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As I sat down on my couch Sunday night getting ready to watch the season finale of The Walking Dead, a thought occurred to me. Network television is (very nearly) dead. I thought about it for a while and tried to figure out why this was.
I thought about all of the shows that I currently watch on a week-to-week basis, and 90% of them are on either basic cable or a premium channel. However, what’s most interesting is that three years ago, the opposite was the case. The only shows that I watched were on Network, shows like Lost, 24, Heroes, and Chuck. Now all of those shows are gone, and we’re left with Glee, at least four different singing competitions, Grey’s Anatomy, three CSI’s, two NCIS’s, and about 10 other nondescript cop shows that people just can’t seem to get enough of for some reason.
The innovation is gone. There is no more desire among the network execs to create something new and fresh that pushes the boundaries of what can be done on television. Not for lack of trying, however. The past several years have seen a slew of high-concept dramas trying to fill the shoes of Lost and 24, and nearly all of them have failed. Shows like Flashforward (canceled after one season), V (canceled after a season and a half), The Event (canceled after one season), and Terra Nova (canceled after half of a season). To put it simply, none of these shows were successful because they weren’t good. They were trying too hard to be something that already existed, and they were failing. Then you have a show like Fringe on Fox (which has been called the worthy successor to The X Files) that is a very interesting and intricately-written show, with innovative plot twists and layered characters, and no one watches it. It has been on the air for nearly five years and the ratings have sunk to around three million viewers per week (to put things into perspective, a rerun of Two and a Half Men averaged about nine million viewers last Monday). So naturally the networks believe that none of these types of shows will be successful, because they all either end up canceled or on the edge of being canceled, leaving us with five new versions of CSI. Even the cop shows on CBS that don’t have ‘CSI’ in the title are just carbon copies of CSI. Clearly the original title of the new Hawaii Five-0 was going to be CSI: Honolulu, but they realized they could rope in more old people if they gave it a recognizable title.
With no hope of the networks picking up these high-concept dramas, they have no choice but to go to cable, which is how AMC became the best channel on TV. You have all of these relatively new cable networks (AMC, FX, HBO, and Showtime) and all of them want to be actual networks that show scripted programs and not just B-Movies from the 80’s and 90’s. They want to make sure that they hit the ground running with shows that they know will be “great” shows so they can be taken seriously, which accomplishes two things. One, it allows them to be slightly more selective in their pilot process, and two, causes them to give the makers of these shows a lot of creative freedom in order to allow for no restrictions on the show’s quality. The creative freedom that comes with being on cable has also become a major selling point for these showrunners, which has led to a long string of shows in recent years that push the envelope and change the rules of what you can and can’t do on television. Game of Thrones features nudity, graphic violence, swearing, and incest, all in the 10 o’clock prime time slot; but that’s on HBO, you get what you pay for. It’s not just the premium channels, though. Right over on AMC on basic cable in that same time slot, Mad Men can say s#!+ whenever they want, and Breaking Bad gets to drop one f-bomb per season as well as literally blow off a man’s face and have us see the results. In that same time slot on NBC we have The Celebrity Apprentice.
However, there is one thing that I believe broadcast networks hold over cable. While cable has completely taken over the television Drama, on the whole, Network still owns sitcoms. NBC still has “Thursday Night Done Right” and I think their Thursday night lineup is as good as it’s ever been, with the exception of the exponentially-decreasing quality of The Office. Parks and Recreation is hilarious, and is as good as The Office was when The Office was at its peak. I also maintain that Community is the funniest show to be on television since Arrested Development. It’s not just NBC, either. Over on ABC, there’s Modern Family, which is one of the funniest and smartest shows on now, and on CBS The Big Bang Theory keeps the classic laugh track format fresh, and is on par with its nuanced counterparts. That is not to say cable does not have its share of good comedies. Louie and Always Sunny on FX are great and much unlike anything else on TV, but in my opinion, there’s just something about the network sitcoms on right now that make me feel good while I’m watching them; as opposed to Louie and Always Sunny which are hilarious, but they are hilarious in a much darker way.
Network is on its way out the door, but it doesn’t have to be. It needs to adapt to survive, and to a certain extent, eliminate its boundaries. There are examples of the networks trying to accomplish this: ABC and NBC both trying to repeat the success of Mad Men with Pan-Am (canceled after 10 episodes) and The Playboy Club (canceled after three episodes). They just need to understand that people aren’t watching Mad Men just because it’s a 60’s period piece; they’re watching Mad Men because it’s a great show that just happens to be a 60’s period piece. They need to realize that people aren’t just going to watch any old show just because it’s kind of similar to some other show that’s actually good. People want quality, and the people who don’t want quality watch Reality TV. Then, and only then, they can cease digging their own graves and rejoin the rest of us in the 21st Century.
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