If, as the Talking Heads sang, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," I can get a taste of the afterlife every night on TV. The most successful new show this spring is CBS’s Baby Bob, a tedious sit-com about a talking six-month-old. The producers of Baby Bob say that the title character won’t age significantly, no matter how long the series is on the air, and he’ll be played by a succession of infant actors. Maybe Baby Bob is supposed to be a Faustian tale about a newborn who sells his soul in exchange for premature powers of speech, not realizing that he’ll still be in diapers when he’s legally old enough to drive. More likely, CBS knows that its audience (most of whose members are clipping coupons for Depends) likes its TV to be static.
Baby Bob may be lowbrow entertainment, but NBC’s The West Wing, a favorite of the intelligentsia, is no more dynamic. Each episode is a collection of crises that burn themselves out while President Bartlet and his aides gently bicker about how to handle them. A few weeks ago, they got mildly concerned about an accident involving a uranium-filled truck that might have been caused by a terrorist (it wasn’t) and might have sent a radioactive cloud over a populated area (it didn’t). I admit it’s comforting to think that this kind of problem can take care of itself, especially when our real-life president lacks the gravitas of Greg the Bunny. But can’t West Wing producer Aaron Sorkin create something for us to care about in his parallel political universe? Even Bartlet’s vice-president, a promising villain in the show’s first season, is now just another syncophant to the commander-in-chief.
Baby Bob and The West Wing (why not a "baby Bartlet" crossover episode?) aren’t the only formulaic shows with high ratings. The corpses keep coming and audiences keep growing for C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, Crossing Jordan, and the three pointlessly sordid Law & Order series; meanwhile, shows with evolving characters and story lines have been much less successful. Ratings have slipped for ER, though it’s been fascinating to watch the hospital drama shift from semi-realism to Oz-like sadistic attacks by the writers on all the characters. (The show is like a train that takes years to derail — and there are 22 more episodes to fall off the tracks next season.) Ally McBeal, Felicity, and The X-Files, once popular for their plot twists and complicated relationships, have all been cancelled. The ax also fell on Once and Again, one of those rare shows whose characters you can imagine continuing to grow even after the series finale. (There is a rumor that ABC may rescind this cancellation order because its drama pilots for the fall are all so bad.) Among half-hour comedies, Undeclared and The Job had the strongest character development this season, but neither attracted large audiences. Like Once and Again, they were hurt by erratic scheduling — and by having episodes aired out of sequence.
So there are few series cliffhangers this spring, unless you’re following Alias (season finale on May 12 on ABC), you still care about the Ed-and-Carol mating dance on Ed (May 15 on NBC), or you’re really surprised by anything that happens on Friends (May 16 on NBC). The final month of the season is also short on TV-movies and mini-series (the most notable is ABC’s Dinotopia, a fantasy along the lines of Jurassic Park that’ll run May 12 through 14), and there are few variety programs with original content (CBS’s Barry Manilow concert on May 11 counts as new entertainment these days). Instead, the networks are banking on nostalgia specials, hoping to repeat the success of last fall’s tributes to I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, and The Carol Burnett Show. Upcoming clip shows will celebrate American Bandstand (May 3 on ABC), The Honeymooners (May 6 on CBS), Laverne and Shirley (May 7 on ABC), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (May 13 on CBS), and The Cosby Show (May 19 on NBC). Other highlights include the NBC 75th Anniversary Special (May 5) and TV Guide’s The 50 Best Shows of All Time (May 13 on ABC). It’s a curious message for the major networks to send viewers: don’t bother watching us and you won’t miss anything you haven’t seen before.
In fact, the networks are desperately trying to rebuild their audiences, using all kinds of gimmicks in place of coherent storytelling. Last week, ABC aired Contact: Talking to the Dead, an on-the-cheap special in which a medium claimed to converse with the murdered wife of Robert Blake. After that, he attempted to make us believe that he was putting Wheel of Fortune letter turner Vanna White in touch with her dead boyfriend. (Next time, he’ll try to contact all the ABC News employees who have died of embarrassment.) This kind of situation would have dramatic possibilities as a Twilight Zone episode, but nothing of interest ever happened on Contact, mostly because the medium showed little imagination in toying with his victims. If you missed his session with Vanna White, you can re-create her sense of astonishment with a small dog, a rubber ball, the ability to hide the ball behind your back for a few seconds before waving it in the dog’s face, and the patience to do this trick over and over again. Fun for a few seconds, but hardly engrossing television.
The reality shows aren’t much better. Survivor has some interesting plot twists (producer Rob Burnett knows that the more he works to rig the outcome, the better the result), but the message of these shows is that people can’t change their personalities even when a million dollars is at stake. If someone is stupid and self-absorbed when he steps onto Temptation Island, he’s going to be just as stupid and self-absorbed when he gets kicked off. We already knew this from computer manuals: garbage in, garbage out. (If you think that assessment is harsh, read the comments from the most devoted viewers of these shows, on such Web sites as www.realitytvfans.com.) One of ABC’s rare hits this season (relatively speaking), The Bachelor took arrested development to new heights. It revolved around a Harvard-educated hunk’s choosing a potential mate from 25 pre-selected women. Often seen shirtless, he wasn’t the insecure or introspective type — not surprising, given that ABC was boosting his ego by describing him as the perfect catch. He didn’t have to worry about being rejected, and he knew that the producers wouldn’t let him look too bad on national television (because then it might be difficult to find a bachelor for the show’s next edition). He could say stupid things — like asking a woman whether her breasts were real and then explaining, without irony, "I just want things to be natural all the time" — and still be assured by everyone around him that he was smart. (Even Baby Bob could have come up with a more sophisticated toast than "to a beautiful and super-cool woman!") He was so perfectly sculptured and yet so emotionally stunted that ABC could have called the show The Bonsai Bachelor.
The Bachelor owes much to Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire, the 2000 Fox special that featured a live wedding between two people who had just met. The couple divorced almost immediately after the show aired, which sort of made the whole thing okay. The availability of quickie divorces means that The Bachelor isn’t really about life-changing decisions — which means it isn’t really about anything. In contrast, The Job, which may be the only prime-time series that has steadily improved this season, has been arresting (and painfully funny) in its depiction of a loveless marriage.
Some network executives blame September 11 for the proliferation of nostalgia specials and brainless programs like Baby Bob. They claim we’re all so freaked out by terrorism that we crave uncomplicated (i.e., infantile) entertainment. But this theory is a little too convenient. It’s more accurate to say that the free-TV networks are freaked out by rising production costs coupled with a permanent decline in the number of viewers they can reach on a regular basis (thanks to cable channels, DVDs, and the Internet). Their response is to fill their schedules with programs that are cheap to make and easy to promote.
But at the same time that addictive comedies and dramas are disappearing from free TV, they’re blossoming on the premium-cable networks of HBO (The Sopranos, Oz, Six Feet Under) and Showtime (Queer As Folk, Resurrection Boulevard). A few years ago, it appeared the commercial networks were going to fight for sophisticated viewers, with shows like Once and Again, Freaks and Geeks, and the first year or two of The West Wing and Will & Grace. Now it’s clear that they have a problem with commitment — which may explain their infatuation with The Bachelor, Fear Factor, and other programs that are forgotten the next morning. I hope that ABC, CBS, and NBC find it heavenly to lose viewers, because that situation isn’t going to change any time soon.
