This is my last Smallscreen, so I would like to do two things. First, to say a little about the programmes that have most mattered to me over the past two and a half years since I started this column. Second, to say something about what I have tried to do with this column.
There have been two outstanding programmes in this period: the revival of Dr Who (BBC1) and House (Channel 5). They have a number of things in common. First, most obviously, they have taken a familiar genre (science fiction, medical drama) and done something new with it. One of the key developments of television drama in the past generation, especially in the US, has been the kickstarting of old genres by mixing up elements of different ones. House is a sophisticated medical drama-cum-detective show with comedy, angst and unresolved sexual tension. The old Dr Who always had a light touch, but thanks to Billie Piper and the two doctors, the new show has taken the unresolved sexual tension to a new level and, thanks to a remarkable team of writers led by Russell T Davies, has added a new element of pathos to the Doctor. What was one-dimensional in both genres has become richer and deeper.
Perhaps the most interesting quality of both series—and of much of the best recent television drama—is what one might call television noir, an emphasis on loneliness, loss and a troubled past as the centre of a life. These shows have no happy endings. They convey an irreducible bleakness, but with a wisecrack. There is something very interesting about the episodic nature of the programmes: moving on and yet hinting at a personal history which is continuous.
What distinguishes these programmes, House in particular, are their ambition and sophistication. Amid all the manic dumbing-down that has left whole channels simply unwatchable, there are signs of a remarkable new kind of smart television. The dialogue is super-clever. The characters are yuppies who work hard and play hard. They are too smart to be happy but smart enough to be funny. There are references to books, movies and things Jewish.
At its best, smart television breaks the rules. There have been two episodes of House—one in the first series and the last episode of the second series—which played so much with time and realism that at crucial moments you didn't know where in the story you were or whether what you were watching was real or a hallucination or both. This is not new to television, of course, but in the first golden age (c1960-80s) the home of experimental drama was the single play. Now it has moved to the serial, weaving themes and references over 24 episodes.
A recent article in the Sunday Times argued that television has replaced cinema as the natural home of new, smart kinds of storytelling. This isn't quite right. There has been an extraordinary explosion of clever film-writing since the early 1990s: the Coen Brothers, Tarantino and films like Seven (1995), The Usual Suspects (1995) and Memento (2000). This has coincided with a new golden age of television in American comedy and drama, starting in the 1980s with Hill Street Blues, Cheers, Roseanne and The Simpsons and taking off in the 1990s (Twin Peaks, The West Wing, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Frasier and Friends). Smart young movie writers, television writers and fiction writers in America are trying new things with old forms. It is a mistake to see the second golden age of television (US c1980) in isolation from what is going on in American film and literature.
In Britain, Dr Who and Green Wing are the nearest we have come to this. It is a kind of rearguard action in the new culture wars being fought on both sides of the Atlantic. On the one hand, there are (so-called) reality television, prime-time soaps, fantasy escapism and old wine in old bottles (all those ITV detective dramas or BBC1 primetime family sitcoms, for example). On the other hand, there is what? The single drama is dead, ideas television is dead, arts television is dying. That leaves smart new drama series, alternative comedy and, above all, US imports and DVDs of old television classics.
Television critics have been cheerleaders for the dumb and trashy. Sometimes in the name of a vacuous post-modernism or in the name of technological determinism: new technology means change, why expect value when people can vote for a hundred other channels with their remote control? This has not been properly discussed. In this column I have tried to do three things. First, to champion creative and talented people. They are largely on the defensive: ignored by critics, abandoned by audiences, distrusted and underfunded by executives. Second, to pour scorn on executives who have been too cynical or cowardly to champion the brave and the new. Finally, I have tried to find a different kind of writing about television from that on offer elsewhere. Most television critics review single programmes, tell the story, give some vacuous value judgement, hype the already famous. They are parochial: ignorant of the past and the foreign. They have no critical language. What we need is a cultural criticism of television. In television and in criticism we need to try something new.
