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For the most part, the increased competition, the need to stand out in an electronic glut, has kept producers from complacently cranking out the kind of wan, homogenized fare that characterized TV seasons past--and can still be enjoyed on Nick at Nite if one is so inclined. (But is there honestly any reason beyond nostalgia, graduate theses in popular culture or a lingering taste for boyhood erotica for anyone to watch the painfully lame Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie?) The easygoing suburban blandness that Nick at Nite dines out on was owing to the fact that network TV was once the massiest mass medium ever invented. It still is, of course, but thanks to the increasing sophistication of audience-measuring "science," networks have learned they can profit by delivering smaller-niche audiences to advertisers. Which means that Seinfeld and Mad About You don't have to appeal to everyone in order to make money; they need only reach 18- to 49-year-olds with lots and lots of disposable income to spend on bmws and Nikes. It thus behooves producers to create shows that are intelligent and quirky because intelligent and quirky appeals to upscale audiences.
Unfortunately, there are a number of downsides to this phenomenon. One is that some audiences--primarily older folks, younger children and minorities--are being ignored. Another is that some series--the late Northern Exposure, for example--end up choking on their own quirky intelligence, crowded with characters who are less than the sum of their arbitrary tics. A third drawback is that seemingly every other character on television is now a white young professional who lives in Manhattan and goes out on unfortunate blind dates; bizarrely, all four of NBC's high-rated Thursday-night comedies (Friends, The Single Guy, Seinfeld and Caroline in the City) are in that vein. Fox at least had the wit to set Partners, one if its twentysomething shows, in San Francisco. But then again, its ratings stink.
This demographic obsession is one reason why so many shows have scenes set in coffee bars. Another, more telling explanation is that TV producers, lacking the budgets for car crashes and Bruce Willis, fill up a lot of airtime by having characters sit around and gab; talk, in production terms, is cheap. A virtue of this necessity is that it allows writers the luxury of exploring the ins and outs of characters and relationships in ways that feature films--certainly mainstream studio films--rarely do anymore.
This has helped foster an important change from TV's early days, when series characters were largely static from episode to episode, season to season. There was little shading or evolution in Darrin Stephens' nincompoopcy. And Joe Friday--not counting the occasional expression of disgust with punks and hippies--was a tragically repressed emotional cipher (which isn't to say audiences would have wanted to see Jack Webb really air it out as an actor). In essence, TV's early characters were subjected to the same drama every week, as if they were stuck in a time warp. Would Darrin stop Larry Tate from finding out that Samantha is a witch? Would Lucy come up with a scheme to subvert Ricky's wishes? Would McGarrett get to say "Book him, Danno"--or maybe, just once, "Book him, Chin Ho"?