TV: The year 2005

TV's in one of its awkward stages though no one seems to notice.

With all the "death of the sitcom" stories, it doesn't appear to have sunk in that no new genre has come along to dominate in sometime.

The franchises? Law & Order's been on how long? CSI how long now?

For all the talk of the so-called death of the sitcom, there's not been much life in television period. It goes beyond the corpses that tend to emerge before the opening credits on the franchise shows.

The body wash operettas aren't making any real waves. Few new shows crack the top ten.

Attempts to water-cooler-ize certain shows have fallen flat.

It's been a year of flux. Not even a sub-genre within a genre has broken out. What, no one can top skinny wives and fat husbands?

Here are a few trends as we see them. Note, we're not chasing them down, we're merely noting them.

1) Adults playing high schoolers and winning far too much praise for their dead pan style that, for many, masks an inability to step inside a character.

2) Young or old, a tendency to cast males who look like they were extras on the set of Disturbing Behavior.
What's with the foreheads? This may be the year of the sloped forehead.

3) Boobs.
Breasts are a perennial, evergreens, if you will. And they were in your face in 2005. As writing grows ever more simplistic, breasts have had to provide the subtext. The division is similar to the shorthand in the old Proctor & Gamble commericals where blondes and brunettes faired differently when attempting the same task. Leslie Erin Grossman knows the score which is why she often urges Jennie Garth to let her breasts speak on What I Like About You. Not only can Garth's breasts not be silenced, it's as though we've traded The Vagina Monologues for The Breast Monologues. As everyone rushes in to chant "how low can they (necklines) go," the TV industry in NYC doesn't stand a fighting chance. No one's going to relocate if it means Jennifer Love Hewitt would catch a severe chest cold.

4) We know best.
You see that in Prison Break's I've Got A Secret from the audience attitude. You see it in the characters disdain for the public's right to know in Threshold. You see it in the rape, woops, it wasn't of Veronica Mars. Did Donald Rumsfeld get a WGA card? There are a lot of "unknowables."

5) We don't really like to read.
With Friends off the air, few shows feature adult characters who actually pick up a book. Many feature characters who actively put down reading. It's true, each administration does have its own impact on television!

6) We don't like to watch TV.
King of Queens has a fierce dedication to showing their characters watching TV. More than the nonsense of passing by a TV set as news is breaking or gathering around to watch sports, King of Queens features characters who live in front of their televisions. And have the ever expanding waistlines to prove it. On the majority of other programs, the characters avoid the TV -- something that viewers might want to consider emulating.

7) Aged boys who are ooh-ed and aaw-ed over despite looking like they were part of the Calvin Klein ads that paid hommage to the film Kids.

8) Single men who spend a lot of time thinking and talking about sex but never seem to actually do the deed.

Shows like Joey, Jake In Progress and Freddie seem to exist to market viagra to younger men.

Some trends are less obvious but exist. Take the current idea of network specials or "specials."
With PBS reairing My Name Is Barbra this month, viewers may have been shocked. Here was the woman most derided for vanity and ego (and of course it would be a woman slammed for that) in a one hour special. There were no guest stars. Streisand was the focus of every minute.

So why did it seem to exhibit far less ego and vainity than Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson's Tour of "Duty"? Maybe because Streisand wasn't marketing her personal life? (Oops, looks like they're splitting up.) Maybe because her special revealed talent and didn't exist as an extended commercial for an upcoming film? (Didn't do all that well, did it?)

Or take Kenny Chesney. With several aspirin and nothing else to watch on TV. Like Elton John, Chesney and the people behind the special and at the network seemed to think tossing some cameras into a standard concert made for a "special." Between clips of Chezney With A Z! performing, you also got long winded whines about how hard it was to be an entertainer. Though Chesney may have tried real hard to sparkle, this not-so-special special blended concert footage with it's-a-hard-knocks-life-in-the-fast-lane footage which wouldn't have brought the house down at The Palace. Wasn't it only a few years ago that you had to have made it and crashed (sometimes also been reborn) to qualify for the Behind The Music treatment?

But Streisand's the one with the out of control ego?

Specials once had to be "special." Now they just have to offer concert footage. "In your living room!" Since, good or bad, part of the concert experience is mixing with crowd, these performers, entertainers or not, come off flat on screen.

The only "special" we saw in 2005 that was worthy of the being termed that was Faith Hill's.
We wouldn't argue that it was on the same level of My Name Is Barbara. We would suggest that somone involved went to the trouble to conceive a concept that actually made it different than all the filmed concerts offered.

2005 was also the year that saw Somebody Loves Raymond close up shop. We thought we'd get a break from the cast. We were wrong. Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle aren't irritating in their commerical. Patricia Heaton is. Albertson has hired Joan Rivers and just hasn't realized it yet.

The biggest trend has occurred off screen, really bad reviews. Working out your own personal grudge against Melanie Griffith may make you feel good and it might even be funny (in one case it was) but you're tossing credibility out the window when you attempt to drive the points home by propping up Don Johnson and his now cancelled show.

Far worse is the desperate desire to weigh in the perceived water cooler show with few facts and lots of spin.

We've noted before, TV reflects the mood of the country. Judging by what was offered in 2005, we're in a holding pattern with lots of doses of crap and very few bright spots. Lot of chatter being wasted praising the mediocre, not a lot of attention being given the rare worthy shows.