TV writers particularly lamented the rise of reality TV, since it put them out of a job. The good news for them is that this trend too is passing and scripted drama is making its comeback. The new trend in network TV is what I call the Long Arc series (though I think the suits are still using the old catch-all term "high concept"), shows whose individual episodes are often a little weak but which keep you watching by an addictive season-long storyline.
The best example of this new genre is ABC's "Lost." "Lost" is a terrible show, but it is crammed full of enticing mysteries, the main one being whether the survivors of a plane crash will get off the remote island on which they now find themselves. "Lost" seems to have been created as a direct response to "Survivor," the imagination struggling to reassert its rights over the realm of fact. They like desert islands, we'll give 'em desert islands!
“Alias” is arguably a long-arc show but I think its appeal was less the ridiculous contortions involving the Rimbaldi artifact (Rimbaud + Da Vinci = Rimbaldi, right?) and whose mom killed whose dad and more the glam action sequences: put on this tiny dress and this red wig and go get that disk! "Alias" is part soap and psychodrama, part caper show in the tradition of "Mission: Impossible" recast for the era of the sexy female action hero, following in the who-says-you-can't-have-it-all footsteps of La Femme Nikita and Buffy. These are heroines who can both rescue and be rescued, though I often think someone should do a count of exactly how many times they do each to see if they really are good role models for empowering girls.
The other aspect of the show worth commenting on is that it is super-gay. Of course, no prison drama would be complete without the threat of homosexuality. Fear of anal rape is the symbolic basis of our criminal justice system, otherwise prison might sound like three hots and a cot, same as the army and a whole lot safer these days. "Prison Break" splits homosexuality into the "bad", represented by the lewd and sinister rapist Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, a lean, swishing, drawling white supremacist who can't stop licking his fingers and goateed lips, and those appealing homoerotic elements which can be safely smuggled past the inhibitions of the hetero male: devotion between brothers, the sadism of guards, a tragic inability to connect with women, muscular hypertrophy and the right underwear to go with it.
The show just keeps growing on me; Episode 6 left me genuinely impressed and I'm revising this upwards as I'm watching number 7.
At first I had taken "Prison Break" for a typical example of the current popular post-CSI fare, shows which get by more on high production values than writing, and which suffer from an absence of any real characters. Much of the dialogue is spoken in such a monotone as to be almost unintelligible.
What is this contemporary degree zero of characterization? At first, you take it for the hastiness of cheap hackwork. On reflection, the possibility emerges that it is a new noir style, an update of the hardboiled exterior, the male emotional exoskeleton toughened to the point of paralysis and now generously applied to both sexes. The hardness might be a dim idea of scientific objectivity, or corporate professionalism raised to the nth degree.
It is also possible to put a broader political interpretation on it. It reminds me of movies like "Starship Troopers," the most fascist film I've ever seen, in which the collectivist enemy is reduced to bugs to be exterminated, or "Independence Day," whose characters are all such stereotypes that they seem to be arguing for the extinction of human individuality altogether. The political meaning of individualism and anti-individualism is always ambiguous; both can be right-wing or left-wing. Here the lack of individuality feels covertly reactionary.
Maybe in a couple years there will be a CSI everywhere there's a Hard Rock Café and after having a burger under a certified Elvis guitar you will go home and watch a show about a corpse found in a glamorous locale you wish you had the time and money to visit. With its lurid world of rape reenactments, gross-out butchery in the morgue room, sudden volume spikes and fast camera cuts racing along bullet paths and through colons and such, the CSI franchise is a big step down from its nobler precursor Law & Order, whose special effects consisted largely of a two-beat sound that ended scenes.
In the eternal race to the bottom, CSI is currently beating out Law & Order and its tawdry sex-crimes spin-off by almost two to one, roughly the same ratings lead that Fox News has on CNN. Neither of these shows has any long arcs or even ongoing relationships between characters but viewers keep coming back for more. Whatever trends come and go, it's safe to say the detectives will always be with us.
Instead of trying to mint a new term, shouldn't I have just called these shows cliffhangers? Maybe, but there is a minor distinction, which is that the suspense at the end of your old school cliffhanger changes each time: heading towards the falls one week, surrounded by hungry cannibals the next, etc. These shows, however, take one question, like who/where is my father/mother, and keep it percolating in the background so as to stretch it out over the season.
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