Friday December 02, 2005
CBS Still Smells Like Old People
November sweeps is over and the headline is that CBS had the most viewers overall and fought ABC to a tie among 18- to 49-year-olds. And although CBS took that demo last November as well, I can’t beat the feeling that the Tiffany Network is the same as it ever was—my grandpa’s network, stodgy and square. Whatever the numbers, CBS—which brought us such shows as Touched by an Angel and Murder, She Wrote—still smells like old people.
Let me try to explain. Part of it is obvious. A lot of the network’s recent success was tied to the departed Everybody Loves Raymond, a multi-generational sitcom set in suburban New York. It was pretty much like that other CBS hit, All in the Family, which my grandfather watched growing up. It might have eventually won critics over, but it never felt young. Survivor, I suppose, is neutral for my purposes. CBS deserves whatever booty it can bank for ushering in the reality boom—for good or ill—but it’s worth noting that the show did make a grouchy septuagenarian something of a star. Anyway …
What I really want to talk about is CSI. The show’s variants held two of the top 10 slots last week with indistinguishable counterparts Cold Case and Without a Trace grabbing another two. Like those Cadillac commercials set to Led Zeppelin, CSI feels like a 49-year-old’s idea of what an 18-year-old (or a 36-year-old, like me) might like. In our youth-driven culture, that’s bound to draw some older folks who think they’re down with the kids, but what about the kids? I hope the kids know better.
From the opening strains of “Who Are You?” to the grainy, Fincheresque flashbacks, the whole thing feels like a 10-year-old music video. And, for a crime show, it is surprisingly unseedy. The CSIs coil up in an antiseptic, dimly lit lair straight out of Minority Report as hip-hop and heavy metal tracks back the execution of their heavily montaged experiments. The show poses as a police procedural, but really it’s not. Solutions are plucked, Star Trek-style, from scientific brainstorms, the makings of which have been concealed from the viewer. And the cops don’t seem to know anything. One recent episode featured a man with a genetic disorder who literally ate himself to death. The trail led to a competitive eating event sponsored by the E.X.E.F.—the “Extreme Eating Federation.” The promoter wore a trucker cap that looked like the initials had been stamped on it at the mall. The cops were totally amazed by what they saw at the event, like they’d never seen CNN on the Fourth of July. And this gap wasn’t played for camp. It was supposed to be realism.
When I was teenager, there was a term going around based on a semi-famous episode of Quincy (an NBC show), in which some punk rockers got into trouble. The caricatures of the punks were so bad—yet treated so seriously by Jack Klugman—that obvious posers (like myself, no doubt) became known, derisively, as “Quincy punks.” I mean, can you imagine Lenny Briscoe (God rest his soul), being anything but bored by a competitive eating contest? Law & Order, at least early on, reeked with a realism to which CSI doesn’t even seem to aspire. Briscoe and company had seen everything and they didn’t have time to stop and explain it to you.
The fact is, Jessica Fletcher could arrive in Gil Grissom’s office next week, babbling about some plot she’d stumbled into, and the audience wouldn’t blink. If Briscoe showed up, however, the CSI set would fall down around him. Grissom would be left standing there as parody, as cinematically credible as Fred Flintsone.
Posted by jim at 10:36 AM ||