Pop Goes Culture

It’s no secret that viewership for the four major broadcast networks is disintegrating. When a show receives a historically low viewership percentage among 18- to 45-year-olds and still has a shot at being renewed — yes, I might have to rag on “Heroes” for another season before NBC cancels it — there’s something wrong with the system.

The broadcast networks are well aware of this, and they’re constantly looking for that brilliant new show concept that will be the next buzzy hit, bring in record viewership and lead entertainment blogs and critics to believe the network’s problems are over.

Their strategy? More of the same.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the major networks are collectively producing 28 police-drama or comic-drama pilots in preparation for the upcoming season. That’s 28 shows attempting to achieve the ratings staying power and syndicated dominance of “Law & Order,” a series that never fails to put me to sleep.

Lest we forget, the networks are also putting countless pilots about doctors and lawyers, revivals of old shows (“Hawaii Five-O” on CBS) or sure-to-be-terrible-despite-great-casting remakes of foreign shows (NBC’s “Prime Suspect”) into production.

Sigh.

I’m not ragging on all television shows involving cops. Some of my favorite current series, like ABC’s “Castle,” are police dramedies with heavy procedural elements and small serial character arcs.

But for every “Castle” there are three “CSI:” iterations, all of which seem content to tread water creatively and deliver episode after episode of consistent but mind-numbingly dull case solving.


Each network has its troubles with getting these procedural shows off the ground. Recently CBS has done a great job attaching a compelling lead actor (like Simon Baker in “The Mentalist”), but that doesn’t mean I trust them to do it right again.

I mean, they did put train-wreck medical drama “Miami Medical” on the air. ABC hasn’t had a great track record with these sorts of shows in the past few seasons, even though they’ve had success in other genres, like comedy.

NBC has behaved as expected, canceling “Southland” — one of the most interesting cop dramas on the current TV landscape, in my opinion — in favor of “The Jay Leno Show,” and we all know how that turned out.

FOX has done surprisingly well with procedurals like “Lie To Me,” although they usually prefer them with a twist of mythos a la “Fringe.”


But my questions about the broadcast networks’ plans go beyond whether or not they can actually produce, nurture and promote a drama about a quirky cop/doctor/lawyer.

I want to know why the networks think it’s a good idea to aim for the lowest common denominator and spend pilot season after pilot season reaching for the same type of show instead of branching out and looking for something more, dare I say, original?

The broadcast system is basically dead. Cable sucker-punched it in the ’80s, and it hasn’t recovered since. I think it’s time for the big four to stop beating a dead horse and look to their cable competitors for inspiration.

Creative, genre-bending show concepts are thriving critically and commercially on basic cable networks like AMC and especially on pay cable networks like Showtime and HBO.

Even if ratings standards are different on cable than they are on network TV, I see no reason why ABC or NBC shouldn’t aspire to find the next “Breaking Bad.” FOX went way out of the box with “Glee” and found major success; why haven’t the other networks gotten the memo?