CRICCCK, CRICCCK, CRICCCK--IS that the sound of slowly grinding teeth coming from the networks' office suites? So far, this hasn't been the plummiest of fall TV seasons. Overall network viewership is down 9%; none of the record 42 new shows has really connected with audiences; three have already been canceled; and even Murder One--everybody's pick as the season's best new series--is in danger of being smothered in the cradle, having to compete first with the closing arguments of the O.J. Simpson trial and now with ER. It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for an industry that employs some of the most craven people on earth.
Still, network executives have good reasons to feel their cushy salaries are, to some extent, earned. For one thing, TV remains the nation's dominant medium--witness the fact that in these days of political and racial polarization, the only thing that holds Americans together is our common reflex to hit the remote whenever one of those Jonathan Pryce Infiniti commercials comes on. But more to the point, despite perennial complaints about TV's formulaic and lowbrow fare--and the religious right's conviction that the medium is destroying our nation's moral fiber--anyone who watches even a smattering of TV would have to agree that there are currently more first-rate programs on the air than at any time in television's nearly 50-year history: that comedies like The Simpsons and Frasier and Seinfeld more than stand up to I Love Lucy and Mary Tyler Moore and Cheers; that dramas like NYPD Blue and ER are broadening the scope of narrative art; that, heretical as it may sound, the 1990s are television's real Golden Age, the 1950s and Philco TV Playhouse and Paddy Chayefsky and Winky Dink and You notwithstanding.
Of course, one could go on and on extolling the wonders of CNN, Court TV and American Movie Classics. But discussion here should be limited to old-fashioned prime-time network TV--the fairest way, after all, to draw a comparison with TV's pre-cable Bronze Age. A list of indispensable current series, besides those already mentioned, would include the mighty, acerbic Roseanne, still potent after seven-plus seasons; newer shows now hitting their stride, like Mad About You, The X-Files, Friends, NewsRadio and the wonderful Homicide, more vivid and biting than its more illustrious rival NYPD Blue. Among the season's new shows, American Gothic, Ned and Stacey and The Bonnie Hunt Show are all odd and worth watching before they get canceled.
Superlatives are a little ridiculous applied to any art form, let alone one that boasts Sherwood Schwartz, the brain behind both Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, as an auteur. But here goes anyway. The Larry Sanders Show, with its laugh-trackless verisimilitude, is the best comedy on TV, probably the closest a sitcom will ever come to perfect pitch (yes, it's on HBO--so much for ground rules). The best drama: Party of Five, a thirtysomething for teenagers and young adults--with all the pluses (honest, abnormally well-crafted writing) and minuses (too much acoustic guitar in the soundtrack) that the thirtysomething comparison implies. And for pure cheese, Melrose Place is indisputably TV's greatest accomplishment--and that's really saying something.