Are we in the midst of a new Golden Age of television?
I would even upgrade to a Titanium Age. "Breaking Bad," "The Wire," "Mrs. Maisel," "Arrested Development," Complex characters, narrative structure. Truly "Must see TV."
If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d likely be writing for TV. Indeed, 63 years after Newton Minow, President Kennedy’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, chastised television executives for the “vast wasteland” they preceded over, television is having what I would propose a second “Golden Age,” led by brilliant stories and impressive scripts.1
At the time of Minow’s speech to the broadcasters, there was a total of 73 hours of prime-time programming across all three commercial networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC. Minow said that 59 hours consisted of “action-adventure, situation comedy, variety, quiz, and movies.” It may seem paradoxical that historians have regarded the Golden Age of the 1950s as the same period that Minow describes.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.
And endlessly, commercials -- many screaming, cajoling, and offending.
And most of all, boredom.2 True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few.
This new Golden Age of television was ushered by dramas like “ER” on NBC in 1994, then catapulted by HBO’s “The Sopranos” in 1999, although there may have been premonitions of a leap forward in video quality with “Hill Street Blues,” way back in 1981.
Early TV mimicked radio, vaudeville, theater.
The programming in this original Golden Age was often derived from successful radio shows, such as “Dragnet,” “Jack Benny”, “George Burns and Gracie Allen,” “Perry Mason” and the soap opera3, “The Guiding Light.” Vaudeille was the inspiration for variety shows, such as “Ed Sullivan,” “The Arthur Murray Party” and “The Lawrence Welk Show.” And, perhaps most ambitious, were live stage drama series, including “Kraft Television Theater,” “Philco Television Playhouse,” “General Electric Theater” and “Playhouse 90.”
I haven’t found any source that counts the number of hours of scripted TV created these days by the old broadcast and cable networks and streamers such as Netflix, Hulu, and Apple. However, there was a mind-boggling 600 original scripted series produced in 2022 and slightly fewer last year, likely due to the disruption of the writers’ strike.
What generally differentiates scripted television today from its earlier years is the quality of the writing that has pushed boundaries with layered storytelling, high production values, and diverse perspectives. We are confronted with complex characters and themes, often featuring morally ambiguous motivations. Think of Tony in “The Sopranos” or Walter White in “Breaking Bad.”
Today's television shows often experiment with their innovative storytelling, employing narrative structure, character development, and thematic depth in ways that were less common in the 1950s and 1960s. “Breaking Bad,” “The Crown,” and “Succession” showcased intricate plots and character studies that engaged viewers in new and sophisticated ways. “This is Us” jumped between different eras with the same characters in a single episode, challenging viewers to pay attention and think about the connections.
And it’s not just the drama series that have evolved. “I Love Lucy” stands out as a pioneering half-hour comedy that holds up. But even there, contrast the mostly visual guffaws created by Lucy (stuffing bon-bons, crushing grapes) with the rapid-fire verbal salad spoken by Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope in “Parks and Recreation,” the parody and sarcasm imbued in the banter between “30 Rocks’” Tina Fey and Alex Baldwin, or the bon mots flowing from “Friends” or “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” ensembles.
A case study: “ER” (1994-2009)
Television, as we generally understand the term, is an entertainment medium. In the earliest days, some prognosticators expected it to have a strong education component. “Sunrise Semester” was a pioneering attempt that never gained much traction. What story creators eventually recognized was that they could be educational and edifying within an entertaining narrative structure. I’ll use the medical drama “ER,” as an example.
Although I have been musing about all this over the years, it has bubbled to the surface as Martha and I recently, sadly, came to the end of its run of 331 episodes. “ER” is widely rated as the top medical drama of all time, having been awarded an Emmy for Best Drama in 1996. Derived from a screenplay created 20 years earlier by Michael Crichton, a medical doctor turned author (“Andromeda Strain,” “Jurassic Park”), I had watched ER during its initial run on NBC, one episode per week, 22 episodes per year. But even with the entire archive available on Hulu for binging, it took us about two years to complete the reruns.
Over the course of its 15 years, the entire lead cast turned over multiple times, with some characters staying for seven or eight years and others appearing for one or two seasons. Sometimes a character would be introduced as a medical student—as was Noah Wylie’s John Carter—and, over the course of years, become an intern, resident, senior resident, and some attained attending physician, as would be the progression in an actual hospital setting. Characters would change and develop. One mid-series addition, Archie Morris, played by Scott Grimes, started as a first-year resident who was a goof-off with an apparent lack of commitment to medicine. Over the course of six seasons, the writers had Morris evolve into a lead character and accomplished ER doctor.
The initial cast was impressive: George Clooney, Julianna Marguiles (both early in their careers), Anthony Edwards, Sherry Stringfield, Noah Wyle, and Eriq La Salle. Added—and subtracted—over its run were Linda Cardellini, John Stamos, Angela Bassett, Paul McCrane, Parminder Nagra, Shane West, Maura Tierney, Alex Kingston, Maria Bello, Mekhi Phifer, Goran Višnjić, among a long list.4
Guest actors included many well-known names as well as early gigs for later stars. Sally Fields had a multiple-episode arc, winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series. Ray Liotta and Forest Whitaker won Emmys for guest turns. Others, among many, included Alan Alda, James Cromwell, Zac Efron, Thandie Newton, William H. Macy, Lucy Liu, Stanley Tucci, Kirsten Dunst, Eric Stonestreet, C.C.H. Pounder, Rooney Mara, Susan Sarandan, Chris Pine, Sara Gilbert, and Khandi Alexander.
Educating without preaching
A typical episode centered on scenes that were set in the hospital or surrounding streets. However, over the span of the series, stories took place in California, Hawaii, the Congo, Iraq, France, and Sudan. Beginning in season nine, storylines included African settings. According to Producer John Wells,
We turned some attention on the Congo and on Darfur when nobody else was. We had a bigger audience than a nightly newscast will ever see, making 25 to 30 million people aware of what was going on in Africa. …The show is not about telling people to eat their vegetables, but if we can do that in an entertaining context, then there's nothing better.
Indeed, over its run, the series, in the context of treating patients, confronted a myriad of sociopolitical issues, including HIV and AIDS, organ transplants, mental illness, racism, human trafficking, euthanasia, poverty, and gay rights.
In a particularly memorable episode near the end of the first season, Anthony Edwards’ Dr. Greene manages what seems to be a run-of-the-mill delivery. Over the course of the hour, everything goes wrong, ending in the death of the mother. It all feels like it’s moving in slow motion, bringing this small, painful story to vivid, horrifying life. It is more memorable than many other stories that deal with mass casualties.
In any long-running series that covers the 1990s into the 2000s, observing how the technology evolves from season to season is part of the experience. Initially, the ER’s administrative desk had PCs with large CRT monitors. Staffers were sending and receiving faxes. The clerks were constantly handing out pink “While you were out” phone message slips (remember those?) Waiting room patients might also be using the pay phone. In the second or third season, the CRTs were replaced by flat screens. In a later episode, a patient, for the first time, takes out a cell phone. By the end of the decade, storylines involved data on a DVD, and finally, the doctors were online. Watching the show in real-time, I doubt I noticed. In my slow-motion binging, it helped place the time of the episodes in context.
Rolling Stone noted that “ER drastically quickened the pace of TV drama, operating less like a hospital show than an action movie, with pounding music, frenetic camerawork, and adrenaline-pumping trauma sequences.”
Name the story-tellers
If I had to choose between A-list actors with a B-list script or B actors and an A script, it’s no contest: the story and script dominate. I began by conjecturing that Shakespeare may well have been a scriptwriter if he were around today. My contention is that we recognize great actors with far greater acclaim than we do the story creators and the wordsmiths who conjure the characters and the words the actors dramatically—or humorously—convey to us.
The actors are not responsible for imagining the plots, developing the backstories or fashioning the speech of the characters they inhabit. Good actors are certainly critical in bringing words to life. The best actors quickly blind us to anything else we know about them or their previous roles. Rather, they create the illusion that they are their character. This is true whether for a theatrical film, the smaller screen, or the stage. Think, again, about Brian Cranston as Walter White, Rachel Brosnahan in ”The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Jon Hamm as Don Draper in “Mad Men,” or just about any character in any series that you most enjoyed.
On the other hand, I challenge you to name the creator of each of those characters and the screenwriters. They are not names that most fans of the shows could call to mind: Vince Gilligan , Amy Sherman-Palladino, and Matthew Weiner, respectively.
With twenty-two 48-minute scripts to develop each season, ER required a deep bench of writers. Crichton was credited with only the first episode. However, David Zabel penned 41 episodes. Carol Flint, Neal Baer, R. Scott Gemmill, Lydia Woodward, Joe Sachs, Dee Johnson, and Lisa Zwerling are among the dozens who wrote multiple episodes for the drama over the years. Besides Crichton, three were MDs. I doubt if any of those names are familiar to you.
Given roughly 600 scripted series in production at any one time, catering to different sensibilities and genres, we should not be surprised that quality today varies greatly. There is still enough dreck that there may be ammunition for a later-day Minow to complain about a new wasteland. However, in the first two decades of television, most households had access to only three networks offering, at best, 59 different programs per week. Thus, everything was produced to mass tastes. Ratings required identifying large audiences. Today, programming can be targeted to smaller audiences, in part because most of the money behind the production is derived from those of us paying for the content rather than advertisers.
There is far more worthwhile content than any of us should have the time to watch. At least, unlike in the days of old, we can view it on our schedule, not when some network executive sets the time. My take is that writing in the large top tier of television series ranks with the most respected novelists and dramatists over the centuries. Even William Shakespeare.
By “television,” I include all video programming that can be viewed on those large screens we call our television sets. This could come to that device via processes including legacy broadcasting, a cable subscription, a streaming service via the internet, or a DVD or satellite connection. For this discussion, I exclude movies that were created to be originally seen in a theater, although they may eventually be made available via one of the aforementioned processes. Much television programming may alternatively be consumed via other devices with screens and speakers, such as smartphones, tablets, and computers.
Maybe it’s just me, but that list sure doesn’t say boredom. Certainly not violence and mayhem.
You know, of course, that the term “soap opera” was applied because these shows, aimed at women who were home all day, were often produced by laundry detergent manufacturers.
If you’re at all like me (and maybe that’s not desirable), many of these names will not sound familiar. But you’ve likely seen the actor in other productions over the years. My response is often, “Oh, isn’t that what’s her name from, oh, what did we see her in?”
I guess "Queen for a Day" was the 1950s version of what we now call Reality TV. Trivia piece, one the participants, Kim Johnson, on the third year of "Survivor" went to Dickinson, Class of 1966.
Due to my children's careers I know all of the writers for Breaking Bad, Made Men, the Sopranos and Mrs. Maisel. All wonderful stories.