PRESENT TENSE:TELEVISION IS just not as good as it used to be. And by "used to be", I mean a year ago. Maybe two. We are, it seems, at the tail-end of a television golden age. We just have to hope that it has entered a brief lull and not a lengthy coma, writes SHANE HEGARTY
It’s not that television is particularly bad at the moment. It is not as terrible as it was in the 1980s, when the stink of what emerged from the giant, square, hunchbacked box on a wobbly table in the corner cannot be sweetened by the nostalgia that people of that generation like to treat it with.
This past year or so, there has been the odd decent drama, some interesting documentaries, and the soaps keep a lot of viewers’ evenings lubricated just as they have always done. But switch on your television and hope to land on something truly original, brilliant and ground-breaking.
The bet is that you’ll flick, flick, flick through the channels until you finally land on a repeat on a digital station. Or that you’ll get a DVD box set out instead.
It is easy to get nostalgic about the past. In an accelerated culture, it’s easy to get nostalgic about last week. But the truth is that, for a decade, maybe a decade and a half, television was great. Truly great. Not every night. Not every channel. Not every show. There was some awful stuff in there, as there always will be.
But there was a rolling brilliance, as great drama and comedy overlapped, that meant that in the US, the UK and – to an extent – Ireland, it was undoubtedly a golden age.
Let's take comedy as an example. From the US, Seinfeld hit its stride in the early 1990s, when The Larry Sanders Showwas also changing the rules by which sitcoms operated, while the more conventional, but still extraordinary Frasierwas beginning an 11-season run and Friendswas just about the biggest TV show on the planet. From the mid-1990s until recently, the UK found a seam of great comedy so rich that viewers began to take for granted that it would endlessly provide: I'm Alan Partridge, The Fast Show, Big Train, The Royle Family, The Office.
It was an age of experimentation, of the supposed near extinction of the live studio audience or the laughter track, and yet it still delivered one of the greatest studio-sitcoms, Father Ted.Even on Irish television, where comedy had previously gone for a rest from the sound of laughter, there was Paths to Freedom and the comedy-drama Bachelors Walk.
(By the way, I know this is beginning to sound like of one those late-night, “who could forget these classics . . . ” ads for 20-CD collections of Rock and Roll’s Greatest Hits. It’s a hazard of the theme. So I’ll go on nevertheless.)
During the recent golden age, US drama evolved towards that idea of "novelistic" television, raising the game in terms of the genre's intelligence, ambition and scope: The X-Files; the first couple of series of Lost;the early seasons of ER; Band of Brothers; Battlestar Galactica– which finished just this year – was popular culture's most surprisingly perceptive commentary on the Iraq War. The Sopranoswas television unlike anything made before.
It’s not that each was enough to create a golden age, but there was a steady flow of fresh, culturally vital and influential television.
Perhaps the most interesting US drama running right now is Mad Men, but it's been broadcasting for a couple of years. Yet, there is something revealing in how the most talked-about drama remains The Wire: something that ended last year and has gained true popularity in repeats, DVD box sets and the BBC's decision to feed the SkyPlus-owning viewers with nightly episodes of the show's five series. Other, once great American series – ER, 24, Lost– have either fizzled out, gone stale, or been unable to sustain their promise.
British television, meanwhile, still has an almost pathological fixation on costume dramas. As for comedy, the British channels have returned to an age of cosy but bland sitcoms such as My Family. US imports have dried up.
The big ratings grabbers, such as The X Factorand the other sing-for-a-job or dance-with-a-celebrity shows, can feel seismic for a time, but – as Susan Boyle will soon discover – they last no longer than the average earthquake, and have far less impact. You may turn up your nose at Big Brother, but upon its arrival at the turn of the century it didn't just change television, it became a touchstone of modern culture.
Time will tell if the changing commercial model of television will in future be able to afford series such as The Sopranosand if the firestorm currently hitting Britain's commercial channels and, potentially, RTÉ, will retard the evolution of television over the coming years. Maybe we are simply in a creative lull. Maybe the golden age has not ended but only nipped off to put the kettle on.
But like most television watchers, I don’t care too much about the future. I just want to know if there’s anything good on tonight.