The Revolution Was Televised

It's no secret to anyone who reads this blog that I'm a big fan of television. Just look at how many seasons of the stuff I routinely post here. For Christmas, Marissa gave me this book, written by Alan Sepinwall, arguably the biggest name in the admittedly not-so-big television criticism world. It purports to explain how, in the span of about a decade (late '90s to late '00s), the concept of the televised drama series was, well, revolutionized. I can certainly agree that some amazing shows have come into being over the past 15 years or so. What I can't attest to personally - but what I'll take the author's word for - is that up until the late '90s television had been largely all the same old crap for dozens and dozens of years. Serialization was minimal; heroes and villains came in black and white without any real moral ambiguities; the production model for these shows was to simply exist perpetually until they were no longer profitable, rather than to have definitive endpoints in mind. Sepinwall goes on to specifically cite twelve shows - and he admits these aren't necessarily the best twelve shows of the era - as examples of ways in which TV drama had changed for the better. Unfortunately these are laden with plot details and spoilers aplenty; I cannot stress enough that this is not a book to be read until one has experienced the shows listed here in their entirety. I myself have only seen eight of the twelve shows, and while I had no real interest in two of the other four, The Shield and Battlestar Galactica have now been irrevocably spoiled for me should I ever watch them through. But I knew what I was getting into, and have no regrets about reading this book.

I will now highlight the main arguments Sepinwall poses for how each of the twelve shows he highlights was responsible for certain milestone advancements in TV drama, and how collectively they got us from where we were in the mid-ninties to where we are today. (No spoilers whatsoever, I promise.)

Oz (1997-2003) was the first HBO original series that was anything more than an afterthought; HBO had been making original series for decades, but always primarily as filler to sprinkle around all of the movies it showed. Then someday someone decided that since this was HBO they didn't have to play by the normal rules TV shows have to play by, and decided to get really experimental with Oz. The show took place in a maximum security prison and was full of essentially irredeemable characters: murderers, rapists, and just the worst of the worst. There was plenty of death and plenty of cast turnover. Sepinwall notes that while it was often a decent enough show on its own, Oz is primarily remembered for its crowning achievement, which was to open the door at HBO to the groundbreaking series that followed.

The Sopranos (1999-2007) was just a groundbreaking hit. After Oz showed that you could make pretty entertaining television by throwing old rules out the window, The Sopranos took things up another level by more or less introducing two huge elements to the TV drama: more intense serialization and the anti-hero. Several shows throughout history had loosely played with the idea of setting up things in one episode that played out in ensuing ones, but The Sopranos was doing this all the time as the rule rather than the exception. (What's interesting is that, having seen the show, I can attest that it is far less serialized than most other great ones from the past decade or so. Baby steps, I guess.) More importantly, the character of Tony Soprano presented all sorts of ethical dilemmas for viewers; before, the good guys were the good guys and the bad guys were the bad guys. Here, viewers were being asked to root for and sympathize with a protagonist who was very clearly a bad person surrounded largely by other bad people.

The Wire (2002-2008) was essentially a televised novel of Shakespearian heft and Dickensian detail. Throughout five seasons it told a very specific story, never once compromising its message for the sake of its characters. Its cast of characters was literally a hundred or more deep and, to quote the show itself, "all the pieces matter[ed]." The lowly crack addicts, the teenagers skipping school to sling dope on the street corners, the high-ranking police officers, the mayoral candidates, the stick-up artists, the dockworkers - everyone. The Wire showed that you could make a TV series the same way you'd write any story (to an extent) and that the TV format didn't necessarily have to compromise the integrity of your message.

Deadwood (2004-2006) was another highly revered HBO drama, and... honestly, that's about it. I know Sepinwall is a huge fan of Deadwood, considering it and the previous two shows to be the "holy trifecta" of HBO dramas. I also loved the show, but it's unclear to me what new ground it broke, or brought to the table, really, that neither of the previous two had.

The Shield (2002-2008) is the first non-HBO drama on our list (FX, baby), and that's more or less why it was included here; its quality and success proved that you could make HBO-style shows (this one about a corrupt cop ruling his district like a warlord) on basic cable. The book's titular revolution had now spread away from the premium channels and would only keep growing!

Lost (2004-2010) took the revolution to the big networks, as ABC got into the game with a show modeled like many of the aforementioned ones, only done with the budget and promotional abilities of a primetime network hit. Again, many shows prior to this one had toyed with serialization in their plots, but Lost would prove itself utterly inaccessible to newcomers; fortunately, a glut of new technology like  DVR, video streaming, and TV on DVD enabled fans to catch up and stay caught up to all of the batshit insanity going on throughout this show's run. The now widespread Internet also offered fans an ability to share ideas and thoughts with one another, and this would prove huge for the show's ability to gain an obsessive and passionate cult following in addition to the several million fairly casual viewers.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) feels like a bit of an anomaly on this list; we have to jump way back to 1997 in order to include it here, and also over to the long-forgotten network known as the WB. I think Sepinwall's point here was to show that you could make clever and somewhat edgy shows for teenagers instead of melodramatic shitty soap operas all the time. Mostly this chapter just felt like an excuse to talk about other Joss Whedon projects like Firefly and Dollhouse.

24 (2001-2010) did something that no show before or since has dared to try; it depicted every single episode of every season in real time, just completely packing all kinds of action into each and every episode. It also brought the anti-hero to network television, but kind of inadvertently; Jack Bauer was part of the counter-terrorism unit and as such he was clearly the hero we were rooting for. But as the decade and the show progressed, and Jack went to measures more and more extreme in nature to extract information from his prisoners, and the nation kind of... how can I say this... cared a little bit less about catching terrorists and a little bit more about not torturing them, I guess, Jack became a morally ambiguous character in his own right. Sepinwall points out how 24 kind of lost both creative steam and also its sense of moral superiority as the decade wore on, and specifically cited Homeland, a newer show from the same people responsible for 24, as a perfect tonal follow-up to 24; where the earlier show was an example of a Bush-era post-9/11 show with a flair for patriotism and big explosions, the later one is far more Obama-era in nature, concerned with espionage and conspiracy more than outright body counts; it is a perfect post-post-9/11 show, if that makes sense.

Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) lent new credibility to the genre of science fiction as something more than a low form of geeky entertainment, which is exactly where it was left in the wake of Star Wars and Star Trek. The irony here is that the earliest works of science fiction fro the '50s and '60s were primarily used to satirize or highlight particular aspects of our own culture, so what Battlestar was doing wasn't even unprecedented. It was "science fiction for people who hate science fiction," and in that regard it succeeded. (Game of Thrones would later become known as "high fantasy for people who hate high fantasy," another great example of quality TV-making overcoming genre stereotypes.)

Friday Night Lights (2006-2011) was groundbreaking in a number of ways. For one, it found a second life as a DirecTV exclusive series when it normally would have been canceled by NBC after two seasons. This concept, of critically acclaimed shows being given new life after failing to reach mainstream audiences would have been unprecedented before the "TV revolution" had occurred, and people and networks saw new value in their programming beyond the bottom line on ratings. But back to what made Friday Night Lights revolutionary in the first place; it was a sentimental show about a small town, its football team, and the family at the center of it all, and yet it was the furthest thing from cheesy or overly sentimental. Its pilot features the team's star quarterback getting paralyzed from the waist down, and where most other shows would have had him miraculously healed and walking again by the midpoint of the first season, Friday Night Lights instead opted to explore the repercussions of such a paralysis as it resonated throughout the team and the community. The show was a real tearjerker, but it was never pandering or gimmicky in the slightest. Above all, it showed that quality dramas could also feature ethically sound people with a whole lot of heart, which set it apart from all the anti-heroes that had come to dominate the landscape of quality television in the previous five or six years.

Mad Men (2007-) debuted on AMC right after The Sopranos had ended and when The Wire and The Shield had one season left each. Some were starting to wonder if the "revolution" would end up being a passing thing, and just a phase in the history of television. When Mad Men turned out to be a worthy heir to the "quality drama" throne, and more so when yet another heretofore unknown network jumped into the game, it was clear that this new creative uptick in TV dramas was not just a passing thing.

Breaking Bad (2008-) gave us not just an anti-hero, but a downright villain. Throughout its run, it has defied the idea of stasis - the idea that characters don't ever really change - that defines so many other great TV shows (including The Sopranos). Even when characters do change on TV shows, they typically "grow," and change for the better. How many shows have you seen, after all, where the bad guys are given background stories and motivations and then all of a sudden they're boring good guys? In Breaking Bad, however, we start out with a relatable and kind of pathetic character in Walter White, and we spend several years watching him go from cancer victim to drug dealer to murderer to crime lord. His moral decay has been slow but steady and absolute, and few things on TV have ever been more fascinating than seeing a downtrodden loser become a truly dangerous and murderous villain.

This ran long, but with it I hoped to convey the messages from each chapter without spoiling the shows themselves. I hope you enjoyed it!