Viewing a TV death in four acts
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=1628835
Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Monday, May 25, 2009
We should have known that Without a Trace wasn't long for this world.
After seven seasons, the plots were turning in on themselves. The FBI
agents were taking over the stories, shoving aside the missing persons
they were supposed to be saving. Even the criminals were turning into
afterthoughts, filler placed between vivid events in the lives of the
agents.
In one recent episode, an agent of excellent reputation fell for a
woman who happened to be a vicious habitual criminal. Two agents fell
in love and married. The chief of the bureau lost his great love
(another agent, of course) to a younger man.
Perhaps CBS made the right decision last week when it chose to cancel
Without a Trace, even though the audience remained sizeable. Perhaps
it was a question of the decadence and strain that often precede the
imminent death of a long-running series.
Most episodic shows tell two stories simultaneously. One deals with
fictional characters. The other is the narrative's slow evolution
under the pressure of desperate producers and harried writers.
The second story demonstrates that the history of a TV series, like
the history of a nation or an art movement, falls into four periods -
primitive, classic, baroque and decadent.
In the primitive stage the audience is unconvinced that the show will
matter and the people producing it aren't so sure, either. When
Flashpoint went on the air last summer, it spent far too much time
explaining itself.
Its subject is the fictional Strategic Response Unit in the Toronto
police force, dealing with everything from
hostage-taking to bomb threats. The first show gave us the impression
that this was to be a program about cops loading up their guns,
strapping on their Kevlar vests and checking their smoke bombs before
going into action. The obsession with mechanical detail seemed likely
to limit genuine storytelling. But since then, Flashpoint has turned
into a convincing, fast-moving series. It's now well into the classic
period, confident about what it's doing and how to do it.
To see the baroque sensibility on TV, consider the extensive
ornamentation built into House, the most popular U.S. scripted series
last season. The parallels with Sherlock Holmes are a clear example.
Holmes and Dr. Gregory House deploy similar logic (eliminate
everything false and you reveal the truth), both use drugs (Holmes's
cocaine, House's Vicodin), both relax by making music (Holmes's
violin, House's guitar and piano). House has only one friend, Dr.
James Wilson, an oncologist whose name resembles Dr. John Watson's.
House's address is 221B, the Holmes address on Baker Street.
References to Holmes books and his enemy Moriarty crop up. That's pure
literary ornament.
The decadent era begins when writers lose interest in their themes and
try to maintain audiences by concocting steadily more outlandish
storylines. One of the attorneys in the law firm of McKenzie, Brackman
on the program L.A. Law (1986-1994) was a divorce specialist famous
for seducing his clients and all other available females. A
scriptwriter had him fall through a ceiling in the office while
shagging his secretary. Amusing, but it turned comedy into farce and
drained reality from the character - as Happy Days did in 1977 when
Fonzie rode water skis over a Seaworld shark, making "jump the shark"
a term for a program reduced to terminal silliness. (In 1997 a
website, jumptheshark.com, began chronicling self-destructive TV
shows.)
In another L.A. Law episode a man was accused of using toad venom as a
narcotic, but claimed he kept toads merely as pets; he destroyed his
defense when he licked one while testifying. An annoying executive
partner in McKenzie, Brackman solved everyone's problems by falling
down an elevator shaft. That became a famous event in TV history but
the arbitrary plotting suggested decadence and foretold early
cancellation. Soon L.A. Law was no more.
Da Vinci's Inquest, the most convincing Canadian show in at least a
generation, ran from 1998 to 2005 and created Dominic da Vinci, a
Vancouver coroner, as a credible civil servant with a strong sense of
justice. Its decadent period arrived in the form of a follow-up show,
Da Vinci's City Hall, with the same character promoted to mayor.
Everything that seemed natural in the original now seemed false.
Chris Haddock, the producer, tried in vain to surround the central
figure with political conspiracies that would bring the show to life,
but it's hard to make the routine of an honest mayor interesting.
Apparently there was no way to keep him from spending most of his time
going to meetings or planning to go to meetings. The audience
departed, then the show. Haddock's next series, Intelligence, about a
B.C. marijuana magnate and his Byzantine connections with the forces
of law, didn't go the distance from primitive to decadent. While at
times it seemed the most convincing drama ever produced in Canada, it
died quickly when viewers realized they needed almost scholarly
concentration to follow the plot.
As a program's fourth or fifth season ends, alert viewers often notice
that a frantic quality invades the scripts. Writers are running short
on ideas just when they're trying to squeeze another season out of a
somewhat worn concept. They reach for increasingly dubious themes and
put the main characters in deeper and deeper jeopardy.
That happened during the recently concluded fifth season of Numb3rs,
an amiable show about a mathematical genius, Charlie Eppes, who helps
his brother Don solve crimes for the FBI in Los Angeles.
The stories became painfully marginal, the sign of writing that's lost
its way ("When a pair of valuable sneakers is stolen from the vault of
a foreign ambassador, the team delves into the world of sneaker
collecting"). The star characters began turning into victims. The FBI
harshly investigated both Charlie and Don for leaking classified
information, but let them off with a warning. Don was stabbed while
pursuing a murderer, Charlie blaming himself. Next, Charlie was
knocked unconscious and his mathematician fiancée (another consultant
for the FBI) was kidnapped for her computer skills by a Charles
Manson-like figure leading a gang of crazed females.
Numb3rs has been renewed for 2009-2010, but recent programs brought
with them that sense of decaying inspiration that appears not long
before a series heads for the great re-run in the sky.
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