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Date Posted: 18:02:43 10/13/05 Thu
Author: Jay
Subject: I'd usually throw in a fake email address to get it, but I'll copy the article here
In reply to: AW 's message, "Darn, you have to be a member. Is it up anywhere else? NT" on 12:50:28 10/13/05 Thu

Posted on Sun, Oct. 09, 2005

CSI: Creative Stagnancy Imminent

By KEN PARISH PERKINS

STAR-TELEGRAM TV CRITIC

With its ingenuous attention to race and class, its unabashedly perplexing plots, not to mention its ever-shifting moral point of view, HBO's shrewdly conceived drama The Wire is, for the most part, a Dead Show Airing.

Though the series will return in March for its fourth season, it doesn't even appear to have the strong backing of its own network's chairman and CEO, Chris Albrecht, who, when asked this summer whether he'd heard from inflamed loyalists over the show's rumored demise, uttered, with a straight face, "Yeah . . . all 250 of them."

As The Wire moves toward its resting place in the "brilliant but canceled" bin, the formulaic CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, on CBS, has begun the new television season averaging 28 million viewers and sitting atop the primetime mountain like some fat and happy Lion King.

CSI isn't nearly as smart as The Wire, just more glitzy. It isn't as exciting, either, just a blissfully dull show disguised as an interesting looking one. Yet the series, which airs on Thursdays, has become the poster child for Procedurals TV, an hour-long series that has managed to woo viewers by emphasizing plot over character, crisp forensic-speak over messy emotion, and the art of lighting over the arcs of life in an often creepy whodunit pieced together like an interactive video game.

Viewers are encouraged to play along by sniffing out clues to who or what killed the (of course) unclothed female found (of course) blood-splattered on the bathroom floor, and they often do so with the help of flashbacks and the hyper-stylized re-creation of events. Judging by the ratings, fans of CSI take great delight in seeing how this detective work is done with gee-golly-wow gizmos like the Automated Biosystem Genetic Analyzer -- you know, that thingamabob that breaks down DNA evidence -- and high-tech goop like that glow-in-the-dark spray that detects blood traces.

Since arriving in the fall of 2000, CSI has been like a giant Pac Man gobbling up everything in its path, and along the way creating a schedule full of spawn, distant cousins and knockoffs -- some bad, some good, all of them interchangeable. And all of them, when taken as a group, choking the living daylights out of a prime-time landscape that just a few years ago was -- dare we say it? -- flourishing with depth and sophistication, or at least a more textured and distinctive assortment of television dramas.

Before CSI and evil twins CSI: Miami and CSI: NY, before Cold Case and Without a Trace, before Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, before NCIS and Numb3rs, before Criminal Minds and Bones, before gripping someone's hand was the only way to get through a night of television, watching serials on a weekly basis was no different than finishing the chapter of a good book and itching to move on to the next.

The rise of these crime shows and their crisp, 60-minute story arcs -- shows that seemed alluring because they offered a whodunit and a howdunit -- hasn't completely obliterated the serialized, open-ended drama. ER is still, well, around, as are the family dramas Everwood, Gilmore Girls and 7th Heaven. The West Wing, despite its many changes, can still be counted on to offer up those silent tableaus of Washington power, and The Sopranos, The L Word and The Shield remain programs with wit and attitude. And shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives offer an almost comic-booklike spin on the TV drama.

It's perfectly legit to blame Procedural TV for at least stifling the momentum that television dramas built during the late '80s and '90s, especially those on the networks: NYPD Blue, Homicide Life on the Street, Picket Fences, and Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz's generational trifecta of thirtysomething, My So-Called Life and Once and Again, each of which thoughtfully, if uncomfortably, took a hard look at the pains of adolescence, adulthood and divorce.

Last year, one of ABC's most talked about pilots was, in fact, Zwick and Herskovitz's 1/4 Life, which focused on the lives of seven people in their mid-20s who were already at a crossroads where dreams or a sellout opportunity confronted them. Unlike Zwick and Herskovitz's earlier hits, which obtained network approval with merely a cursory glance at a pilot, 1/4 Life never made it onto the fall schedule.

"We couldn't find a place for it," was ABC's answer to that.

Don't believe anyone who says that the popularity of procedural crime dramas will soon fade, particularly on CBS, which is betting its immediate future on them. Seven of the 10 top-rated dramas this past week were procedurals, luring well over 100 million viewers combined. Without a Trace drew 21 million on Thursday and Cold Case collected nearly 17 million last Sunday. Criminal Minds, another CBS series, this one about profilers hunting down serial killers, pulled 10 million viewers on Tuesday. And it was up against Lost.

No wonder Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of the powerhouse CSI franchise, as well as Cold Case and Without a Trace, has little trouble getting such poorly executed and awfully acted shows as the new E-Ring (an action drama about Pentagon heroes) on air, and why CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler vows, like a true network soldier, to stay the course with the crime dramas until "our viewers say they've had enough."

Tassler is in sync with her boss, CBS Chairman Les Moonves, who ushered in CSI and has, like a proud papa, watched the genre multiply and propel CBS to the lofty status of America's No. 1-watched network. (And, as a result, rocket him up the corporate ladder at Viacom.)

The concern is that our small screen is now awash in crime-story clones, which may give viewers what they think they want but in fact is robbing them of the kind of programming that holds up a mirror to their lives.

Television may have rightfully earned its reputation as a boob tube over the decades -- I mean, Saved by the Bell: The College Years? But no mass medium -- not theater and certainly not the movies -- had proved better over the past 15 years at opening a window onto our souls. Now that portal is a nostril and the insights are provided by snaking camera, which zooms through our insides like some virus, a dazzling, disturbing visual device perfected by CSI and now replicated on even a more conventional (though still procedural-inspired) medical drama like House.

Before CSI, even cop shows like NYPD Blue (with prickly characters like Andy Sipowicz) and Homicide (with the scarily intense Frank Pembleton), and medical dramas like ER and Gideon's Crossing, demonstrated an insatiable need for soul-searching, philosophizing and the dissecting of moral dilemmas. All of it done while navigating dark alleys for perps or mulling the often overwhelming responsibility of holding someone's heart in the palm of your hand.

Producer/writers like David Milch and Steven Bochco (NYPD Blue), Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls), Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Barbara Hall (Joan of Arcadia), Shawn Ryan (The Shield), J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost), Brenda Hampton (7th Heaven), Joel Surnow (24), John Wells (ER, The West Wing), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) and David E. Kelley (L.A. Law, Chicago Hope, Picket Fences, The Practice) often gathered the troops to discuss not just their work but the meaning of life.

Some call it navel-gazing; I call it sociologically delicious drama. Kelley became king of the episode-ending post-mortem, in which his characters would wrestle with what it means to be a lawyer, a cop, a doctor or a parent just trying to get through the day. Wells' work on ER proved time and again that characters could have consciences without slowing down the show's plot. Bochco, who studied as a playwright at Carnegie Tech, and Milch, who studied Shakespeare at Yale, gave Blue an intrinsic, overarching emotional undertow.

With Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon, who's been influenced by mythology, comic books and feminist film theory, juxtaposed fantasy with the struggles of girls confronting sex, love and their own power. The demons who stalked Buffy and her friends weren't just creatures of the night but scarier horrors awaiting her in high school. Buffy scripts tempered vital coming-of-age issues with the kind of humor and poignancy you won't get in a procedural.

When Buffy, played by Sarah Michele Gellar, revealed to her mother that she was a demon fighter, her confession sounded like that of a lesbian leaping out of the closet. In response, Buffy's mother kicked her out of the house, saying, "This happened because I didn't provide you with male role models."

Most of the shows cited here are long gone, having had their heyday when network TV was less under the thumb of the money men and therefore under less pressure to deliver big ratings out of the gate. (Witness this season's Head Cases, canceled after two episodes on Fox, and Inconceivable, which, having been pulled from the schedule by NBC after only two weeks, is well on its way out.).

As a result, television was frequently more daring and less formulaic. Producers could afford to take chances, and often they did. TV has always been helped creatively by being more of a writer's medium than film, where "you get [creative feedback] from the producers and the actors and the actors' chauffer," says John Ridley, who scripted the movie Three Kings, television's Third Watch and Showtime's Barbershop. "On TV, there's something to be said about having a singular vision and actually seeing it on the screen."

In television, people who create and produce most shows are also the people who write them. No wonder the more inventive TV series became, for our era, the equivalent of the serial novel, unfolding epic stories like chapters and sweeping us up in a shared anxiety. What lies ahead for poor Brea on Desperate Housewives? Who, exactly, are the Others in Lost? And will Lorelei and Rory ever mend their relationship on Gilmore Girls?

But television fell victim to conglomerate thinking and belt-tightening, and it has affected the way shows are conceived, bought and marketed. With each new series, there's so much more at stake now that networks work harder on the front end to limit the possibility of failure.

Of course, one way to do so is to recycle what's worked before, which has always been a staple of the TV industry but seems to be almost exclusively how things get done now. Having survived in this brutal business, Moonves is viewed as some kind of wunderkind visionary. It's an incorrect description, if only because CBS programming lately has been the safest of the big networks, refusing to move outside its crime-show comfort zone.

Moonves -- who likes to think he has the pulse of what Americans want to watch -- as well as a number of producers and actors link the popularity of procedurals to the emotional fallout of 9-11. Anthony LaPaglia, star of Without a Trace, TV's most interesting procedural, thinks we live "in a certain amount of uncertainty," and shows like his, which offer up a beginning, middle and end, "might be comforting" to those who feel a need for some sort of closure, even in their entertainment.

There aren't a lot of life-changing epiphanies on Without a Trace. Even when LaPaglia's Jack Malone loses his wife, kids and nearly his job, he trudges on, since life in procedurals is about clues and blood and numbers. And logic.

That's the problem. Life is never logical, as the marvelous Six Feet Under pointed out over its tenure on HBO and especially poetically in its series-ending montage, which made clear that death comes knocking not just for Nate or Lisa or the show's other characters but for all of us.

Rarely has the conclusion of a series generated so much outward discussion that turned inward. "I'm going to die."

We know that, of course. But how gratifying that a drama -- on the boob tube, no less -- reminded us in such an unnerving and moving way.

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