6.3/The Lived Worlds/Television

Prime-Time Drama: The Long Apprenticeship, 1989–2001

The Ordinary Loss

A show did not need to be struggling to feel that arithmetic. On September 21, 1993, fifty-seven ABC affiliates, concentrated in the South and in small and mid-sized markets, declined to carry the network’s own new police drama on its premiere night, before a national audience had seen a single frame of it.² The American Family Association’s Donald Wildmon had spent months organizing advertiser pressure against a pilot most of the boycott’s own supporters had not watched, built around a scene between David Caruso and Amy Brenneman that included partial nudity; Steven Bochco trimmed fifteen seconds of it at the network’s request and then marketed the trim as evidence of the show’s daring rather than a concession. NYPD Blue’s premiere still drew twenty-three million viewers, a number no boycott had managed to prevent, and every affiliate that had refused it carried the show within the season.³ David Caruso, the lead the boycott had organized itself around, left four episodes into the second season after a salary dispute conducted almost as publicly as the boycott itself; Jimmy Smits replaced him, and the show outlasted the exit the way it had outlasted the affiliates.⁴ A dozen years later, L. Brent Bozell III — who founded the Parents Television Council in 1995 with this same premiere among his stated reasons — told a national newsmagazine the specific image that had moved him: “Suddenly it became artistic to see Dennis Franz’s rear end.”⁵

Nothing about the fight was conducted in the vocabulary later criticism used for the same decade’s dramas. It was a fight over what a broadcast network could show at ten o’clock, argued in the language of indecency, advertiser pressure, and Nielsen numbers — the same terms that had governed every prior decade’s standards battles, applied now to a show whose writing staff happened to include people who had spent a decade learning a craft the deficit was quietly financing all along. The boycott drew a national audience toward the show rather than away from it, and some part of that audience stayed for the writing underneath the noise, becoming some of the medium’s first amateur episode critics rather than its usual professional ones.

The Room Bochco Built

Steven Bochco co-created Hill Street Blues with Michael Kozoll in 1981; the two shared that year’s Outstanding Drama Series Emmy with director Gregory Hoblit, and Kozoll left after the second season over where the show was headed, not over who got named on it.⁶ What Bochco and Kozoll had built survived Kozoll’s departure and multiplied through the people who passed through the room afterward. David Milch came up under Bochco on Hill Street Blues before the two of them co-created NYPD Blue together in 1993, carrying the earlier show’s ensemble density and moral ambiguity into a network still nervous about both. Tom Fontana came up the same decade on a different Bochco-adjacent show, St. Elsewhere, which ran from 1982 to 1988 on the same understanding that an hour of network drama could hold more than one plot and more than one register in a single episode; Fontana carried that understanding into Homicide: Life on the Street a decade later. Neither man ever ran a writers’ room without someone in it who had learned the trade in the other’s.

The influence reached further than the two men’s own résumés. Joss Whedon, a decade after Hill Street Blues left the air, called it “more of a template” for Buffy the Vampire Slayer “than anything else, because you never knew if a scene was going to be dramatic, or funny, or violent” — a description of a 1981 police drama’s tonal risk offered by the creator of a 1997 vampire show on a fourth-place network, with no professional connection between the two projects beyond one having taught the other how an hour of television could behave.⁷ A style could travel between genres, networks, and generations without the people carrying it ever meeting.

A Town That Wasn’t There

Tom Shales previewed a two-hour pilot for the Washington Post on September 7, 1989 — seven months before any American television viewer could watch it — after catching it at the Telluride Film Festival, and told his readers, flatly, that they had to see it: “Twin Peaks isn’t just a visit to another town; it’s a visit to another planet.”⁸ David Lynch and Mark Frost’s small-town gothic, in which a homecoming queen’s murder investigation kept dissolving into dream logic and unexplained menace, drew 34.6 million viewers and a 21.7 rating when ABC finally aired it on April 8, 1990 — the highest-rated television movie of the entire 1989–90 season, on a network gambling an hour of prime time on a director whose most recent feature film had been booed at Cannes.⁹

The gamble did not survive contact with a second season. ABC pressured Lynch and Frost to resolve the murder mid-run, and the network got its answer on November 10, 1990, in an episode watched by 17.2 million households: Laura Palmer’s killer was her own father, possessed by a malevolent spirit named Bob.¹⁰ No episode after it drew as large an audience again; a mystery, once solved, stopped being a reason to tune in, and the show spent the rest of its second season losing the audience it had needed the reveal to keep. The finale aired June 10, 1991. A theatrical prequel, Fire Walk with Me, opened August 28, 1992, to reviews that treated its own source material’s cancellation as evidence the studio should not have tried again; it lost money in North America.¹¹ What outlasted the show’s ratings was its grammar — a police procedural willing to let a scene run past the point of explanation, tried again a few years later on Fox in a show about two federal agents chasing cases the Bureau’s own paperwork could not hold, and tried again after that on HBO in a New Jersey mob boss’s dream sequences, both times by writers who had watched the same seven months of television Shales had told the country not to miss.

On the Fence

Homicide: Life on the Street premiered January 31, 1993, in the time slot immediately following Super Bowl XXVII — the single largest lead-in audience American network television could offer a new drama — and still opened to numbers NBC’s own spokesman called the network “on the fence” about; the pilot, “Gone for Goode,” drew 18.24 million viewers, the largest single-episode audience the show’s own first season posted, and NBC still considered it a disappointment against the football audience it had inherited.¹² The show survived its first season on critical acclaim rather than ratings: Barry Levinson won the directing Emmy for that same pilot, and Tom Fontana won the writing Emmy for “Three Men and Adena,” an episode built around a single unbroken interrogation. Adapted by Paul Attanasio from the newspaperman David Simon’s own nonfiction account of a year inside the real Baltimore homicide unit, the show ran seven seasons on a network that renewed it, several of those years, on faith rather than arithmetic — shot on grainy 16mm with a jump-cut editing rhythm no other network drama that year was using, and built its reputation less on any single plot than on Andre Braugher’s interrogation-room performances as Detective Frank Pembleton. When Fontana shot a presentation reel for a new HBO prison drama four years later, he did it on the same Baltimore locations Homicide was already using, on the same production days, understanding by his own account that NBC never fully worked out how much of that reel its own budget had paid for.¹³

Michael Crichton had written a screenplay called EW, drawn from his own year as a Harvard medical student inside a hospital emergency room, in 1974, and shelved it when no studio wanted it; two decades later, having turned down a chance to write a Jurassic Park sequel, he pulled the old script back out largely unchanged, and NBC filmed it as a two-hour pilot under John Wells’s stewardship. ER premiered as a two-hour special on Monday, September 19, 1994, and moved to its regular Thursday ten-o’clock slot for its second episode — opposite David E. Kelley’s Chicago Hope, which CBS had premiered the night before. John Wells, the show’s day-to-day showrunner, later said only that Steven Spielberg, a producer on the project, “may well have picked up the phone and called Warren [Littlefield, NBC’s entertainment president] at some point,” the kind of assist Spielberg was already known for making — a claim about what Spielberg might have done, not one either man confirmed outright. Chicago Hope lost the Thursday audience and was moved to another night within its first season; ER stayed at ten o’clock, won the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy in 1996, and could still produce a water-cooler event out of one supporting character’s death nearly six years later, when Lucy Knight was stabbed by a patient and died of the injury the following episode.¹⁴

Dick Wolf’s Law & Order, premiering September 13, 1990, ran the opposite structural bet from Homicide: a half-hour of police work followed by a half-hour of prosecution, cast changes absorbed without disrupting the format, syndication built into the design from the start. Wolf and Fontana had shared an office in their Hill Street–St. Elsewhere years, and the friendship outlived both shows; in 1996 the two staffs engineered a crossover in which a Law & Order detective delivered a fugitive directly into a Homicide interrogation room, one network drama handing a suspect to a competing network’s drama as a stunt neither series needed ratings to justify.¹² Elsewhere on the same network’s schedule, Joshua Brand and John Falsey’s Northern Exposure, premiering July 12, 1990, gave a young staff writer named David Chase an early credential in a small-town ensemble register he returned to, on a different network, under his own name, at the decade’s end. David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, premiering September 18, 1992, on the same Wisconsin-small-town instinct turned dark rather than whimsical, won the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy in both 1993 and 1994 — a network drama, twice, beating shows with larger audiences on the strength of a writing staff whose principal writer was Kelley himself.¹⁵

The Ones the Numbers Killed

Winnie Holzman’s My So-Called Life, produced by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, premiered August 25, 1994, ran nineteen episodes, and was cancelled on May 15, 1995, despite an online campaign to save it that became, by most accounts, the first fan-rescue effort the World Wide Web had ever hosted for a television show.¹⁶ Alicia Silverstone had auditioned for the lead before the fifteen-year-old Claire Danes was cast instead. Herskovitz later gave the plainest account of why the show still died: “Networks didn’t understand that you could sell to adolescent girls.” Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman’s Party of Five, premiering on Fox that same September, survived several years of the network’s own cancellation threats and won the Golden Globe for Best Drama in 1996 anyway, a prize that did nothing to change the ratings conversation happening inside the network each spring.¹⁷ Chris Carter’s The X-Files, premiering September 10, 1993, climbed the slower way — from twelve million viewers to fourteen million across a single season, finishing 105th out of 128 shows its first year — written in its early seasons by the team of Glen Morgan and James Wong, and it survived long enough for a staff writer named Vince Gilligan to join in its third season and write his first produced episode, “Soft Light,” in 1995.¹⁸ Paul Feig’s Freaks and Geeks, produced by Judd Apatow and cast largely with unknown actors — James Franco, Seth Rogen, Linda Cardellini, Busy Philipps, and Jason Segel among them — aired fifteen of its eighteen finished episodes on NBC before the network let it go in the summer of 2000; the last three sat unbroadcast until a cable channel picked them up that fall.¹⁹ Four shows, four different survival paths through the same ratings apparatus: an online campaign that failed, a Golden Globe that changed nothing, a slow enough climb that nobody pulled the plug before the audience arrived, and a cancellation so quiet that most of the season never reached a broadcast schedule at all.

A Room of One’s Own

David E. Kelley wrote both Ally McBeal and The Practice largely by himself, and on September 12, 1999, he became the only producer ever to win the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Drama Series in the same year — Ally McBeal took the comedy prize, The Practice the drama, both credited to a single working writer rather than a staffed room.²⁰ Aaron Sorkin built The West Wing largely out of material cut from his own 1995 screenplay for The American President, and the show, premiering September 22, 1999, won nine Emmys for its first season alone, a record that stood for fifteen years — Thomas Schlamme’s restless walking-and-talking camera among the citations, alongside Sorkin’s own writing award.²¹ Joss Whedon, six years removed from a staff-writer credit on Roseanne’s second season, watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer outgrow its home network entirely: the WB’s final offer for the show topped out at a reported $1.8 million an episode in the spring of 2001, and UPN, a fourth-place network with less to lose, paid a reported $2.3 million to take it instead — roughly five hundred thousand dollars more per episode for a show whose own network had decided it could not afford to keep.²²

None of these shows understood itself, at the time, as evidence for an argument literary critics had not yet built. That argument arrived more than a decade after the fact, in books like Brett Martin’s Difficult Men and Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised, which retroactively organized the decade’s scattered ratings fights and mentor lineages into a single “Third Golden Age,” anchored overwhelmingly in hour-long dramas about difficult men — a frame Salon’s own review called, without much argument from anyone who had lived through the underlying decade, an “exercise in canon-building that, by definition, exclude[s] as many series as [it] include[s].”²³ The exclusion was not incidental. It cut the comedies these same years had also produced at David E. Kelley’s own writing desk, and it cut the two women, Winnie Holzman and Marti Noxon, who had run rooms alongside the men the books chose to remember.