Golden Opportunities

Thanks to the spectacular crash of thunder early yesterday morning that introduced an almost continual downpour, I put my feet up and finished reading Robert J Thompson’s Television’s Second Golden Age. Published in 1997 and subtitled “From Hill Street Blues to ER”, the book is obviously out of date now, but what’s important is how it began rather than where it is now.

Yes, the American system is different from the English was of programme-making, but there are still things to be learnt, whether they directly apply or not. Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University sees the Golden Ages of Television being predominantly defined by the drama on offer. These were the programmes described as “quality television” by the critics of the time and to narrow the focus, Thompson looks to The Viewers for Quality Television organization for a definition:

A quality series enlightens, enriches, challenges, involves and confronts. It dares to take risks, it’s honest and illuminating, it appeals to the intellect and touches the emotions. It requires concentration and attention, and it provokes thought. Characterization is explored. And usually a quality comedy will touch the funny bone and the heart --

So, that’s Knight Rider off the list then. Taking on board what viewers, critics and scholars agree makes up “quality television”, Thompson creates an eleven-point profile that includes:

Quality TV is best defined by what it is not. It is not “regular” TV.

Quality TV creates a new genre by mixing old ones.

Quality TV tends to be literary and writer-based.

The subject matter of quality TV tends toward the controversial.

Reading those snippets today may lead some to think, “Yeah, so?” but remember this is relating to the 1980s when we were still having the likes of The Dukes of Hazzard foisted upon us. As noted in the book, prior to the arrival of the first of these quality dramas, prime-time stories based around abortion, homosexuals, racism and religion had yet to appear. AIDs was ignored until St Elsewhere ran a storyline.


Though the critics’ darlings, most of these shows were never great ratings winners. Ordinarily they should have been cancelled, but the networks usually saw their way to giving them a reprieve. It could have looked like they were looking for much needed plaudits the same way film studios indulge in movies that attract accolades rather than audiences. Instead, the shows may not have got all the viewing audience but it did get the right demographics: the “upscale, well-educated, urban-dwelling, young viewers advertisers so desire”.

One other drawback of the quality television shows was how it didn’t make syndication in America easy. People could take a load off and enjoy an episode of Magnum PI or The A-Team because the narratives were structured to be self-contained. Coming across an episode of Hill Street Blues or thirtysomething, the casual viewer would be confronted by a story that wouldn’t be properly resolved until the next episode or the one after that. That may be why so many of the more contemporary dramas that specialise in ongoing stories have been speedily packaged into DVD boxsets.

Still, that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The first Golden Age of Television in America took place in the 1950s and the shows associated with it were the anthology dramas like Kraft Television Theater, Studio One and Playhouse 90 that put on work by the emerging new writers like Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose and Gore Vidal. In early 1961 the Golden Age was ruled to be over by the US government who declared television had become “a vast wasteland”.

Addressing the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington DC on May 9th, Newton Minow, the newly appointed Federal Communications Commission chair challenged station owners to watch their content for an entire day, stating:

You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about 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. true, you will see a few things you enjoy. But they will be very, very few.

Replace “Western” with the more repetitively tiresome contemporary genres and that all sounds horribly, horribly familiar. With BBC One being named Terrestrial Channel of the Year at the recent Edinburgh Television Festival, it makes you wonder whether it shouldn’t have been the celebrated for being the least worst channel as opposed to the best. As for BBC Three being named the best digital channel and Doctor Who winning the best programme of 2008, let’s not even go there.


The book covers such dramas as St Elsewhere, Moonlighting, thirtysomething, Northern Exposure, China Beach and Picket Fences, and shows what each brought to television. Although very different in content and style, one thing most of the shows had in common was that they were picked up that networks that were in last place at the time, meaning they had space in their schedules and willing to take a chance on something different.

Although ABC, CBS and NBC would in turn be seen as networks that embraced innovation, over the years they would also become less friendly to bolder programmes as their stock rose. As well as celebrating the ingenuity of such shows, Thompson also offered a warning about the damage a drama like Twin Peaks could unwittingly do to quality television. Writing for Connoisseur magazine in 1989, Warren Rodman called Twin Peaks “the series that will change TV forever”. For all the wrong reasons it almost did.

Mark Frost and David Lynch’s quirky small town crime drama was initially the critic’s darling and an audience pleaser but by the second season the bloom was firmly off the rose. Filled with nods to past films the way St Elsewhere before it had been rife with amusing television references, Twin Peaks may have set out to defy traditional television drama but ultimately became, “a show about little more than it’s own strangeness” that alienated everyone but the core fan audience.


While its influence may have lived on in Northern Exposure and David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, the perceived negative effect of Twin Peaks would see network heads lose patience with numerous “quality” shows and the critic’s favourites were purged from the schedules. Although quality television wasn’t completely snuffed out, the new wave of shows like NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street and ER would be set in more traditional television genres.

Still, the best lesson to be learnt comes from the opening chapters of Thompson’s book. Although Hill Street Blues would revolutionise US television drama, creators Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll both had a bellyful of working on cop shows and initially turned down the invitation. They eventually relented only when Fred Silverman, Michael Zinberg and Brandon Tartikoff at NBC effectively gave them catre blanche to come up with something completely different from the shows they had worked on before.

It also helped Bochco and Kozoll were making the show at MTM, the company co-founded by Grant Tinker and his then-wife, Mary Tyler Moore in 1970. Initially formed to produce The Mary Tyler Moore Show, MTM, with its familiar meowing cat logo, went on to produce a number of the acclaimed dramas of that decade. Many of the shows stood head and shoulders above their more obvious contemporary fare because of Tinker’s decision to make MTM a writer’s company.

Openly acknowledging that he was not a creative person, Tinker let them get on with what they wanted to do, all the while shielding them from any network interference. Under his watch, this new kind of quality television began to emerge from the nurturing environment. Even when he later became chairman and CEO of NBC, Tinker decided that the network should follow the same lines as best it could. As Thompson writes:

Celebrated as one of the giants in television history, Tinker’s principal contribution to the medium was to do what few executives have had the courage to do: to gather together talented creative people and to leave them alone.

If only such a radical idea could be employed over here.