Tube Talk

The world was set topsy-turvy last fall when my dog died and the writer's strike crippled the TV industry all in the same week. Well now I have replaced the dog (okay, Josie cannot be replaced, but the new one will certainly fill the gap), and the writers have returned to the business, more or less, if they aren't trying to find some obscure website to ply their wares to what would be very fragmented audience.

I have begun to receive my Emmy "screeners" for consideration fo this year's awards (and try to name a show or an actor who won last year, I dare you). I've gotten the requisite Showtime and HBO boxed set of DVDs, most of which I will not view because I've seen them already. Of all the series, the only one that stands out (and will probably earn some acting citations) is HBO's "In Tretment," a 43-episode psychodrama in the most literal sense. Though it required patience and dedication on the part of the audience (a very small audience, apparently), our patience was reward (or should I say his patients were rewarded--but I digress). Gabriel Byrne as the self-doubting shrink, and Dianne Wiest as his mentor/shrink, will cetainly receive nominations. But I believe a second season may be difficult to produce.

Of the new network series, very few stood out, and some were practically stillborn or fatalities of the industry's labor wars. I did enjoy "Dirty Sexy Money," a shameless and self-mocking supersoap, and appreciated the artistic dimensions of "Pushing Daisies," though it wandered off far too often into the Land of the Precious. My favorite guilty pleasure, "Journeyman," died on the vine. Another time-traveling program that was fortuitously held off until after the strike was "New Amsterdam," about a 400-year-old detective who has lived in Manhattan the whole time, never aged, married and sired half the island's population but seems to have not garnered an iota of attention. Now there is suspension of disbelief for the sake of storytelling, as in the ludicrous "Pushing Daisies," but when you have a gritty modern police procedural, one would expect a modicum of rational consistency.

The best example of such a show is "Medium," a program in its fourth season that I have come to like more and more. Though it demands one accepts the premise of a psychic police detective--supposedly based on a "real" psychic--its blend of domestic comitragedy and some very dark and often violent storytelling constitutes some of the deftest and surprisingly varied scriptwriting on television. Yet it never wins any awards. I'd vote for it, but I'm in the comedy category, and I'm still struggling to get an Emmy over to "Scrubs" before it is scrubbed.

Then of course there is the major beneficiary of the strike, the phenomenon "American Idol, " which to me gets less and less interesting as the season bounds ahead to its overhyped climax.
I only monitor the show because I have a niece who blogs about it for a major East Coast newspaper. The song stylings are predictable now, as if course are the comments by the Kingston Trio (anyone get that arcane reference?). It has been generally accepted that the strange little Mormon boy David Archuleta will win, thanks to his dimply looks and the legions of tweenie girls who will be texting his number incessantly on their cells. In fact he is rather talented, if someone robotic and someone who would probably make a very boring dinner companion. The eliminations, announced at the end of the interminably padded weekly hours, have gotten more surprising, as in yesterday's axing of matinee idol Michael Johns. But the order is really irrelevant. As the number of "Idol" finalists has now gone into the eighties, the distinction of being in the top twelve is hardly impressive any more, and it will take a special personality to break through unless attached with the cachet of winning. And even then there are the popular flops such as Taylor Hicks, who will never achieve anywhere the success of the girl he defeated, Katherine McPhee, destined for Broadway stardom.