They say in recovery programs that the first step in getting help is admitting you have a problem. The start of the new TV season has persuaded me the networks might finally be on the verge of this momentous breakthrough. Oh, I know I say that every season, and every season I’m proved wrong. But I’m really serious this time. TV can’t get any worse. The new season is so bad that it has to represent some kind of ultimate creative vapor lock. I don’t see how it’s possible to make a series with fewer laughs than Encore! Encore! or one that insults the spectator with more self-destructive spite than Costello or that flickers as dimly on the edge of a blank screen as Mercy Point. These aren’t TV series–they’re desperate cries for help.
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To be fair, there’s always at least one show on the fall schedule that’s so bad it knocks the wind out of you and that’s immediately canceled just so the programmers can claim they still retain some shred of human decency. The problem is that Costello isn’t much worse than the average product this year. UPN has a stunningly inept show called The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, which has attracted so many protests it seems to be lurching through the program grid like Frankenstein’s monster pursued by crowds of villagers with torches. It’s an attempt to do political satire by transposing the Clinton scandals back in time to the Lincoln presidency–so if you’ve ever wanted to see Lincoln trashed as a moronic, venal, sex-crazed oaf from the sticks, here’s your chance. Some spectacularly ill-judged jokes about slavery in the pilot episode (still not broadcast), apparently thrown in for period flavor, are what have attracted the complaints–though my guess is they fit right in with the general atmosphere of mean-spirited idiocy. The decision to ridicule Mary Todd Lincoln as a freaked-out proto-Hillary struck me as particularly ungallant.
NBC has an even more painful show, Encore! Encore!, which is as befuddled by rich people as Costello was disgusted by the working class. It’s made by the team responsible for Frasier and seems intended to demonstrate how much of a creative miracle that show’s upmarket veneer really is. The lead in Encore! Encore! is a world-famous operatic tenor who loses his voice and goes home to the family business, a small but fabulously successful winery. Well, God knows, we’ve all been there, but I think we all could have pointed out what an unworkable premise this is for a sitcom. A remote mansion deep in the California wine country, where the nearest wacky neighbor is miles away? It sounds more like a recipe for cabin fever; The Shining with cabernet sauvignon. The pilot episode had to introduce a wisecracking limo driver just to cover the interminable shuttle back to civilization. As if to prove that there are no laughs to be wrung from the premise, some sadist in NBC programming hired a cast worthy of Congreve–including Nathan Lane, Glenne Headly, and Joan Plowright–and then sat back to watch them drown in flop sweat. But professionalism is its own reward: they’re all bound to be on their way to something better soon, because the buzzards of cancellation are already circling.
Of course, this being TV it’s a half-assed and self-canceling revival. Buddy Faro, for instance, is a Rip van Winkle story about a famous private eye who disappeared in 1978 and has now come back to cope with the horrible 90s. The joke is that he represents a lost ideal of 70s masculine virtue sorely needed in our PC wasteland. Or at least I think that was going to be the joke, and it would probably have been pretty alarming if it had been done with any consistency. But Faro turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with the 70s. His suave lounge-lizard attitude, his constant allusions to the Rat Pack and Radio Free Europe, his vintage Ford Thunderbird–all carbon-date to 1963 at the latest. He would have been as unthinkable an apparition in a disco as a goateed beatnik with a set of bongo drums. So what happened? I’m guessing that when the producers really contemplated the 70s ideal of masculinity–say, the smirking, gum-popping Burt Reynolds of Smokey and the Bandit–they recoiled in horror and retreated to an earlier form of machismo they thought an audience today might be able to stomach.
The new show wouldn’t dare make fun of celebrity. The sad succession of has-beens has disappeared; now the guest stars are a normal assortment of anonymous working stiffs, the kind you expect to see next week being harassed by the cops on Law & Order. They’re really there only for Roarke’s sake–he’s now the whole show. In the old version it was always a bit equivocal whether he had supernatural powers; now they’re the whole point. He dances magically through every scene like a dervish–floating beside a skydiver here, insinuating himself into somebody’s martini glass there, taunting and cackling. And why shouldn’t he enjoy himself? He’s got the one quality denied everybody else on the fall schedule: name recognition. It may not be much, but on TV it’s a value worth clinging to.
