For sheer gratuitousness, however, the season premiere of prime time's other doc-and-cover show won out, since unlike Chicago Hope's dim bulb Dennis Potter rip, ER's affected return to the glory days of live TV--was anybody craving this?--couldn't even pretend it served any expressive purpose. In fact, that week's script took pains to avoid narrative developments or revelations of character, leaving us nothing to appreciate but the inane feat of getting all the actors to hit their marks and not flub their lines--twice in one night, too, since the broadcast was redone for West Coast viewers.
Because its most strenuous heroics were the stage manager's, the stunt was instantly forgettable. Of greater interest than the stupid human tricks onscreen was the producers' readiness to trash everything the show normally sets out to do for the sake of a vacuous coup de theatre. Rather more than Chicago Hope's, ER's shtick-in-trade is its naturalism, which means that showboating can only violate its compact with the audience. At least on me, George Clooney has had this effect from the start; every time he wanders into a scene with his pet chin lolling coyly on his collarbone, any illusion of real life disappears, and I wish his fans would buy him a neck brace. But Clooney's castmates have spent three years painstakingly getting us to forget they're actors, and deserved better than this flagrant reminder that they are.
Such follies are all too symptomatic. True, people who work on long-running series often make the mistake of assuming that viewers must be as sick of watching the same old folderol as they are of concocting it, forgetting that we're only wasting an hour, not a career. Needless to say, series fatigue afflicts performers most noticeably: as his boredom with doing Kramer increases, Michael Richards's work on Seinfeld gets sloppier by the week. But instead of telling him to be a pro like Jason Alexander, the producers have begun inventing excuses for his character to make with the wacky impersonations--the tried-and-false way to appease TV regulars with a yen to remind us they used to act for a living.
Another standard remedy is finding pretexts for frustrated song-and-dance types to strut their stuff, although Chicago Hope's wretched crew hardly appeared to be living out a dream. But this year, something else may be goading the makers of usually reliable shows to grab the audience's attention with more outre ploys than usual. Basic cable's audience share has reached parity with the major broadcast networks', making serious inroads not just on their market but on their cultural sway. That both ER and Chicago Hope felt obliged to resort to what amounted to art moves this fall suggests that the decline isn't just in audience numbers but in perceived cachet. Forget bottom lines: these days, all but a couple of the coolest TV shows--the ones that people phone me up about without getting paid to--are on either cable or nontrad broadcast networks. Had you noticed? I believe it's a first.
Even at that, former upstart Fox--lucky Fox, making the big leagues just in time to be a dinosaur--accounts for one of the exceptions. The twist is that King of the Hill, the network's only show with that old groundbreaking buzz, is determinedly anticool; maybe kids get off on it, but to their parents it's redemption. Sure I feel like a ninny for panning it last year, but shit--who knew Mike Judge was such a classicist? Hank Hill's resemblance to Dave Berg, Mad's in-house square, looks less like a coincidence and more like a manifesto all the time.
As for the other exception, well--who knew Ellen DeGeneres was such a hardhead? I used to find her one of the most dislikable presences on television--doleful, crabbed, and flooding me with nostalgia for Sandy Dennis's easygoing sensuality. But she's the best advertisement for the psychological benefits of coming out since Quentin Crisp realized he'd never been in. Now she's doing something rare for TV, namely inventing a new audience--many of whose members couldn't probably care less if she's glad to be gay, but simply delight in a milieu whose politicized, cryptobohemian concerns and references they find recognizable (it's a treat to hear inside jokes about p.c. for a change). For all we know, it could even include a large chunk of her old audience, who were either fools or uncommonly patient--who were those shadowy folks who kept the pregay Ellen on the air for three vague years?
But on what we still call the major networks, that's it for buzz. Yesterday's hip breakthroughs lumber on as today's warhorses; by now, Seinfeld might as well be The Waltons, and lately you can't help but wonder, even if Steven Bochco apparently hasn't, whether future generations will find NYPD Blue's mannered hysteria as funny as Reefer Madness's. Meanwhile, along with masses of dreck--which is less oppressive than the big guns' dreck, because the stakes are too low for us to feel beleaguered--the WB has Buffy the Vampire Slayer, syndication has Xena: Warrior Princess, and the much despised USA Network has La Femme Nikita, all of which somehow feel more, um, apposite to our condition. And since August, lowly Comedy Central has been running (and rerunning) this year's ultimate cool show: South Park, certainly the greatest cartoon series ever to get its start as a bizzer's foulmouthed video Christmas card. Brian Graden, the then Fox exec who commissioned it, must feel like the guy who blew his chance to sign the Beatles.
If you've downloaded the original "Spirit of Christmas" from the Internet, you've seen how far South Park's head pranksters Trey Parker and Matt Stone have toned down their demented anti-Peanuts for (semi) mass consumption. You just know that, given their druthers in the series version, they'd have let Mr. Garrison the psycho teacher assassinate Kathie Lee Gifford at the behest of his revenge-crazed hand puppet Mr. Hat, instead of shooting poor Kenny instead. (No great loss--Kenny dies horribly in every show.) But on the I-can't-believe-they're-doing-this meter, what's left is still jaw-dropping: I always lose it myself in the episode where one kid's pet pig docilely presents its hindquarters to another's pet elephant for sex, then squeals horribly off-camera as the whole gang goes goggle-eyed and Isaac Hayes--the voice of Chef, their unreliable mentor—mutters gloomily, "Now I know how all those white women felt."
Even so, the best joke of all is that this scurrilous goof's fab four—shrewd Stan, baffled (he's Jewish; they're in Colorado) Kyle, luckless Kenny, and Cartman the raging 90-pound misogynist--are by miles the most convincing children on the air. They're uninformed wiseasses, full of bizarre notions and garbled information about their surroundings, and hopelessly stumped as to whether pop culture is religion or vice versa. No wonder: having survived his battle to the death with Santa Claus ("We meet again, Jesus") in "The Spirit of Christmas," their drop-in messiah now hosts Jesus and Pals on local TV. The first new episode since the original six debuted airs tonight, and yippee; it's not like I needed nudging, but South Park makes it even harder to swallow the major networks' hopeful delusion (why, they've got charts to prove it--and they need 'em, too) that Dharma and Greg is this season's sparkling new hit.
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BY TOM CARSON