Fair-Weather Fans Need Not Apply

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Television has a problem. Too many of the fall season’s new programs — ABC’s “The Nine”and “Six Degrees,” CBS’s “Jericho (CBS),” NBC’s “Heroes,” etc. — have narratives that spread forever outward like Southern Californian tract housing marching toward the Mojave desert. Plots disappear inside so many subplots that to miss an episode is to risk rendering the entire viewing enterprise meaningless. (And that’s if the shows aren’t canceled.) Television used to be about relaxation, but teams of pop culture Tolstoys are starting to make it feel like homework. The TiVo runneth over.

In the end it comes down to choosing your poison. Do you decide to invest countless hours in the bedraggled citizens of “Jericho” as they strive to discover why half the country’s been nuked, or do you elect to hang with the traumatized victims of “The Nine,” a group of men and women who spent two days as hostages in a bank robbery and look set to spend the next two years mulling the consequences?

The paradoxical aspect to this “Lost”- inspired pullulation of time-gobbling television is that all these expensive, upscale programs portray Americans as extremely busy people — far too busy, certainly, to sit around watching television. On the most ambitious network programs, there’s rarely any down time.(For that, you have to go to the remaining sitcoms, like CBS’s “Two and a Half Men,” NBC’s “The Office” and “My Name Is Earl,”or reruns of HBO’s “Lucky Louie,” where it’s all down time.)

According to our television sets, Americans are on the go, picking up the kids, dropping off the kids, juggling phone calls and text messages, beating traffic, with barely a moment to breathe. The biggest cliché on the box is the cell phone that rings just as two people are about to make love. (It’s amazing anyone’s ever conceived.) And whereas popping a Vicodin — a drug with a plug from both FOX’s “House” and NBC’s “Studio 60” — takes only a second, smoking a cigarette can consume as much as three minutes. My God, who has that kind of time? No wonder hardly anyone smokes on television.

Even “Weeds,” Showtime’s slacker paean to the pleasures of growing and smoking high-grade pot — “it’s organic, it’s therapeutic, it’s of the earth, like tomatoes” — opens with a montage of joggers swarming pristine suburban streets and ends with the Feds pounding on the door.

NBC’s “Friday Night Lights,” the season’s most perfectly executed new show, takes place in a nowhere Texan town where there’s so little to do that everyone’s obsessed to the point of mania with the high school football team. Result? The place is as buzzed as Times Square on a Friday evening.

The football itself, as expertly integrated into the larger drama as the comedy sketches in “Studio 60” are not, is so ferocious that the team’s star quarterback was already a paraplegic halfway through the opening episode. The players, mere kids, need to know how to handle the press as if they’re mini-Kobe Bryants, while the coach is as besieged as a New York mayor in the middle of a transit strike. As for the coach’s wife, when she reluctantly agrees to attend a book club meeting, she returns home having been persuaded to join the boards of 12 different committees.

Why the show isn’t getting higher ratings is a bit of a mystery. It’s sexy, smart, raucous, well written, amazingly kinetic, and populated by good-looking teenagers and interesting adults. I’d as soon chew plastic as watch “Monday Night Football,” but the football on “Friday Night Lights” keeps me riveted, as do its many skillfully drawn narrative vignettes. Yet when the show temporarily bumped “Studio 60” from its Monday night slot, it drew even lower ratings. Perhaps what’s turning people off is that despite all the fast cutting and constant music, this is a show about that most oldfashioned of subjects: team spirit.

The fall season’s most emblematic busy American may be Sebastian Stark, the defense lawyer turned public prosecutor played by a fully caffeinated James Woods in CBS’s “Shark.” In the first episode, when he’s still a sleazy superstar defense attorney, Stark has a month-long nervous breakdown when a client he’s just got off a spousal-abuse charge kills his wife the moment he returns home. Suddenly, Stark, a.k.a. “Shark,” for whom justice is all about winning, is a sad-sack loser who can’t get out of his dressing gown and face the music. Finally, he’s tasted shame.

In actual screentime, this breakdown lasts all of five minutes, after which Stark redeems himself by becoming a prosecutor for the city, putting away the monsters he used to defend. From “You’ll never eat lunch in this town again,” he’s back to “Too busy to eat lunch in this town.” So he fires off instructions to his legal team while chewing on takeout sushi and waving his chopsticks at them.

The show’s excitement is provided by the cases Stark and his team are working on; its emotion comes mostly from his relationship with his earnest teenage daughter, Julie (Danielle Panabaker). Fortunately (sentimentality threatens), Stark is too busy to have a relationship with Julie, mainly because he’s already in a relationship — with his cell phone. What they have is largely a deferred relationship — paternity mañana. But then Julie is accused of plagiarism at school, at which point Stark steps in as her personal legal adviser. Finally they get to spend some quality time together, because now it’s professional as well as personal. There’s a reason for them to spend time together. Of course, it’s also a matter of dramatic economy, allowing the abrasive Mr. Woods to play papa without turning into a puddle of goo — who wants to watch that? — but it’s also symptomatic of the typical American of the 2006 fall season.

What’s user-friendly about “Shark” is that each episode is more or less selfcontained. Though not nearly as good as “House,” on which it’s obviously modeled, “Shark” is a program you can dip in and out of. Skip an episode or two (you have a dinner date, a life, etc.) and it won’t really matter. In other words, this is a show about busy people that busy people can watch.

bbernhard@nysun.com


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