The Final Rerun

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

There were months in 2004 when I wouldn’t dare watch TV without ammo — a stack of fresh tapes and VCR head cleaner.

There were months in 2004 when I wouldn’t dare watch TV without ammo — a stack of fresh tapes and VCR head cleaner.

Not only were there three wholly intriguing new American shows to disappear into — Desperate Housewives, Lost and Deadwood — but many returning series that, in other seasons, would’ve been a cinch for TV best friend status. For instance: Alias, Arrested Development, Chappelle’s Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos. The Wire, an HBO cop show I kept hearing about, I taped for a future dry spell.

What a shock to discover those Wire tapes would be needed in 2005, a TV season with more than a few arid patches and disappointments. For during the last 12 months, Alias and Arrested Development were cancelled. Dave Chappelle strolled away from his show. Desperate Housewives and Lost became… well, desperately lost. And Curb Your Enthusiasm stopped being funny.

Neither was 2005 a banner year for Canadian television, especially for sports fans, as the NHL lockout left us with no spring Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in our TV history. And a late summer CBC lockout meant, among other things, that Saturday evening Canadian Football League contests were silent-era affairs with no commentary.

Indeed, in reconstructing the past TV year, it’s apparent that although there was still much to celebrate, the 2005 season suffered in comparison to its predecessor. Here’s one handicapper’s scorecard for what went right and what went wrong:

Writer and producer Chris Haddock. Courtesy Haddock Entertainment.

Auteur, auteur
Canadian TV artist of the year award goes to Chris Haddock, who in 2005 deftly orchestrated Dominic Da Vinci’s move from coroner to mayor (Da Vinci’s City Hall, CBC), and still found time to knock off a trim, purposeful thriller (Intelligence, CBC).

Working class works
The continued success of Trailer Park Boys (Showcase), the best comedy on TV, and the increasingly popular Corner Gas (CTV), my favourite sitcom, confirms a long-standing truth about Canadian television: we simply love watching our essential tuqued selves bumble about the permafrost.

The greatest TV Canadian, 2005
Mike Smith’s Bubbles: Myopic yet far seeing; the moral centre of the Trailer Park Boys universe.

Party like it’s 1929
The biggest surprise of the 2005 year was the sudden appearance of Depression-era style hoofing contests. The unexpected hit of the early summer was Dancing With the Stars (ABC), a competition that paired professional dancers with C-grade “stars” like the white-haired boss who was always yelling at Elaine on Seinfeld (John O’Hurley). Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance? followed. The series were at first hotter than July. Dancing With the Stars once drew 15 million U.S. viewers, despite memorably bad writing. (Jive, the show claimed, was “a fast-paced rock-n-roll extravaganza born in the 1920s.”) But both series faded like a summer tan as the season progressed.

HBObit?
In 2002, HBO attracted an average of 2.4 million prime-time viewers. This past year the U.S. pay service dropped to 1.7 million. Part of the problem was that there were no new episodes of The Sopranos, and Carrie hoisted her last Cosmopolitan on Sex and the City in 2004. But it’s also clear HBO has become creatively lazy, glibly assuming insider Hollywood humour was everyone’s catnip. Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Comeback, and Entourage are all facetious industry satires. The Comeback won’t, it’s been cancelled. And Curb Your Enthusiasm has become a wearying vehicle for the self-glorifying neurosis of creator/star Larry David. Reason to believe: Entourage keeps getting better; Jeremy Piven’s elbows-out agent, Ari “The Shark” Gold is the best Hollywood defective since Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show.

Marcia Cross plays Bree on Desperate Housewives. Courtesy CTV.

Flight into danger
In its rookie season, Desperate Housewives (ABC) was gloriously bold — a surreal comic mystery with four surgically enhanced Nancy Drews. The show was best when the DH were together, dishing. This year it’s been Separate Housewives, with the women on their own. Diagnosis? More surgery required. Someone please stitch Martha Stewart-perfect Bree and the mad housewives back together. As for last year’s breakthrough drama, Lost (ABC), I’d been struggling for months to figure out why everyone’s favourite Rubik’s Cube suddenly felt like homework. Visiting a comic book store recently, I overheard a savvy shopkeeper explain what went wrong: “There’s too much back story,” the pony-tailed plot mechanic advised a gathering of back-packed high-schoolers. “You’ve got 14 main characters telling a story through flashbacks. And it’s trying too hard to be important — all the religion and philosophy. Lost has flown up its own ass.”

No soap
In Warner Bros. prison movies from the 1930s, clever inmates broke out of jail with handguns carved from polished soap. A preposterous trick that Woody Allen ridiculed in Take the Money and Run, when he bolted from the slammer in the rain, only to have his soap-gun evaporate into a cloud of bubbles. That the creators of this TV season’s big rookie show, Prison Break (Fox) had to resort to the soap gun trick (a soap cellphone actually) in its third episode is all you need to know about this overwrought hybrid of 24 and The Shawshank Redemption.

Primary time hit
The biggest first-year hit of the 2005 season was Commander in Chief (ABC), the story of a female vice president (Geena Davis) who becomes chief executive of the United States when the president suffers a fatal stroke. An expertly paced middlebrow entertainment, Commander in Chief, with its 16-million viewer constituency in the U.S., is being hailed by pundits as proof that America is ready for a woman president. There is even some buzz about a Condi vs. Hillary race in 2008.

A Better Donald
Though human comb-over Donald Trump continued to fire away on The Apprentice (NBC), an infinitely more intriguing Donald commanded attention in 2005. One of our shrewdest and most resourceful actors, Donald Sutherland enjoyed a banner season as he turned 70. On the large screen, the pride of Bridgewater, N.S., was a wonderfully beleaguered Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. And in TV on Commander in Chief, he bared his teeth with evident relish, gleefully inhabiting the role of Geena Davis’s slyly ferocious adversary, Nathan Templeton.

A kiss is just a kiss
Fighting a seven-season dating slump, gay lawyer Will (Eric McCormack) finally landed a boyfriend on the sitcom Will & Grace. He and his partner (Bobby Cannavale) even kissed. The studio audience offered a glad cheer. And there was no great uproar, no horrified viewer complaints or angry write-in campaigns. The series, which is now in its eighth and final year, recently received 15 Emmy nominations.

Alex gets waxed on Nerve.

A sigh is just a sigh
The most memorable moment on Canadian TV this past year came on the CBC youth journal, Nerve, when a teenager, Alex, arrived at an esthetician’s clinic to have his testicles depilated. “Relaxed?” one of the show’s off-camera journalists asked as the beauty professional lathered Alex’s privates with hot goop. “He seems to know what he’s doing,” Alex allowed, “and I trust…” At which point the esthetician peeled away the bandage and Alex’s mouth jumped open wide enough to accommodate a loaf of bread.

Who’s laughing now?
At one point in 1975, the top 10 shows on U.S. television were shot-in-studio, laugh-track sitcoms. After the May 2005 final episode of Everybody Loves Raymond there were no sitcoms in the top 20 of the U.S. Nielsen Ratings for the first time since Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz invented the genre in 1951.

Signing off
This past year saw a changing of the guard in American network news programming. Veteran CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather signed off, as did Ted Koppel, the host of ABC’s late-night current affairs show Nightline. Peter Jennings, the Ottawa-born anchor for ABC News, succumbed to cancer in August. And at NBC, viewers were getting used to Brian Williams on the Nightly News, after the retirement of Tom Brokaw in December 2004. The newsmen came from an era when America tuned in every night to one of three “voices of God” for news of the world. U.S. network news itself is now largely a relic of the past. The average age of network news viewers is almost 60.

The Lost generation
A recent story on CNN confirmed that a growing number of teenagers and 20-year-olds are turning off television in favour of Internet and movies. Except for the ABC series Lost, which increased its share among the coveted, 18-34 demographic, the top 10 rated series continued to lose young viewers. Reports that television was losing Generation Y first surfaced in the fall of 2003 when Nielsen Ratings chronicled a 12-per cent decline in 18 to 34-year-olds watching television.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.