At the same time that dramatic productions are dwindling on the networks, the cable channels are creating more of their own original dramatic product--usually in mini-series or one-shot movie formats. Meanwhile, the Big Three's commitment to daily news coverage is dwindling, while cable news services proliferate and subdivide wildly.
By the end of the century, broadcast TV, like AM radio today, will be the format for low-cost, high-turnover, high-static programming--mainly sit-coms and news magazine shows. Meanwhile cable will have become the medium for drama, movies, and breaking news.
This is fine and good, as long as one of the Clinton or Gore (or Rodham Clinton) administrations in the decades to come will at last get around to issuing an American Cable Television Security Card, guaranteeing every American a basic-plus cable package that can never be taken away for any reason. Then the New Deal will be complete.
THE NETWORKS haven't completely given up on the dramatic series yet, but the efforts that do get made are symptomatic of the problem. Exhibit A: ABC's controversial NYPD Blue. NYPD is the latest effort from the distinguished TV house of Bochco--Steven Bochco, that is--producer of such 1980s quality TV staples as LA Law and Hill Street Blues.
With NYPD Bochco went back to his roots in the cop show genre, but his marketing savvy seems to have told him that, in today's TV market, quality is no longer enough (as evidenced by the cancellation of Barry Levinson's high-quality cop show Homocide). So Bochco put on his thinking cap.
Judging from his public comments about NYPD, his logic went something like this: Cable is the competition. What does cable have that the networks don't? Naked bodies and swear words. So the way to bring drama back to broadcast TV is simple--get naked and nasty.
This marketing strategy was apparent last spring when, in the midst of the congressional furor over TV violence, Bochco announced that his upcoming series would "push the envelope" of what you can show on television. Of course the timing guaranteed a furor. And sure enough, the Religious Right, conservative Catholics, and other usual suspects raised one before the show even hit the air. On opening night 25 ABC affiliates refused to air NYPD Blue--including big-city stations in Dallas, Louisville, Norfolk, and Jacksonville.
The sad part of the NYPD Blue story is this. The writing and acting is almost as good as TV gets. If the cops-and-robbers format works for you at all anymore, NYPD Blue even has some things to say about the time that we live in, about the ways people cope with moral dilemmas under horrible pressure, and about how we connect with each other--or don't--in the midst of all that.
But, at least for this viewer, whatever value NYPD Blue may have had was far outweighed from the get-go by the crude cynicism of Bochco's "envelope-pushing" innovations. Bochco's big deal turned out to be a network display of female buttocks in a sex scene that could have been suggested, drastically shortened, or eliminated entirely with no loss to the story or the character development.
It was the kind of moment that makes life difficult for civil libertarians. In 30 short seconds Bochco proved, in a big way, before millions of Americans, that most of Hollywood's high-minded rhetoric about free expression is really just a cover for the practice of laissez faire free enterprise. From the producers' side, the controversy over TV programming content is really an old-fashioned American battle about the inalienable right of a few huge corporations to make the biggest possible buck by any means necessary.
Danny Duncan Collum, a former Sojourners associate editor and now a contributing editor, lived in Alexandria, Virginia, where he was a free-lance writer, when this article appeared.
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