People always say TV is unoriginal, but that can’t be right–or how could it keep discovering new ways of poisoning your soul? You might think American mass culture is a changeless swamp of cynicism, creative exhaustion, and corporate-enforced synthetic cheer, but there are deep currents of fresh unpleasantness beneath the surface. This year’s gimmick is particularly trying: all the new shows are about people who hate their lives. God knows I’m past expecting any show to lighten my spirits, but after sampling premiere week I just don’t see how TV characters find the strength to endure. You can barely hear yourself think with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
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But Ally is a warrior princess compared to the rest of this year’s crop of heroes. By the first half-hour break on ABC’s Nothing Sacred, the hip young priest had had to contend with concatenating disasters involving abortion, priestly celibacy, declining church attendance, violence in the classroom, and the sanctity of the confessional. It was like a CNN Crossfire edition of the Book of Job. At the wrap-up, our hero roused himself to deliver a nervous sermon, the drift of which was that he wondered whether his ever-shakier faith in God was strong enough to support him in his travails. Of course this is just what you want to hear from the pulpit on Sunday morning; it might be preferable to overhear your doctor muttering about whether he should have gone to med school.
Still, that was nothing compared to the woe crushing the hero of the show immediately afterward, Cracker, about a shrink who tracks down serial killers. Five minutes in and he was revealed as a burnt-out case, with a bad job, bad marriage, stacks of unpaid bills–oh, and a serial killer targeting his family. The show’s star, Robert Pastorelli, drifted through it all with the aplomb of a down-at-the-heels gambler having another lousy day at the track, but by the episode’s end you wondered why he didn’t chuck it all, move to Encino, and try hawking real estate.
I think that if the last ten million hours of Princess Di coverage prove anything, it’s that the mass audience has a hunger for an experience it’s not getting from the standard outlets of mass culture–it wants tragedy. And why not? Tragedy was once upon a time a popular form, before corporate-generated American pop took over the marketplace. People were deeply moved by Princess Di’s death the way they used to be moved by The Duchess of Malfi or Lucia di Lammermoor. But tragedy is exactly what TV series are failing to provide. They’re instead offering up every possible variety of resignation and defeat; even the sitcoms are overloaded with fear, whininess, exhaustion, and despair. Yet you still can’t beat the old-time blast of cathartic energy at seeing goodness betrayed, the proud laid low, beauty destroyed before its time.
The hero, one Frank Black–a name that seems intended to sound like a designer shade of paint–tracks down serial killers at the behest of a mysterious bunch calling itself the Millennium group. They’re evidently the hippest insiders in the whole serial-killer-tracking scene; they sail into police stations and FBI offices with the commanding ease of celebrities cutting in line at fashionable clubs. I don’t quite have a handle on what they’re about, but evidently they believe that the proliferation of serial killers throughout America is a sign of the approaching apocalypse (rather than of laziness and incompetence among TV scriptwriters), and they have cast themselves as civilization’s last line of defense.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Archer Prewitt.
