Our "Golden Age" of TV Crime Drama

Features “And yet, I’d had enough of this too-solid ground. I elbowed my way to the front.” – “Ascensions,” by Pierre Bettencourt Read “Ascensions” and three more fabulist tales by Pierre Bettencourt on page 40. WORLDLIT.ORG 9 Our “Golden Age”of TV Crime Drama The Artistic Promise of Television Blooms by J. Madison Davis CRIME & MYSTERY M ORE THAN ONE CRITIC has proclaimed that television in the early twenty-first century is in a “Golden Age” in which the complexities of character and plot, moral ambiguities, and the open portrayal of sex and violence allow writers to explore sophisticated themes that it was difficult for “traditional” television to confront. When there were basically three networks, the economic realities compelled programmers to seek the simplest common denominators in order to compete against their rivals. The ideal moneymaker was a show pitched to “the whole family,” and as such, it couldn’t do much with sex or depict violence too vividly or, lest the audience get bored, delve too deeply into ethical complexities. Heroes were heroes, villains were villains, and, as Archie and Edith Bunker used to sing, “Girls were girls and men were men.” Television in that era was propaganda for the dominant culture and, if it brought up a controversial issue, tried to exploit its “controversial nature” while simultaneously watering it down into meaninglessness. Before their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Rolling Stones were told to sing “Let’s spend some time together” rather than “Let’s spend the night together.” (They didn’t.) The culture was undergoing serious transformations, but the incremental changes in television in those days were snail-paced compared to what was to come. What we call “television” is hardly recognizable as the same thing. The screens became flat. The images larger. After some experimenting with UHF to expand offerings, the general spread of cable and satellite broadcasting created an enormous demand for product as hundreds of channels became possible. Ted Turner founded his “superstations” but needed something to show, so he purchased the MGM film library and the Atlanta Braves. Others bought movies and old television shows that hadn’t been seen for decades and initiated Clare-Hope Ashitey in Seven Seconds 10 WLT WINTER 2019 talk shows and other standard television fare. A few networks positioned themselves as purveyors of arts and drama (such as Bravo and A&E) hoping to finally realize the dream of quality television . Most of these, you will note, have now abandoned the attempt in a quest for higher ratings, and, ironically, the big networks felt easier about ditching the arts because there were now arty alternatives, including PBS, for an audience they no longer valued. The major networks continued to offer pretty much the kind of thing they had always offered, only more so. Westerns having all but died at this point, cop and lawyer shows became a staple of dramatic television, and the majors, now a little worried about the new competition from cable and satellite, experimented a bit with the dramatic forms. L.A. Law (beginning in 1986) and Hill Street Blues (1991) opened up the possibility of multiple storylines carrying over from week to week involving multiple main characters. In September 1990, producer Steven Bochco, emboldened by the success of those two, persuaded ABC to air his innovative Cop Rock, a musical crime show. It was obviously a bridge too far and was gone by the end of the year. NYPD Blue (1993) tested the limits, as well, but safely confined its most notorious innovation to showing David Caruso’s buttocks in a locker-room scene, thereby gathering weeks of end-of-civilization anguish as publicity. All these attempts to build crime shows for twentyfirst -century viewers contributed to the beginnings of our “Golden Age,” but it was HBO that created it. Recognizing that the old formulas of network television need not apply to their subscription service, they were open to more radical adjustments. Their staple was showing movies after the brief theater run, but when they began making original material to make their service more attractive, they were not bound by the traditional economics. They could show their productions repeatedly, for example

Aesthetics · Art · Bunker · Drama · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Reality television · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · History · Law · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism