Community and the Death of Quality Network TV

Posted on 5/21/12 at 12:27 pm

Posted by Baloo

Formerly MDGeaux

Member since Sep 2003

49645 posts

Posted on 5/21/12 at 12:27 pm

This is going to be a long post, even for me. So spare me the TL:DR crap. You were warned, and if you don’t want in on the discussion, just click on another thread now. (This of course, virtually guarantees the first response will be TL;DR). Yes, I also know there’s another Community thread, but I’m trying to have a more focused discussion about what it means for TV. OK, with that out of the way…

I have long argued we are living in the Golden Age of Television. There is more great TV on right now then there ever has been. Unless it was just five years ago. But the point is, there are more ambitious, interesting shows on television than there were in previous eras. TV has blossomed into, well, art. And that has rarely been the case before Twin Peaks, which I view as the dividing line. That’s when people realized what you could actually DO with television, even if it took ten years to actually start doing it.

What has fueled this incredible burst of creativity over the past decade? Cable. Go ahead and make a list of the top ten shows on TV right now. Chances are good that your list is dominated by shows on cable. Expand the list to, say, the top 20 of the past decade. Once again, almost all cable shows.

Why is this? Simple. Cable shows don’t have to draw as large of an audience to be considered a success. The Sopranos was a wildly successful show, and it never got the numbers Community gets on a bad night. Yet the Sopranos was the lynchpin of HBO’s original programming and Community is getting shuffled to Friday so it can reach syndication and then be quietly smothered with a pillow.

Here’s a hard fact of pop entertainment: the best stuff will never find the largest audience. You get large audiences by aiming for the middle. Hugely popular movies, shows, and music don’t suck per se, they are just usually competently made mediocrities. It’s precisely because they are competently made mediocrities that they are successful.

Movies are a bit of an exception, but audiences as a rule, do not want to be challenged. They do not want engaging. They want comforting. They want familiarity. And it’s not wrong for a business to give the consumers what they want. In fact, that’s largely a positive thing.

But that makes for terrible art. Over the past decade, TV has made a real push to be considered more than just a vehicle for selling cars and soda. TV show runners have made a compelling case to be considered legitimate artists. Like all pop artists, they still need to bring in some sort of audience to be viable, but they have done so by making challenging shows for a targeted niche. The best shows don’t get the best ratings, but they get the most fanatical devotees. Their viewers aren’t passive, they are active. The audience actually engages the material which, theoretically at least, means each viewer is more valuable.

Which of course brings us to Community. Community is, or more accurately “was”, the best show on network TV. It was high concept, challenging, and funny as hell. It also had almost no chance of success among the average TV viewer who wants familiar – Community is far too weird and self-aware to ever serve as good white noise in the background. Because of this, the show has been moved to Friday and Dan Harmon has been fired.

Losing Harmon means the show is dead. It was his voice and Community without Harmon is like The Godfather without Coppola. The history of shows losing their showrunner mid-run is not auspicious. In fact, most had dramatic drops in quality (SEE West Wing, Gilmour Girls). NBC will leave a neutered “wacky” show on Friday until it reaches syndication and then turn out the lights. It’s an ignoble end.

Sure, NBC is a business and needs to make a profit. But I find it hard to believe they can’t make money off of a fanbase as devoted as Community’s. The Coen brothers’ Oscar speech thanked the movie industry for letting them play in a corner of the sandbox. NBC certainly has room in their sandbox, given the dire straits the network is in.

But what this really means is that the networks are giving up on quality television. OK, they will still turn out competent procedurals and the like, but they are ceding “art” to the cable networks. The network shows have grown progressively duller while all of the exciting work is being done on AMC, F/X, or HBO. Those of us who look for quality television will completely abandon the networks in the search of said quality.

This is the Golden age of Television, and it’s happening without the networks. Tell me, is that actually good for business? The Big Four don’t have room for Community, Justified, Mad Men, and the like?