Network TV Still Doesn't Get It

Last week I saw an article mentioning that network programmers were once again making their customary push to loosen the censors in primetime "in hopes of becoming more competitive with cable." The cat's out of the bag big-time now, with new shows like The Shield and Six Feet Under taking up where The Sopranos and Sex and the City are beginning to show their age. This is no small matter, either: cable long ago stole news from the networks, and sports are close behind. What's left for them? Network execs have long spoken of prime-time drama and sitcoms as the French spoke of the Maginot Line, circa 1939. Execs know that if they lose the weeknights, they could lose the whole damn ship. It's taken twenty years, but it's finally come to this.

What's most pathetic though is how little the bastards get it. It can be argued that The Sopranos simply would not work without the no-boundaries world of cable. "Why don't you eat some fucking salad you fat fuck" simply doesn't work without the fuck, and I can see where Sex and the City is just too rich for the Family Hour. But neither of these shows succeeded just because they were allowed to be graphic. I'd actually argue that artistic freedom pretty much killed HBO's otherwise-gripping prison series Oz. Despite good acting and great material, the show's drive to show prison life at its most brutally naked simply became unappetizing. I don't give a damn about equality: men do not look good in full-frontal nudity. I'll be the first to admit the value of shock in art, but it's like salt: a little too much and the food's ruined.

The latest generation of cable series have grown beyond this, though, most notably FX's The Shield and HBO's Six Feet Under. Do bosses at CBS et. al. really think that Six Feet Under got umpteen Emmy nominations because the characters can say fuck on the air? Surely it has nothing to do with decent acting or writing or anything else, it's just about the sex, violence, and dirty language. Remove Brenda's nymphomaniacal antics and the occasional cuss and you have almost nothing that a network hasn't shown a hundred times before with notably less sophistication.

But for my money, there isn't a more interesting show on TV today than The Shield, and if it can't be shown on a "real network" the question has to be why not. What really separates The Shield from its long and inglorious string of bad-cop predecessors can be summed up in one incendiary word: race, and nobody says so, but that's the part that keeps it on basic cable. Network TV reduces the complications of race in America today to a series of saccharine stereotypes. Black people are invariably jolly and wise, hispanics are fast-talking jokers, and white people are like a bunch of big dumb cows who somehow got the top job.

The Shield takes an unflinching look at the way things really work, whether it's the politically-ambitious, race-baiting Hispanic captain or the white chief whose mistress is buying up ghetto property to make money when the patrols are put back in the neighborhood. Rarely pretty, the picture is nonetheless eye-opening, and problems are rarely improved by the Pollyanna-ish dreaming that mainstream TV presents. Watch Boston Public and The Shield back-to-back and you'll see what I mean.

So in the end, the answer for the Nets isn't to show more skin and talk dirtier, though that would probably help for a few months, but to produce shows of the same quality as HBO et. al. But that is like asking a supertanker to turn around inside a bathtub. For five years now we've heard the Big Three say that the recipe for more viewers was to churn out ever-increasing volumes of fetid tripe like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Big Brother. It wasn't supposed to happen this way: cable was where you used to get the real garbage, the pilots the real stations threw away, the "real life TV" programs the white-tablecloth networks wouldn't dream of sullying their reputations with. As the saying goes, how's it feel now that the glove's on the other foot?

Oh my god, they un-killed South Park

Usually the release of a movie based on a TV show is among the surest signs that the show has jumped the shark. The X-Files, which for a few years was so smart it was a hit in the UK, went down faster than Fr. Shanley's altarboys in the season fllowing the movie, and never recovered. They could have Scully and that other female agent do a naked scene for an entire episode and nobody would watch. The season after the movie almost always sucks, and to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, "There are no second seasons in American TV."

Which makes the comeback of South Park all the more remarkable. The novelty of toilet humor and cursing kiddies inevitably wore off, much as the Bart-centered Simpsons petered out after a season or two.

While The Simpsons made a genuine shift in making Homer the star of the show, South Park put satire and social comment at the center from the beginning. And unlike The Simpsons, whose writers surely vote with the New York Times editorial board, South Park's creators enjoyed filet of sacred cow regardless of which fringe-interest group it came from. But lately, the show has taken a truly noticeable shift to the right. To be more specific, it's become counter-counter-cultural.

The recent episode about the Catholic Church and, erm, crapping out your mouth, took this trend clear over the top. While painting the Church as an institution filled by loony, out-of-touch old men is so Village Voice, South Park gave equal time to grilling trendy yuppie atheism, and health food nannyism. In the end, the Catholic Church is destroyed, but religion as an idea is saved, and South Park's priest emerges as a righteous man. The last bit of dialogue, where Stan (?) asks his parents if "this mean[s] we have to go to Church" again, and they respond, "No, this means we get to go," is almost shocking.

What emerges from the rubble is a classically-American politics of pragmatic individualism, which sees fit to savage tired institutions and stupid fads equally. While Matt Stone and Trey Parker aren't exactly Jefferson and Madison, their message is a welcome one. For these days, it seems the main choice we have in politics is between the nannies of the left and the scolds of the right. You can have Al Gore, or John Ashcroft; laws against making gay jokes, or laws against being gay. I just hope that kids who watch South Park get the message in between the fart jokes.