Recently, CBS, which is owned by Paramount Global announced they would air Yellowstone which have already aired on Paramount-Plus on its fall line-up as a way to get programming on the channel as the writers’ strike and now the actors’ strike has shut down Hollywood. Judging from the recent list of Emmy nominations, network TV is struggling for any types of programming. All network shows were snubbed from the majors awards with only nominations for categories like Best Talk Show or Best Animated Series. This begs the question, is network TV a thing of the past?
Thirty years ago, there was an uproar over the upcoming NYPD Blue because it had PG-13 style language and nudity. And apparently the script sounded like it was written by a 13-year-old with words like “dickhead” and “asshole” in substitution for the really profane language (shit, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker) New York City cops and criminals would say. There was even some controversy over Dennis Franz’ character pulling down his pants to have sex with a prostitute. You didn’t see anything because some mobster rushes in and shoots him.
There was also a sex scene between David Caruso and Sherry Stringfield that was so edited by so many cuts and chopped up, we saw some side boob and both of their bare bums, but it wasn’t nowhere near the Eyes Wide Shut orgy people were making it out to be. Granted the hype probably had most people tuning in and they were smart to keep the sex scene toward the end. Yet it wasn’t the first show to show nudity. St. Elsewhere had the late Ed Flanders moon the hospital adminstrator played by Ronny Cox. And Mariel Hemingway had done some minor nude shots in the TV show Civil Wars.
Yet, it still wasn’t very vulgar. But back in the mid-1950s, people went nuts when a fully clothed Elvis Presley gyrated on national TV earning him the nickname “Elvis the Pelvis.” Late during the 1993-1994 season, Meredith Baxter, of Family Ties fame, famously appeared in a TV movie, My Breast, about a woman who deals with breast cancer. She was shown having a breast exam within the first half hour or so, which meant a lot of people switch the channel once it was over and done.
But aside from hearing a bunch of middle schoolers passing along dirty language in the locker room, TV shows at the time had balls, even if they couldn’t show any. Speaking of St. Elsewhere, the subject of a male doctor played by David Morse being sexually assaulted during a prison riot was presented in an episode. On All in the Family, a TV show that did everything it could to change things up, had an episode of Edith Bunker nearly getting raped herself. Along with All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times showed us real issues of race relations, poverty, abortion and violence against transgender people before they turned into “Very Special Episodes” in the 1980s.
And these were supposed to be fucking sitcoms. The drama shows were grittier as Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and even Starksy and Hutch portrayed a different view of cops and crime that was different than Dragnet or M Squad. Granted there weren’t many cable TV stations at the time and even the pay premiums were too busy trying to show what they could get away with. The first couple of seasons of 1st and Ten played more like Porky’s meets North Dallas Forty.
But then you had smarter shows like Dream On and Tales from the Crypt on HBO, which despite their use of foul language, nudity/sex and violence were top programming. Maybe that’s what encouraged other TV producers and writers to change things up. Let’s face it, no one ever died on The A-Team despite all the gunfire, car crashes and explosions. And there were moments in which The Cosby Show made The Brady Bunch look like All in the Family.
To keep the divide between network TV (of which Fox was even struggling) and cable TV, there was the Cable ACE Awards which were awarded from 1978 to 1997 when people realized they could move pass the now-Big Four Networks. After a lull in the late 1980s, the 1990s caused a resurgence of excellence in TV with shows like Twin Peaks (at least the first season), ER and The X-Files. But I think the TV rating guidelines in the late 1990s helped the same way it did with the film industry in the 1960s. The first thing I ever remember seeing as TV-M (TV-MA now) was the 1997 network showing of Schindler’s List on NBC that had profanity (including the F-word), lots of graphic violence and gore, as well as nudity (including full-frontal of both women and men). Reportedly sex scenes were edited. Apparently, they were okay with old people, women and children being killed and burned, but sex was an issue. Go figure. No wonder Games of Thrones went overboard with the sex and nudity.
But as Bob Dylan sang, “These times are a-changin’.” On Jan. 10, 1999, The Sopranos aired on HBO. Dream On had left three years earlier and the Arli$$ show was hated by critics and a SNL joke. But The Sopranos knocked it out of the park. If anything, it was a reason to get HBO to see what the big deal was. TV shows weren’t restricted to subject matter but also pacing now. A scene didn’t have to end short for a commerical break.
If you watch Showtime’s Masters of Horror with the spin-off NBC’s Fear Itself, you’d see the latter is like a red-headed stepchild of Masters, Tales From the Crypt and The Twilight Zone. Horror directors (John Landis, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and more) looked like they had more freedom and Masters went for the jugular (literally!) in some episodes. Fear Itself had a few good episodes but then dropped off in quality and was canceled during the summer of 2008 with only eight of the 13 episodes aired.
Maybe it was the rise of “Reality TV” in the 2000s that killed network TV. Network execs didn’t have to worry about TV stars arguing over salary disputes when they can have regular people stuck on an island in the Pacific. Rumor has it that The Apprentice was set to be canceled at the end of its sixth season in the spring of 2007. But as the threat of the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike seemed more immient, it caused NBC to fast track a seventh season to be filmed and then broadcast. Reformatted as Celebrity Apprentice with famous people, the change saved the show and thus made Donald Trump a higher paid TV game show host.
But just as writers and actors wonder how streaming services will affect their pay, it’s the format that’s helped kill off network TV programming. What was the last good TV show on one of the Big Four. The Good Place ended in the winter of 2020 after four seasons right before the onset of Covid-19. This Is Us seemed to fall apart after the first few seasons. I think it’s the last network show to get an Emmy nomination for Best Drama.
All the good comedy series that used to wow critics and win awards on network shows are gone. The fact that they couldn’t think of anything to replace The Big Bang Theory but Young Sheldon shows they ran out of ideas. The Goldbergs remained stuck in a 1980s time wrap becoming the next That 70’s Show which was the next M*A*S*H as in a show that overran several years past its premise. Law and Order: SVU is still going after 23 seasons but it seems to fit the same format that I mentioned of pacing and commercial breaks.
Maybe the problem is the networks screwed themselves? I was never a fan of Firefly but I admit Fox did the show dirty by not broadcasting them in order. And Futurama shouldn’t have aired on Sunday evenings at the strange time of 7 p.m./6 p.m. Central and Mountain Time, especially considering NFL football often pre-empting many games. And while King of the Hill lost its luster when Mike Judge and Greg Daniels left to work on other projects, it had been pre-empted so much that Internet chatter had spread the rumor the show had been quietly canceled.
Usually this was the time of summer when most networks would run promos ad nauseum about their upcoming new shows. I swear, it seems if you were to tabulate the run time of all promos of one show with the actual episodes runtime of the show broadcasting before it’s canceled, I think promos ran longer in length. You see a TV show that looks interesting and then you watch a couple of episodes and then, it’s canceled. Anyone remember the travesty that Emily’s Reasons Why Not?What’s crazy is if you look at some older shows like Diff’rent Strokes, Cheers or even Friends at their start, there almost unwatchable. Even the first episode of Saturday Night Live back in 1975 is hard to sit through.
Granted people have more options now and networks couldn’t work on shows to find the right timeslot and base. But I often wonder how many people watched shows back when there were only three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) just as background noise. You’ve had a long day at the office and you want to read the paper so you turn it to I Spy or Leave it to Beaver. You’re not really into the show but you just want to hear something like in the olden days when they’d keep the radio on. Maybe TV was still a young concept that people just tuned it the same way they’ll flip through YouTube and TikTok videos now without really getting interested.
Basically streaming shows are shorter in season duration. There’s usually no more than 10 episodes. Andor had 12 painfully long episodes while most of the Disney-Plus episodes were at eight. And Netflix had the novel idea of filming all episodes at once and streaming them all at once. Peacock has done the same. I’ve heard some reviewers say this is what saved Orange is the New Black from an early cancelation as the first season wasn’t the best. I never got into the show.
But TV has evolved. First there were just a handful of networks. Then there was the superstations like TBS, WGN and WWOR, among others which could be accessed on UHF dials. Syndication became popular as TV shows could be shown in first-run syndication. Most weren’t that good and aired at outrageous times. Next came cable TV with the pay premiun networks.
People are ditching satellite TV for streaming services and add-on plans. But the question is what is going to happen next? Is it going to be in in Batman Forever where they’ll be broadcasting shows in our brains? Or will we have to pay more for a TV show that is popular. Futurama is coming back this year on Hulu but what if you had to pay an extra $1 a month to watch it.
I don’t want to give them any ideas. But with Paramount Global owning CBS, NBCUniversal and Peacock both owned by Comcast and most of Fox’s programming is owned by Disney which owns ABC and both programming along with FX is on Hulu, why put the good shows for free on the dying networks? In the 1993 “event series” Wild Palms which was a precursor to the limited series format, there was a TV station that broadcast shows in a realistic hologram format. That series was set in 2007 but I wouldn’t doubt with the rise of artificial intelligence, we see something similar in the next 20-30 years.
And TV has gotten more bolder attracting A-list talent. It used to be where celebrities went to revive their careers or pay the bills. Now, an A-lister (like Harrison Ford, Zoe Saldana, Jeff Bridges, etc.) can film a limited series and a blockbuster movie in the same year and come back for subsequent seasons without having to worry about the summer hiatus to pick and choose their film roles. TV formats aren’t set in stone which is what I think people realized with streaming services.
Can network TV survive the 2020s and after or will it just become all streaming? I think we’ll see a total blackout of network TV by 2050, if not sooner. People forget it was a product of a bygone era. Most daily programs catered to elderly people, housewives or kids with programming such as cartoons, soap operas (excuse me, daytime dramas) and game shows. The late afternoons were mostly news programs and then you had the prime time shows with the occasional TV movie of the week. Late night news was followed by a talk show or a late night movie. And then the stations went off the air. Believe it or not, my friends and I were at college one Saturday night, circa 2000-2001, when the TV broadcasting went off the air. It was about 3-4 a.m. but still surprised us.
TV programming took into account summer time fun which is why most networks aired reruns or burned off shows they were contractually obligated to air. But no one wanted to spend the warm spring and summer months in front of the boob tube. Also, most of the best shows were on the weekends. You see, movies often stayed in theaters for months or even years moving around to different style theaters, dollar theaters, drive-ins, etc. So there was really no reason to go out on a Friday or Saturday night each week to catch a movie.
I never caught on with CBS’ Survivor, but I think that part of the initial appeal was the bright idea to air it during the summer of 2000. It gave people something new to watch. In the movie Avalon, the family gets their first TV set and they watch a test pattern on a black-and-white for hours on end. Why? It’s new to them.
And then something new will come around when network TV has gone the way of the dodo. Right before Covid, I visited with my friend’s parents who I was close with. They had just canceled their satellite TV. They were in their mid to late 70s. Streaming is easier and cheaper they said. They’re right.
Yes, Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen Zers even may gather their grandchildren around with the Internet goes out and tells them the days in which TV shows were aired on the TV without the Internet. Hell, if the Gen Xers live long enough, they’ll them them how there was an antenna wired into the TV and that’s how it was done.
“Unfortunately, you couldn’t stop what you were watching, children, and had to go to the bathroom during the commercial breaks. No, we couldn’t pay extra for no commercials. We didn’t have to pay at all. That’s what the commercials took care of. Yes, it was free and we didn’t realize it.”
As Archie and Edith sang, “Those were the days!”
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 