A Golden Age
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A GOLDEN AGE
By Daren Foster
**TV's no longer a complete and utter wasteland.**
Anxiously awaiting the final episode of Mad Men’s second season.. I mean, how long are we going to have to wait for season number 3?! Was there anything else coming down the pike to fill the void!? They weren’t going to force me onto a steady diet of network television, were they?!? So yeah, I was plenty justified in being anxious. Not to mention distracted..
What was I saying? (Har, har.)
Waiting for the show to begin, I was struck by a particular promo claim. It seems that Entertainment Weekly has declared Mad Men to be the finest television program for the past 25 years. The last 25 years? You mean, since 1983? Why 1983?
Casting my Google-enhanced mind back to a time when a German girl named Nena ruled the radio airwaves with her 99 Red Balloons, movie audiences swooned over Jennifer Beals, Stephen King published both Christine and Pet Sematary, in 1983 Dallas was the highest rated show on television and The Jeffersons -- I shit you not… call me a liar, you’re calling Wikipedia a liar -- was still a Top 20 hit. This is the fare that Mad Men took 25 years to overcome? Yes, yes, some among you out there with equal Google searching capabilities will point out that the 1983-84 American television schedule also included the likes of St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues, Cheers, Diff’rent Strokes, Mama’s Family, The Facts of Life, Manimal!! (Sorry. I just couldn’t help myself.)
Newsflash, folks. While St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues stood head and shoulders above the competition of their time, they are now simply cultural artifacts, curiosities from an earlier time. Your daddy’s TV. Any similarities between those shows and the likes of Mad Men are purely coincidental. Yes, technically they all belong to the same phylum we call ‘Television’ and we still sit prone in front of a magical device that slavishly dishes out mind-numbing amounts of entertainment gruel for our viewing pleasure but any and all other resemblances end at that point.
Television is presently experiencing a golden age, a renaissance. Nothing that came before it can be considered anything other than a distant relative. A second cousin twice removed from a remarriage of a stepmother’s great aunt on her father’s side. They might as well be total and absolute strangers, is what I’m saying here.
Actually, that’s not quite true. There is still the same ratio of quality television programming to crappy output. That’s to say, for every one excellent show, there are 20 that are insufferable, from the merely derivative and formulaic to nothing short of atrocious. It just seems like there’s a lot more garbage filling the airwaves as the television universe has expanded exponentially over the last quarter century. 
While the bad remains bad (new Knight Rider allow me to introduce you to the old Knight Rider), the great ones have achieved a level of perfection only dreamed of in earlier eras. It’s as if a new breed of content providers has been created from some laboratory experiment, fusing the best DNA samples from previous generations. A little Steven Bochco here and a piece of Joshua Brand and John Falsey there and, voila, a mutant strain of pure television gold.
Admittedly, many of those now churning out their masterpieces cut their chops in network television over the past 25 years. David Chase toiled on the writing teams of shows like The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure before getting the chance to step up to the plate with The Sopranos. David Milch of Deadwood and John From Cincinnati worked alongside Bochco on NYPD Blue. Former journalist David Simon first started writing for television on Homicide: Life on the Streets before perfecting his craft with The Wire and Generation Kill.
From a creator’s standpoint, there is a clear line of descent from the old network days to the explosion of brilliance in today’s TV. What has changed, and changed seismically, is the television landscape itself. It is a change that is best summed up with one word or three letters to be exact. HBO.
Conventional wisdom has it that The Sopranos started it all back in 1999 but you can look back 7 years earlier to The Larry Sanders Show for the rightful beginning. A premium cable channel, HBO basically aired movies, uncut and free of commercials along with satellite feeds of live sporting events like the Ali-Frazier Thrilla in Manilla. The Larry Sanders Show was one of its first attempts at a primetime series and while the show never garnered the massive audience later HBO series did, it set the table for what was to come. As a subscription provider free of the advertising pressure to rein in controversial content and language, HBO was able to offer creators absolute freedom in terms of subject matter, tone and style.
So when The Sopranos swept into the mainstream consciousness, all bets were off and everything changed irrevocably. Other pay cable outlets emerged (Showtime and FX) and in less than a decade not only was standard network television under threat of irrelevance, movies saw their dominance as the supreme creative force called into question. Think that’s hyperbole? How many films can you name off the top of your head that have the satisfying depth and emotional charge of The Sopranos or The Wire? Or Deadwood? Or Mad Men? Or Generation Kill?
Not every show that emerges from the specialty cable world is a work of pure genius. The Shield seems to be bereft of any moral centre. Rome and Carnivale were high concept ideas that didn’t fully succeed in capturing the popular imagination. Six Feet Under generated legions of devoted fans but revealed creator Alan Ball’s limited repertoire that began with American Beauty and is on full display with his new series, True Blood. There’s a creepiness that lurks below our normal lives. Yawn. Damages was fun but ultimately played out as a mere hyper-melodrama. And John From Cincinnati?! What the hell was that?
Yet, I would happily watch and re-watch John From Cincinnati over pretty well every offering out there on network television. It defied expectation at almost every step and its ultimate failure to creatively coalesce was still more satisfying than anything on offer from the commercial networks with all their CSI knock-offs, paranormal sleuths and idle rich kids. And don’t even get me started on the plague that is reality programming. 
All that dross aside, it is a grand time for a television viewer these days. However, it does come with these gaping holes. With Mad Men now on hiatus, how are we to fill our evening hours? I could read a book, I guess. Take up a hobby or learn a new language. Better yet, maybe I’ll dust off The Sopranos box set and start to watch it from the beginning again. For some 65 hours or so, I can sit back and revel in the pleasure that comes with being treated like an intelligent, fully sentient being.
READ MORE COLUMNS BY DAREN FOSTER
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