With the departure of 'Friends', 'Frasier' and 'Sex and The City', the US TVnetworks are turning all serious, writes Ian Kilroy.
The end is at hand . . . the apocalypse upon us. After filling our lives for the past decade, Friends, Frasier and Sex and the City are wrapping up. In television terms, it's the end of an era. Hordes will emerge from their TV rooms dazed and perplexed.
After a decade of addiction, they will wander out into the light like confused zombies, chanting in unison: "Ross, Rachel, Dr Crane - why have you forsaken us?"
Maybe money has something to do with it. That and the fact that long-running series tend to tire and become predictable. Kelsey Grammer, who plays Dr Frasier Crane, the title role in Frasier, reportedly gets $1 million per episode. And the final series of Friends is costing NBC about $65 million to produce. As a series returns season after season, actors who were once cheap start demanding better and better deals. Then ambition kicks in and they begin to think about branching out into solo acting careers.
Still, Frasier and Friends will be huge losses to NBC.
Frasier picked up five Emmys in a row for best comedy series after it opened in 1993. And while Friends - which opened a year later - hasn't done so well in the awards stakes, it has consistently out-performed Frasier with the public. For six successive seasons, it has been TV's most-watched sitcom. People that haven't seen their own close relatives for years know that Phoebe is getting married and that Monica is considering adopting.
A common plot trajectory, which Friends and Sex and the City share, is that the characters' single lives are giving way to marriage, new relationships and maturity. The tight circle of twentysomethings or thirtysomethings is breaking up. While the Friends characters have been stagnating for years in the same young-adult reality, they are now moving on, finally forging separate identities.
Maybe this signals the end of "generational" sitcoms. The new emerging shows are less about a bunch of the same age group than they are about a family, a profession, or an individual. But many of the old rules will still apply.
Take the Friends spin-off series, Joey, for example. Much as Frasier was a spin-off from Cheers, Joey will branch off from Friends to follow Matt LeBlanc's character as he pursues his acting career to LA.
The increasingly popular Will and Grace will keep presenting us with the trials and tribulations of adult single life, while we can expect as yet unimagined Friends replacements to emerge, as the television networks scramble to fill the gap.
However, with the rise of reality TV, the television landscape has changed. In the US, as elsewhere, more and more cheap-to-produce reality television is being made. If it's bed-hopping twentysomethings you want, then it's real-life, living and breathing bed-hopping twentysomethings you'll get. However, TV executives have realised they need to serve up something more. At a recent TV critics' press event in Los Angeles, spokespeople for the major networks noted they needed more comedies aimed at young men and more dramas tailored for young women. And the suits have been scrambling for new programme models.
The HBO network has been leading the way. The surprising success of the masterful Six Feet Under has opened more than one sunglass-covered eye in sunny Los Angeles. TV execs are now prepared to allow producers develop darker visions for the small screen.
Take Nip/Tuck, which started on TG4 last Thursday, and has been running on Sky. Set in Miami, the series takes us below the superficial surface of the world of plastic surgery. Taking its lead from the likes of Sex and the City and Six Feet Under, it is controversial, explicit, daring television. It is pretty far from the all-hugging and all-loving world of Friends. Ditto OC, a California-based series on its way to Channel 4 next month. It reveals the darker side of the sunshine state, in which the beautiful people of Orange County turn out to be not so beautiful.
Both shows, well received in the US, display a willingness by producers to think beyond what have become tired formulas.
With these new shows emerging, it seems clear that while NBC says "nothing can replace Friends", it must surely be scrambling to ensure something does. Joey, the Friends spin-off, is a predictable idea. For interesting innovation, look to HBO. One HBO production that has already been successful Stateside is Carnivale, a bizarre series that follows a travelling carnival in Depression-era America.
What might also prove interesting is the network's planned Sex and the City for men, set in a Chicago newspaper office with three very different married male journalists as the central characters. With matters sexual being frankly discussed and presented, The Mind of the Married Man will be doing well if it's half as entertaining as its older sister show.
But Frasier-Friends-Sex addicts still have a few more months before the laughter dies. The final episode of Friends, recently filmed on a top-secret closed set, won't be aired until early summer. In the meantime, rumours are rife as to how the series will conclude. Will Ross and Rachel finally get together? Will Monica become pregnant? Will Chandler get his old teeth back? Frasier producers, on the other hand, say they have no secrets, claiming they still don't know how they will wrap up the 11-year series. The finale will be aired in early summer also.
Meahwhile, everybody's favourite Manhattan girls are busy filming the final episodes of Sex and the City in Paris. Again, the ending is a closely guarded secret.
What devotees of all these shows - nay, institutions - can hope for is some kind of ending that recognises the emotion involved for the audience, that credits the loss that will be felt by people who have followed these characters for years.
Never mind. Maybe there's a sitcom heaven, where eternally reside the spent characters of the sitcoms of yesteryear - where Sam Malone tends the bar, where Lou Grant always has his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and where Hawkeye ended up after Korea. Maybe even the Riordans are there.