It was a destination without many vacancies, particularly on Sunday nights, where Desperate and Boston Legal looked like a pairing that could run together for a long time. A year before, ABC had bought an absurd number of new series because the network was so starved for hits over the past few seasons. Winning the lottery twice with Desperate and Lost meant most of those shows were no longer necessary, and came and went quickly. (Hang your heads in memory of Blind Justice, a show about a blind, gun-toting NYPD detective that was somehow cocreated by Steven Bochco.) Those other shows were at least being placed in open time slots where they could, in success, remain; Grey’s was being squeezed into a four-week window on Sundays when Boston Legal would otherwise have been airing repeats, and there was no plan for what to do with the remaining episodes once Denny Crane and friends reclaimed the hour.
Instead, Grey’s was such an instant smash that it was the Lou Gehrig to Boston Legal’s Wally Pipp, becoming the backbone of ABC’s entire lineup for the next decade.
In hindsight, it seems improbable that anyone wouldn’t have expected Grey’s to be a big hit. In telling the story of five attractive young surgeons beginning their internships at a Seattle hospital, Rhimes had spliced together the most appealing parts of ER (high-stakes, fast-moving medical drama) and Friends (good-looking twenty-somethings bonding together during their first real taste of adulthood), with a dash of Sex and the City (the on-again, off-again, frequently self-destructive relationship between Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd), and combined that with her own flair for melodrama and oratory to make it feel like something wholly new.
Grey’s could be erratic, sometimes due to forces beyond Rhimes’s control (actors bad-mouthing the show or one another in the press, or leaving the series abruptly), sometimes from her reaching too far for a big idea (the fifth-season story arc where Izzie Stevens had sex with the ghost of her dead lover Denny Duquette, later revealed to be a hallucination caused by cancer that had spread to her brain). But when the show clicked in its depiction of romance, friendship, or the incredibly violent stakes of working at Seattle Grace (like the two-parter where Meredith had her hands on a piece of unexploded ordnance stuck inside a patient’s body), it could be extraordinary. Even relatively recently, after churning through so many different iterations of the cast, an episode like Derek’s death—injured in a car crash (only minutes after saving the survivors of a different car crash) and rendered unable to talk, he’s helpless to do anything but watch as the underqualified staff at a regional hospital misses an easy diagnosis—can work spectacularly well, because Rhimes still has precision aim for her viewers’ tear ducts.
While Rhimes’s other series were designed with finite creative life spans, it’s conceivable Grey’s could be around for fifteen seasons, maybe even twenty. Not bad for a show whose own network had no plans for it past its first month.
—AS
Homeland season 1 (Showtime, 2011)
In the fourth episode of the first season of Showtime’s military thriller series Homeland, CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and her quarry, returned Marine POW and possible terrorist Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis)—who’d been orbiting each other since the pilot—get drunk at a pub and have impulse-sex in a parked car. It was the biggest of many pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you moments in the first leg of Homeland, a series that was created by 24 producers Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon (adapting the Israeli series Prisoners of War) and that often played like its slowed-down, more psychologically oriented cousin.
Nobody who’d become engrossed in the show by that point expected it to become a doomed love story: a cat-and-mouse story where the cat and the mouse are secretly crazy about each other, and this might have been a credibility-destroying gambit in any other ostensibly realistic series; but because Homeland had prepped the moment—carefully detailing Brody’s alienation, depression, and troubled marriage and Carrie’s antipsychotic drug regimen and lifelong history of flouting rules and courting danger—it felt psychologically credible and hilariously right. And it turned the show into a unique television event: a sexy, sad, sometimes emotionally devastating amour fou superimposed upon a Manchurian Candidate–like story of a brainwashed war hero who may or may not be helping Islamic terrorists plan another 9/11.
The season finale found Brody, now the beloved mascot of the US executive branch, preparing to detonate an explosive-laden vest inside a bunker in order to kill the vice president and his advisers. Had the story ended there, with a bloody detonation or Brody being killed or arrested, Homeland might have been acclaimed as one of the great, wild miniseries in TV history. Instead, both Brody and his targets lived so as not to kill the source of the show’s unexpectedly huge ratings; the machinations required to hide Brody’s murderous plan as well as his last-minute change of heart (brought about by a cell-phone call from his teenage daughter) were absurd even by Homeland’s increasingly lax standards of credibility, and they tipped the series over into cartoonland, where it wandered for two more years.
Seasons 2 and 3 were all about digging the plot and characters out from under the rubble left by the producers’ expedient decision; Brody, who had been elected to Congress, found himself doing nasty but menial errands for his handlers (such as strangling a fellow plotter in the woods) and then murdering the vice president in his own office and getting away with it; by season 3 he was a fugitive, and by the end Carrie watched from afar as he was publicly hanged as a traitor by Iranians. Seasons 4 and 5 managed to recover a bit of the show’s luster, but the stench of opportunism continued to contaminate the good work of Homeland’s writers, actors, and filmmakers.
—MZS
I’ll Fly Away (NBC, 1991–1993)
The only US dramatic series to deal primarily with the meaning and impact of the civil rights movement, and another example of a brilliant but low-rated program that was kept alive by fan adoration and critical praise, I’ll Fly Away was the brainchild of Northern Exposure cocreators Joshua Brand and John Falsey. Set in an unspecified Southern state in the late 1950s and ’60s, it was sold as a counterpart of To Kill a Mockingbird, and featured an appealing lead performance by Sam Waterston as Forrest Bedford, an Atticus Finch–like district attorney who struggles to raise his three children (played by John Aaron Bennett, Ashlee Levitch, and twins Jeremy and Jason London) after his wife’s death. More daringly, though, the show gave equal time to the life of Forrest’s housekeeper, Lily Harper (Regina Taylor), who served as an unofficial adoptive mom to Forrest’s kids as well as a biological mother to her own, yet still found time to get involved in the civil rights struggle, sparking an evolution that helped radicalize her earnest but politically calculating boss. An honest, affectionate, and evenhanded portrait of a tumultuous time and place, I’ll Fly Away rose beyond the clichés of liberal humanist history, presenting the former Confederate States as a vibrant, complex place where familial, romantic, and racial allegiances were at odds. NBC’s cancellation of the show left plot threads dangling; PBS helped the cast and crew tie them up with a powerful 1993 movie that borrowed on the real-life lynching of Emmett Till. The movie, more so than the regular series, is Lily’s story, built around her return home thirty years later; its climax, a moment of rapprochement between Lily and Forrest, is quietly devastating.
—MZS
Julia (NBC, 1968–1971)
It would be wonderful to report that Julia, one of the most important series in TV’s early political and racial development, was also a great show. It’s actually so pleasantly inoffensive as to be nearly unwatchable, but its milestone status is still guaranteed by virtue of its central casting: Diahann Carroll’s performance in the title role of widowed nurse and single mother Julia Baker marked the first time in network TV history that a woman of color had been given the lead role in a situation comedy, without having to play a domestic of some kind. Series creator Hal Kanter and his writers were never quite able to balance social relevance with involving comedy; Julia’s defining traits were indomitable patience
and niceness. But the show did give her an active romantic life (her boyfriends were played by Fred Williamson and Paul Winfield), and there were plotlines that somewhat gingerly plugged into hot-button topics that viewers could read about in the newspaper (in season 2, the clinic where Julia worked had to tighten its belt, and nonwhite staffers got laid off first). Carroll was proud of her game-changing performance on the show but clearly had a lot more fun as the scheming Dominique Deveraux on ABC’s Dynasty (1981–1989), an African American counterpart to that show’s resident bitch queen Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins).
—MZS
K Street and Unscripted (HBO, 2003 and 2005)
Producers Steven Soderbergh and Grant Heslov created these two heavily improvised series, which are temperamentally and stylistically unlike anything ever aired on American TV. The former is a comedy about lobbyists (including Mad Men’s John Slattery) working in Washington shortly after the US invasion of Iraq; it was shot newsmagazine-style, with every episode written, shot, edited, and aired in the span of a week. The result was necessarily rough but has an undeniable energy, and the cameos by real politicians and celebrities (à la Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88 and Tanner on Tanner) add to the credibility even when the plotting is fuzzy or patently absurd. The latter, a drama about struggling Los Angeles actors under the sway of a guru-type acting coach (Frank Langella), is one of the more penetrating psychological dramas about performance in both art and life.
—MZS
Kolchak: The Night Stalker (ABC, 1974–1975)
Along with Freaks and Geeks, My So-Called Life, Firefly, and a handful of other one-and-done series, this single-season horror-thriller series had an impact far beyond its brief run on network television. Created by Jeff Rice, it started out as a stand-alone TV-movie, 1972’s The Night Stalker, starring Darren McGavin as Fox Mulder’s pop culture forefather, Chicago newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak, who realizes that a serial killer terrorizing Las Vegas is actually a bloodsucking vampire. That twist was startling to viewers because screenwriter Richard Matheson, adapting Rice’s then-unpublished novel, wraps Kolchak’s investigation in X-Files-style uncertainty and official obfuscation. The film was such a ratings success that a sequel, 1973’s The Night Strangler (also scripted by Matheson), inevitably followed; this time the killer was a non-bloodsucking immortal that had been preying on innocents since the Civil War.
The regular series, which ran just twenty episodes, pitted Kolchak against a series of monsters drawn from folklore and horror literature, including a succubus, witches, a dopplegänger, a thawed-out caveman, an android, a headless motorcycle rider modeled on the horseman who tormented Ichabod Crane, a possessed suit of knight’s armor, and an immortal Helen of Troy. McGavin soon became disillusioned by the series, which he found repetitious and formulaic, but its format influenced The X-Files, Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and other shows that merged the police procedural and horror-movie situations. X-Files creator Chris Carter failed to convince Gavin to reprise Kolchak on his ’90s series but managed to get him to appear as retired FBI agent Arthur Dales, a character described, appropriately, as “the father of The X-Files.”
—MZS
The Knick (Cinemax, 2014–2016)
“A servant doesn’t talk back to his master,” a loan shark tells a debtor in the early twentieth-century period drama The Knick. It’s just a throwaway line, but it comes close to summing up this series from creators Jack Amiel and Michael Begler and executive producer Steven Soderbergh, who directed every episode. Power dynamics are in the foreground of each scene. The show’s title is a nickname for New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital, where Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen), a cocaine addict and casual racist, has just been installed as chief of surgery following a sudden staff upheaval. John butts heads with Cornelia Robertson (Juliet Rylance), who runs the for-profit hospital on behalf of her social-reform-minded new-money dad, as well as with pretty much everyone else on staff, including Dr. Algernon Edwards (André Holland), an African American surgeon with European hospital experience who’s been made the deputy chief of surgery, against John’s wishes, as a precondition of getting the place wired for electricity.
As on all hospital shows, the building serves as a crossroads for the city and becomes a microcosm of the larger society, a petri dish in which social malaise can be treated and reforms incubated. Representatives of every class, race, and ethnicity pass through the Knick’s doors at one point or another, and the world’s issues are given an old-fashioned dramatic (often melodramatic) workout. Not since Deadwood has a period-drama production designed to a fare-thee-well and steeped in nasty atmosphere been so politically astute about who has power over whom and why—although the subtler brand of gallows humor and Soderbergh’s fondness for intricately choreographed long takes aligns The Knick with a different TV classic that Deadwood creator David Milch worked on, Hill Street Blues.
—MZS
Lace (ABC, 1984)
Adapted by Shirley Conran from her same-named novel, this miniseries follows a young film siren named Lili (Phoebe Cates) as she travels the world hoping to learn the identity of the mother who gave her up for adoption, a woman known only under the pseudonym Linda Lace. Brooke Adams, Bess Armstrong, and Arielle Dombasle play the three likely candidates, all of whom went through failed relationships, one of whom got pregnant; a sacred pact to protect the identity of Lili’s birth mom. Flashback and present-tense intrigue follows, none memorable, all lurid and dumb. The miniseries is hot garbage and tedious to boot, fun only if you watch it with bitchy friends emboldened by your intoxicant of choice; but it’s worth enduring for the thrill of being able to say you witnessed the delivery of the greatest line in 1980s television: “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”
—MZS
Little House on the Prairie (NBC, 1978–1982)
Based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved series of memoir-novels about growing up on the Kansas prairie in the late nineteenth century, this labor of love from producer-star Michael Landon (formerly of the so-called “adult Western” Bonanza) became one of the most beloved family series of the 1970s and beyond. Landon starred as Charles Ingalls, patriarch of a hardscrabble pioneer family in Walnut Grove that also included Karen Grassle as Charles’s wife, Caroline; Melissa Gilbert as Laura; Melissa Sue Anderson as Laura’s older sister, Mary; twins Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush as their kid sister, Carrie; Dean Butler as Laura’s future husband, Almanzo Wilder; and Victor French as Charles’s loyal best friend, Isaiah Edwards.
The show’s title is now synonymous with a kinder and sweeter sort of entertainment, but anyone who watched it when it was on can tell you how bleak it often was. Mary went blind, and there were story lines about rape, extreme poverty, economic exploitation, racism, morphine addiction, and mob justice. Landon’s Charles had the shaggy hair and gentle demeanor of a me-decade, post-hippie dad, but he had a streak of Old Testament toughness reminiscent of Chuck Connors’s Lucas McCain on The Rifleman. The series eventually devolved into a prairie soap, more engaging than its equally successful CBS rival The Waltons but much less gentle in its methods. Landon personally directed 87 of the series’ 203 episodes and took the lead in battling NBC to get some of the rougher story lines past censors. His thorny relationship with the network was most vividly expressed in one of several reunion movies, 1984’s Little House: The Last Farewell, in which Charles and Caroline revisit Walnut Grove to discover that it’s fallen into the clutches of a railroad baron; they blow up every building in town with dynamite.
—MZS
Luck (HBO, 2011–2012)
A dream project turned nightmare: Longtime racing fan David Milch got to make a drama set at the Santa Anita Park racetrack, then was barred from the set by fellow producer Michael Mann, then saw the series canceled abruptly after three different horses died following participation in one of the show’s staged races. But the nine episodes that aired are a strong testament not only to its creator’s love of the subject but of his ability
to repackage that love into a series that could, for a brief, precious time, make his audience feel that same love, regardless of their prior interest.
The cast included movie stars like Dustin Hoffman (as a recently paroled gangster splitting his time between plotting revenge against his rivals and tending to the career of his beloved new horse) and Nick Nolte (a bitter, guarded old trainer taking one last shot at the big time), along with fine character actors like Dennis Farina (Hoffman’s genial but deadly bodyguard) and John Ortiz (a brilliant, paranoid trainer). But the series’ heart was with a quartet of degenerate gamblers (played by Kevin Dunn, Jason Gedrick, Ritchie Coster, and Ian Hart) riding the greatest hot streak of their lives. None can quite believe the way their fortunes keep rising, and all expect it to fall apart in an instant. As Dunn’s wheelchair-bound Marcus puts it in the last completed episode, “You want to know how I feel? Today’s the day they take it all away from us.”
Milch, who had already seen HBO cancel Deadwood and the inscrutable John from Cincinnati out from under him (and who reportedly lost much of his TV fortune betting on the ponies), could empathize with Marcus. Luck wasn’t perfect (the Hoffman revenge plot seemed to exist on another show entirely, and Ortiz’s character spoke in a syntax that was impenetrable even by Milch standards), but nor did it feel like self-indulgence from a creator who finally had the money and (relative) power to make a show about his favorite subject. For those nine episodes, that track, and the people and horses who populated it, came to thrilling, poignant life. It’s a shame the streak couldn’t have gone on a little longer.
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