So . . . I started watching a show called the Good Guys, starring Josh Lyman from the West Wing (who has a moustache now) and Tom Hanks’ younger clone, er, son. Not a bad show, really super-cheesy, but entertaining. And a complete departure from how TV has gone in the past few years. I like this change so much that I stopped watching the show.
Because I could! Imagine that, a TV show where you can enjoy it without having to watch every single episode. Most of the shows that I have watched in recent years (Lost, Mad Men, The Wire, The Sopranos, etc.) require that you watch every episode if you want to know what’s going on. You can’t just tune into a single episode of Lost and expect to follow the action. But this show, The Good Guys, you can miss as many as you want. It’s a definite throwback.
The serialized-series phenomenon goes back as far as TV itself, with soap operas. I don’t mean to generalize, but these were shows that were geared towards housewives with their hair up in curlers who sat around after the cleaning was done and waited for the husbands to come home from work so they could give them their martini and dressing-gown before serving dinner (hey, I said I’ve been watching Mad Men). Prime-time soaps like Dallas and Dynasty also had storylines that bled from one episode to another. But the soap-opera format was also designed to pick up viewers along the way, always providing enough information to let a new audience understand. Now they just do “Previously on [whatever show]” and expect that to be enough.
Two shows in the 1990’s pushed through this idea that viewers had to watch every episode, and both failed. Twin Peaks is more like a 25-hour movie than a series, with the disadvantage that anyone not watching from the start felt like they were walking into the middle of a (very weird) movie. As a result, it could only lose viewers, not gain them, and was cancelled after two seasons. The other was Murder One, which told the story of one murder trial stretched over a whole season. It abandoned this premise in season two and told several overlapping stories. As a counterpoint, Law & Order used to highlight the fact that each episode was stand-alone.
There was no penalty for missing an episode of Knight Rider, Diff’rent Strokes, or MacGyver; though there may have been the occasional recurring character, each week brought a clean slate. One of the most celebrated episodes of Family Ties had to do with Alex P. Keaton’s grief over the death of a close friend, but even the most loyal viewer wouldn’t have mourned the dead character, because he had never been on the show before. Clean slate.
Now if you want to watch decent TV, it has to be a ritual – miss a week, miss a lot. If you didn’t start watching from the beginning, you don’t know the whole story. And with iTunes and DVD sets and all of that, you can watch the whole thing, but sometimes it’s fun to just tune in when you feel like it. Otherwise, TV can feel like a chore; I recently finished watching season one of the Good Wife, which we had recorded all season because we didn’t have time to watch it every week. And we would refer to it as “working our way through the episodes.” TV shouldn’t be work!
So I’m happy can delete episodes of The Good Guys from my DVR worry-free when I need space. And unless I want to start watching the crappy dregs of TV (I don’t think I’m too at sea if I skip an episode of Ghost Whisperer or Cougartown, but who knows), this is what TV will be, at least for a while. And I can be more selective about the shows I take on, because it is a commitment, at least until the show starts sucking (e.g. Heroes). Even so, a few more cheesy throwback shows wouldn’t hurt.
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