With the season premiere of Fox's 24 coming Tuesday, and the announcement last week by NBC that it has given its celebrated new cop drama, Boomtown, the green light for a full year of 22 episodes, this is a good time to try to fine-tune conventional wisdom about the state of prime-time network television.
As part of the critical chorus that has been relentlessly lamenting the sorry state of most new network series this fall, I feel a responsibility to get out what might seem a counterintuitive message: Overall, prime-time network television is not as bad as you might think. It is not all second-rate compared to the premium cable service of HBO, which is regularly and rightfully acclaimed for landmark series like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under.
In fact, if you look at series like 24 and Boomtown, it is fair to say that the craft of storytelling on prime-time network television is in one of the most exciting and creative phases of the medium's 55-year history. While no series make the case as compellingly as those two, the evidence extends well beyond to include other dramas such as: CSI and Without a Trace (CBS), Smallville and Gilmore Girls (WB), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (NBC) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (UPN). Each pushes the boundaries of traditional television narratives in ways that enrich the medium and make for more viewing pleasure.
But 24, which last month won the Emmy for best dramatic writing, is the show of shows when it comes to rewriting the book on television writing. No series since Steven Bochco's ill-fated Cop Rock, which in 1990 tried to re-imagine the police drama as a Broadway musical, took on more iron-clad network conventions than this one, starring Kiefer Sutherland as a counter-terrorism agent trying to stop the assassination of a presidential candidate. The biggest dare 24 took in its debut season last year was telling its story in real time, with 24 one-hour episodes recounting the 24 hours of CIA agent Jack Bauer's battle to thwart the assassins while his own personal life spun out of control.
'24' a calculated risk
The main reason network drama had never been done in this highly serialized way is the belief among programmers that it would preclude viewers from dropping in and out of a series over the course of a year. It was feared that if viewers missed one week, they would simply stop watching altogether.
That did happen to some extent. The series ended with a weekly audience of about 8.7 million viewers. By way of comparison, CBS' The Guardian, a traditional drama about a lawyer who defends children, had 13.4 million viewers last week in the same 9 p.m. time period that 24 will occupy. Making the ratings somewhat more palatable to Fox is the fact that many of those 8.7 million viewers are in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic most attractive to advertisers.
Still, Fox deserves credit for bringing the series back in the same real-time format this year, even though it's costing the network money. Taking the longer view, Fox understands that the excitement generated by 24's brand of storytelling is one of the most effective weapons network television has in the war with HBO and the rest of the cable and satellite universe.
For those who did not stay with the series through all 24 weeks, Bauer did stop the Serb terrorists from assassinating Sen. David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), but at great personal cost, as his wife was killed in a season-ending shootout. Tuesday's opener, which will run without commercial breaks, picks up 16 months later, with Palmer in the White House and Bauer in a deep depression and on leave from the counter-terrorism unit.
So as not to spoil any of the pleasure of watching a series that so relies on startling explosions of plot, I'm going to be scarce with details. But the first two episodes offer almost as good a dramatic ride as last year's pilot.
The wounded hero
And it's not only about 24 being new and different. It's the wise recombination of archetypal material with narrative innovation. The Jack Bauer who greets us this season is a guy we have met often in American popular culture: the frontier gunslinger as psychically wounded hero who has laid down his weapon in anger, guilt and grief.
Wearing a scraggly beard, Sutherland's Bauer is a man all but broken by the violence that has now touched his life. The writing enhances this portrayal by daring to change speeds rather than running along at the standard steady, don't-turn-that-dial pace of network drama. This series, known for its adrenalin-fueled pacing, takes the risk of slowing to a crawl at the very start of the hour to capture Bauer's state of depression. And the shift in rhythm makes for that much more of a dramatic bang when Bauer straps the six-shooter back on in answer to his president's call to duty.
The series has already changed the way storytelling is done elsewhere on television. Last year, when David Simon was explaining how The Wire, a series he had then just sold to HBO, would stick with one investigation through the whole year rather than doing self-contained episodes week to week, he referred to 24 a number of times.
Of course, HBO reruns episodes numerous times each week, minimizing the problem of viewers missing an episode and dropping out. But it was clear that HBO had looked closely at 24 in deciding about The Wire. For once, HBO was looking at an innovation from a broadcast network rather than the other way around.
The effect of 24 can also be seen in CBS' Without a Trace, starring Anthony La Paglia as chief of a missing persons' unit. With its older audience, CBS isn't yet willing to risk a break with self-contained episodes, but the emphasis on the investigation during the first 24 hours a person goes missing is taken straight from 24. It both jacks up the pacing and creates a dramatic intensity few series can match. Without a Trace is already in Nielsen's Top 20, and that's opposite ER on NBC.
Shifting points of view
But, while 24 is the groundbreaker, it is Boomtown, a police drama set in Los Angeles, that truly advances narrative technique by telling its story each week from shifting points of view.
In Boomtown, creator and executive producer Graham Yost (Band of Brothers) dares to stop the tape, back it up and start it over - repeating scenes that viewers have just seen. Except that each time, he shows it from the point of view of a different character.
Yost is to television drama what John Barth was to the post-war novel in the way he constantly reminds us of the constructedness of Boomtown - that it is only a story being made up by a storyteller, not a window on social reality. And, yet, it makes the drama no less gripping.
The episode scheduled to air Nov. 3, titled "The Freak," is one of the most powerful hours of police drama that I have seen since the finale of Homicide: Life on the Street. It features Mykelti Williamson as Detective Bobby Smith trying to protect a single mother and her daughter from a Russian mobster.
Like 24, the episode borrows an archetype from the American western, with Smith ultimately trying to hold the fort against a wave of gangsters in a downtown motel vacant except for him and the two people he is protecting.
It's the police detective as modern-day John Wayne.
But the cultural breakthrough of Boomtown is that you don't see the story in simple black-and-white terms. While a series like NYPD Blue relentlessly reinforces the dominant culture's viewpoint, Boomtown's varying points of view radically alter that paradigm, if not eliminate it altogether.
This, too, happened in The Wire, and I don't think it is any accident that 24, Boomtown and The Wire offer some of the most enlightened depictions of African-American identity on television. While Haysbert's depiction of a strong African-American president on 24 isn't the leading role Williamson's Detective Smith has on Boomtown, it is just as important.
The saying is "If you can conceive it, you can achieve it." Television is one of the primary ways we come to conceive of new things as a society - when new voices tell culturally resonant stories in new ways to millions of us gathered nightly on the other side of the screen.