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JAG rose through the ranks, cracking the top 20 by 1998. But it attracted relatively little media attention compared with less widely watched but trendier contemporaries like Sex and the City. Why? There is the slight hitch that, by most critics' measures, it's never been very good. Rip off the epaulets and you've got one more lawyer/cop show, with flat characters and dialogue and extra rations of melodrama. But critical contempt didn't exactly keep Fear Factor and the XFL out of the headlines. JAG simply embarrassed post-Vietnam tastemakers, according to Bellisario. "In Hollywood and in most of the media, the military was spoken of in pejorative terms," he says. "Now people have a lot of curiosity about the military. It always changes when the country is in trouble and we need someone to protect our ass."
That's a cry straight out of Kipling--"For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!'/But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot!"--and the U.S. is Kipling country now. But patriotism aside, another post-Sept. 11 trend is working for JAG. Across the dial, viewers have been flocking to established shows and familiar faces. Last Monday, a Carol Burnett retrospective on CBS stunned the industry by becoming the fourth highest rated broadcast of the season, drawing 30 million viewers, nearly 13 million of them adults under 50, to watch clips of a decades-old variety show. (Presumably, someone at NBC is now trolling the vaults for old Flip Wilson tapes.) The biggest rating coups of the season have gone to years-old shows: Friends, now in its eighth season, swooned last year against Survivor, but this fall popped to the No. 1 spot for several weeks, and Everybody Loves Raymond, which debuted in 1996, recently grabbed the weekly top spot for the first time. Meanwhile, even the most buzzworthy fall premieres--Alias, 24, Undeclared--have done O.K. at best.
Explanations in the industry range from the practical to the philosophical. Moonves sees a nation reaching for a visual security blanket: "People want to settle in with what they are comfortable with." But NBC entertainment president Jeff Zucker points out that the attacks monopolized the country's focus all fall, leaving little attention for new-show promotions. "All of us were hugging and holding on to our loved ones and thinking how to protect ourselves," he says. "We didn't have time for new faces on television."