Face it: Most of the shows we've watched were not classics. We're just learning to live with that

By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff, 12/12/99

YOUR SHOWS OF SHOWS: ONE CRITIC'S CHOICE OF UNFORGETTABLE TV How do you choose 10 comedies, 10 dramas, and 10 variety shows from the thousands of series ever aired? With a little bit of angst and a lot of good humor. Also, by sneaking in a list of honorable mentions including "Ally McBeal," "Julia," "The Flintstones," "The Puppy Episode" of "Ellen," "Twin Peaks," "Dark Shadows," "The Flip Wilson Show," and "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." The selections are based on a loose standard involving the show's influence and originality, along with my own bias and whimsy. They are in no particular order. Comedies "M*A*S*H" "All in the Family" "I Love Lucy" "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" "The Dick Van Dyke Show" "Roseanne" "The Larry Sanders Show" "The Cosby Show" "Seinfeld" Dramas "The Sopranos" "The Twilight Zone" "thirtysomething" "Homicide: Life on the Street"v "Hill Street Blues" "Dallas" and "Knots Landing" "Playhouse 90" "The Waltons" "General Hospital" "Masterpiece Theatre" Variety shows "The Ed Sullivan Show" "Saturday Night Live" "Your Show of Shows" "Entertainment Tonight" MTV "The Tonight Show" "Sesame Street" "Late Night with David Letterman" "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" "The Carol Burnett Show"

It's the time of the season, year, decade, and century, when writers and armchair historians pull out the big-bigger-biggest entertainment TV landmarks for some very important throat-clearing. About how Lucille Ball was an iconic American wife and how "I Love Lucy" shaped the sitcom mold in the 1950s. About how the Beatles used TV to graduate from pop phenomenon to full-blown revolution on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the 1960s. About how Archie Bunker's toilet flush on "All in the Family" unleashed realism on TV and changed it forever in the 1970s. About how "Hill Street Blues" brought direly needed verite to drama in the 1980s. And about how irony and nothingness became a mainstream club when "Seinfeld" reigned in the 1990s.

Not that there's anything wrong with all that. But put the MTV-paced collage of TV profundity on pause for a minute, if you will, to take stock of The Rest of TV, the non-sponge-worthy stuff of the small screen that has not and never will become legendary, the everyday programming that isn't about to be dubbed classic by Nick at Nite or anatomized on "The E! True Hollywood Story." Because the real matter of entertainment television - its lifeblood, in fact - is that steady, ordinary flow of unremarkable, unmemorable, unhistorical images, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's each individual viewer's own personal history of insignificant TV, what he or she watched in the thousands of hours between "The Twilight Zone" and "The X-Files." It's the filler, the froth, and the detritus - Larue and Gidget, Top Cat and Benny, Flip and Geraldine, Ike and Corabeth Godsey. It's kiddie fodder like "Romper Room," lost soaps like "The Edge of Night," and ads, ads, ads (paging Mr. Whipple). How about when "Petticoat Junction" went to "Green Acres"? Oh Hooterville! Oh Consuelo! Oh Hadji!

Let's face it. While the influential "Mary Tyler Moore Show" will go down in history, along with that golden "M," and while the eye-opening "Puppy Episode" of "Ellen" will be referenced for years, most of TV is endlessly disappearing into a black hole. The flooding river of blue glow flows into your home, and then on to a forgotten land where decades of TV visions evaporate. Unlike theatrical movies, or CD releases, or, of course, books, TV shows do not carry about them the hint of immortality, the promise that they will outlive our age. Sure, the afterlife that's granted by syndication keeps the luckier series on the air beyond their natural spans. But, ultimately, TV is about immediacy, expendability, and the passing of time. It's the electronic incarnation of Be Here Now.

The Infinite Hallway

By all rights, we should be quite overwhelmed by The Rest of TV, which grows fatter with each new cable concoction. It was in the 1980s that TV began its shift from a safe armful of network series into a dizzying fantasia of options, with MTV, ESPN, and CNN leading the way. And at the same time HBO quietly gained ground with its movies and uncensored series, despite its inauspicious 1972 launch featuring a polka festival. And presto - here we are in 1999 with some 200 doors off the information hallway, ranging from the pop cultural archive of VH1 and the celebrity dressing room of E! to the serious classroom channels (History, Learning, and Discovery). There's USA, TNT, AMC, BET, and TBS. There's Pay Per View, and its multiplex of movies. It's hard to believe, indeed, that only 60 years ago, when the very first program was televised in New York from the 1939 World's Fair, TV was borrowing from vaudeville and radio in a desperate attempt to invent its own identity.

But the story of TV in 1999 is not just the story of a fiftysomething medium that's growing out of hand; it's the story of a public that is simultaneously gaining control over TV with their hands. I speak of the remote control, that little convenience that allows us to wear holes in our couches and engage in power struggles with our loved ones. The remote control has been around since the 1950s, when it was a primitive extra that shook the entire set as it turned the dial among its few options. But it came of age in the 1980s, and flourished in the 1990s, because the multiplicity of channels called for a simple way to get us from Ch.2 to Ch.47B. Today, remotes are a necessity, and there are currently some 400 million in use in US homes.

The remote, so small and sleek, symbolizes our huge power over programming execs at network and cable stations. We are no longer captive audiences, never again to be stuck with whatever the big three - ABC, CBS, and NBC - choose to bestow upon us. It is easy to surf over NBC's "Veronica's Closet," ride the cable wave to HBO's "Sex and the City," and thumb our noses at TV honchos with a press of our finger. It is easy to dodge the networks' efforts to hold onto you for an entire night of shows, and surf from "Will & Grace" at 9 on NBC to "Sports Night" at 9:30 on ABC on Tuesdays. It's easy to say "oh yeah?" to Must-See TV. Notice how the networks fight to keep us from surfing away between shows by shortening theme songs, by eliminating bookend blocks of commercials, by splitting the screen at the end of a show and running a vignette while the credits run.

But still we surf more and more, and increasingly into non-network realms. Statistically, higher numbers of viewers are making the psychological leap to cable every year, and for a short period last summer, cable actually beat the networks in the Nielsens for the first time ever. As a result, network programmers have been scared awake and forced into a ferocious competition to hold onto to viewers who are becoming ever more aware of their options, their power. One of the great landmarks of "The Sopranos," aside from its creative brilliance, is the hype it has built up for cable TV, particularly after its 16 Emmy nominations. The mob series has made surfing away from the networks seem just a little less frightening to viewers who, much to the networks' joy, tend to fall into a network-only rut.

News loses

The contest to win viewers has been a blessing for series TV, if not for news, which has become something of a travesty at the end of the 20th century. While the competition has led to a marked improvement in TV entertainment product since the 1970s, it has turned televised nonfiction into a parody of itself. Local nightly newscasts mimic "Entertainment Tonight," making everything from tragedies to the weather report into glitzy, artificial segments. Newsmagazines take MTV's "The Real World" approach, imposing fictional narrative devices onto real life to make it juicier. And breaking news events, from the Monica Lewinsky affair to JFK Jr.'s plane crash, are turned into tabloid melodramas, with the endless drone of punditry in the background. News outlets from the networks to CNN, MSNCB, and CNBC pat themselves on the back for letting Caroline Kennedy grieve privately, while they convene en masse outside her house and aim telephoto lenses at her windows. They compete to land an interview with the friend of the wife of the son of Lewinsky's mother's garbageman. In those cases, the winner is the loser, in my book.

Meanwhile, critics are rightly applauding another golden age of prime-time series as the century winds down. Oh, there's still plenty of bottom feeding on entertainment TV, there's too much sexual button-pushing, and clearly the sitcom is in need of post-"Seinfeld" reinvention, although "Will & Grace," "Friends," and "That '70s Show" still charm. But the dramas - with series like "The West Wing," "The Sopranos," "Once and Again," "ER," "Law & Order," "Freaks and Geeks," "Roswell," "Felicity," and "The Practice" - are better than ever. The realism and moral ambiguity first seen on "Hill Street Blues" in the early 1980s is now in full bloom, along with sophisticated writing, acting, and camerawork. Hourlong hybrids like "Ally McBeal" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are expanding TV genres, as are non-stand-up-based sitcoms like "Sports Night" and "Sex and the City." The cable channels are also airing extraordinary pop documentaries and made-for-TV movies, some of which - Showtime's "The Baby Dance," or HBO's "Always Outnumbered" - are better than many theatrical releases.

Press record

And there's no forgetting the VCR, the remote's lovely accomplice in helping us take charge of The Rest of TV. The VCR has made us into our own programmers, as we tape shows and watch them at our convenience. We can fashion our own night of TV, and, most radically, we can skip through commercials. The VCR got its biggest boost in 1984, when the Supreme Court decided that taping did not break copyright laws. Now, it's hard to imagine life without it. And in the near future, the VCR may take the ultraconvenient form of a computer chip, squirreling away shows for us from an even larger collection of channel options. At that point, we may be shopping and banking on the same screen that we watch TV, and channel surfing and Internet surfing will be one and the same.

Ultimately, television only wants to be watched, and it will continue to adapt to get you seated passively in front of it. Its screen will get larger, it will become sexier and bloodier, it will grow more intelligent and artful, it will move at a faster pace, it will make the news more entertaining, it will make fiction more realistic, it will bring back the game show, it will mimic the tabloids, it will pander to Generation X, it will sell to baby boomers, it will be moral, it will be amoral, it will be very good, and, alas, it will be very bad - all at once. The question is, will we choose to use our power tools to navigate our epic TV voyage through The Rest of TV? Will we vote with our remotes? The answer when we return.

This story ran on page M01 of the Boston Globe on 12/12/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.