6.11/The Lived Worlds/Television

The Difficult Men, 1989–2001

The Rule That Forbade Owning the Difficult Men

The most durable account of what American television had become between 1989 and 2001 was assembled after it was over, by two men, in two books published nine months apart. Alan Sepinwall, a newspaper critic who had spent the 1990s recapping network dramas episode by episode on a Star-Ledger weblog, self-published The Revolution Was Televised a decade after the period closed; it ran through twelve dramas he argued had remade the form.² Brett Martin’s Difficult Men followed from Penguin months later, narrower still: its subtitle named four shows — The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad — and its organizing figure was the male antihero at the center of each.³ Between them the two books fixed the working canon of the period’s television, and a reviewer in Salon named the procedure without flinching. Both were, the review said, “unabashedly, exercises in canon-building that, by definition, exclude as many series as they include and streamline a narrative of production and reception that, in a different telling, might have been more ragged and diverse.”⁴

The streamlining is visible in the arithmetic of the canon itself. Of Sepinwall’s twelve dramas, only three had aired inside the years the schedule ran from three networks toward six: Oz in 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997, The Sopranos in 1999. The other nine belonged to the decade that followed. What the period 1989–2001 supplied the canon was mostly ancestry — Twin Peaks, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, The Larry Sanders Show, the shows the crowned dramas had learned from — which fixed the decade in the record as a prelude rather than an arrival. And the twelve had one attribute in common that the canon did not remark on because it did not have to: every one of them had been created by a man.

The Comedy the Canon Filed Elsewhere

The cable prestige the canon crowned had begun in comedy. HBO’s first original program to draw critics into a sustained argument was The Larry Sanders Show, which premiered in August 1992 and ran without a laugh track, without a studio audience, and on a single camera — the production grammar the network’s later dramas adopted whole.⁵ The ladder HBO climbed toward The Sopranos started on that rung: a half-hour comedy proved the channel could make television that the trade press fought to cover, before Oz proved it could sustain an hour and Sex and the City proved it could draw a crowd. The drama inherited the room the comedy had built.

The canon kept the drama and set the comedy aside. Martin’s account acknowledged the exclusion in passing and made it anyway; the male-antihero hour was the argument, and a book built around Tony Soprano and Walter White had no structural place for Garry Shandling’s talk-show monster or for Larry David’s paranoiac spirals on Seinfeld, whose finale in May 1998 was watched by seventy-six million people.³ The Larry Sanders Show had itself been a study of exactly the sorting the canon later performed — a fictional talk show that weighed, every week, a guest’s cultural standing against a slot on the couch — and its finale took the writing Emmy in 1998, the kind of institutional honor the record treated as decisive when a drama collected it.⁵ The single-camera form that became the prestige default in the 2000s had been worked out first in comedy and then reassigned, in the record, to the dramas that borrowed it. A history organized around difficulty had no slot for the funniest television of the period, which was also, by audience, among the most-watched.

The Creators the Canon Didn’t Count

A second body of the period’s television was sorted out on different grounds. In Living Color premiered on Fox in April 1990 as the first sketch-comedy show since the 1970s built around Black creators, and it launched more careers than most of the canonized dramas combined — Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, and, as a background dancer, Jennifer Lopez. Its creator, Keenen Ivory Wayans, stopped appearing after the third season in 1992 and left over fights with Fox: the network censored sketches, and it began rerunning early episodes without his consent, a practice he believed was draining the show’s eventual syndication value into the network’s account rather than his.⁶ By 1994 every Wayans had gone and the show was over.

The sketch floor across town told the same story in miniature. Chris Rock spent three seasons on Saturday Night Live, from 1990 to 1993, hired in part because the show had gone years without a Black cast member, and then largely left on the bench, handed sketches he found stereotyped and sometimes refusing to film them. He left for In Living Color as a guest in the fall of 1993, weeks before that show was cancelled. He wanted, he said later, “to be in an environment where I didn’t have to translate the comedy I wanted to do.”⁷ None of this reached the canon of the revolution. The twelve dramas and the four flagships had, among all their creators, almost no Black authorship in them at all — not because the period produced none, but because the work it produced had been made in comedy and sketch, the genres the record had already agreed to file below the line. A network built its business on the same audience and drew the same blank. UPN, launched in January 1995, assembled a block of Black situation comedies — Moesha, The Parkers, The Hughleys — that made it the second-most-watched network among African-American households by the late 1990s, and produced, in the histories written afterward, no auteur, no canon, and no claim that any of it had changed the form.⁸

The Shows Sorted by Gender

The word in Martin’s title did the sorting on gender before any chapter argued it. Women created and led a substantial share of the period’s most ambitious television, and little of it survived into the canon. My So-Called Life, created by Winnie Holzman for ABC, ran nineteen episodes across 1994 and 1995 before its cancellation prompted one of the first organized fan-rescue campaigns conducted over the young World Wide Web.⁹ Party of Five took the Golden Globe for best drama in 1996;¹⁰ Ally McBeal put its star on the cover of Time in 1998 under the question of whether feminism was dead.¹¹ These were arguments about how women lived, made by women or built around them, and the record that organized the era around difficult men had no obvious shelf for any of them.

Beneath the prime-time schedule sat the largest television audience of the period, and the canon reached it not at all. Daytime — Oprah Winfrey’s syndicated hour, whose Book Club from September 1996 moved hundreds of thousands of copies of a single title on a Wednesday, and the tabloid-talk universe of Springer, Ricki Lake, and Sally Jessy Raphael beneath her — was watched by tens of millions of people every afternoon and produced no canon whatsoever. Winfrey’s single word could move a book to the top of the national bestseller list, a power no editor at any magazine held; her September 1998 turn toward what she called “Change Your Life TV” reoriented the most-watched daytime program in the country around self-improvement, and the trade press covered it as a business event rather than a cultural one. Beneath her, the tabloid-talk hours drew a young, working-class audience the prime-time advertisers prized and the prestige critics disdained — Ricki Lake’s studio audience skewed years younger than the network news it competed against. It was television made mostly by and for women, and it generated no book of twelve, no roster of auteurs, no argument that it had changed the form, though on the raw measure of how many people it reached it drew a larger audience than every drama the record kept.

What the Record Didn’t Keep

The chronology the canon told itself — decline, then renaissance — flattered the storytellers more than the record supported. The schedule that produced the difficult men also produced, in far greater volume, television that was exploitative, cheap, and forgotten on purpose. Steven Bochco’s Cop Rock, a musical police drama, was cancelled after eleven episodes in 1990 and survived only as the era’s punchline for auteur excess. Daytime supplied a body count: a 1995 episode of The Jenny Jones Show, in which one guest revealed a same-sex crush on another, ended three days later in a murder, when Jonathan Schmitz shot Scott Amedure. That was television too, made in the same years, and no history of a golden age had reason to carry it.

The gravest of the omissions were the ones the record could not have kept because the people making it did not yet know. John Kricfalusi, whose Ren & Stimpy the magazine critics had celebrated as creator-driven animation, was grooming and abusing teenage girls who wanted to draw cartoons — conduct that ran through the late 1990s as an open secret in the animation trade and was not reported until an account years afterward named two of them.¹² And the newsmagazine that was itself a pillar of the record declined, for a season, to be one: in November 1995, CBS management ordered 60 Minutes to hold its interview with the tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, fearing a lawsuit for inducing him to break a confidentiality agreement, and the program aired a version with his identity stripped out before running the full interview the following February.¹³ The institution built to keep the record had a price at which it would suppress one.

The record had not begun with the two books, either. It had been drafted in real time, week by week, in the same magazines and weeklies, by critics deciding which television deserved the vocabulary of art: James Wolcott treating the medium seriously in his Vanity Fair column, Alan Sepinwall building the episode-by-episode recap that trained readers to follow a drama the way a critic followed a novel. The two books completed a sorting that had been under way in the columns for as long as the shows had been on the air, and the columns had drawn the same lines — up for the ambitious hour, down for the daytime and the sketch floor — that the books later hardened into a canon.

The hidden subject beneath all of it was arithmetic. The Seinfeld finale in 1998 drew seventy-six million viewers; the Survivor finale in August 2000 drew an average of 51.7 million.¹⁴ Those were the last mass events. The Sopranos, at its early-2001 peak, drew roughly eleven million to a first-run airing — a seventh of the Seinfeld audience — and became the most culturally dominant drama of its moment anyway.¹⁵ That asymmetry, a small audience carrying an outsized influence, was the whole prestige-cable wager, and the canon was built to honor exactly it: the shows that mattered most to the people who wrote about television, watched by the fewest. The mass audience that had been the point of television for fifty years — the daytime hours, the water-cooler finales, the fragmenting middle that scattered across six networks and fifty cable channels as the decade closed — was left uncounted, and shrinking, as the record was being made. Pauline Kael, who had retired from The New Yorker in 1991 and died on September 3, 2001, had spent a career establishing film as the serious art the magazines were built to cover; television had never been given her equivalent, and the account that eventually filled the vacancy was the account two critics wrote a decade after the fact.¹⁶ What survived was a roster of who got written about. It was not the same thing as a record of what was watched.