NBC Sick

Ah, weekends in December! Beneath a cloudless sky the waves are gently lapping against a swathe of golden sand... Wait a minute, that’s the front of a postcard on my bookshelf that I’m looking at. If I look out of the window it’s grim and grey with rain pouring down and a blustery wind that bites right to the marrow, making everyone look even more miserable than usual. God, I miss spending December in Burbank, even when it means getting absolutely soaked through on Splash Mountain.

I may not “believe in America” as much as that cowering mortician at the beginning of The Godfather, but it’s always been a pretty good place to visit. They speak a reasonably good approximation of the mother tongue, which is always a benefit. Although there are more exotic locales around the world, in the United States you’re less likely to find yourself tucking into a family pet for dinner and the woman you pick up in a bar probably won’t reveal a cock between her legs when the panties come down.

Of course there are the occasional downsides. If you eat a Denny’s breakfast your first day there, half of it will be clogging your arteries by lunchtime while the rest will be wedged in your colon for the remainder of the trip; and the further west you go the more idiotic the pizza toppings become; and while big city bars have found a way to be more sociable that British pubs, the domestic beer is usually weak at piss. Still, there are always Buffalo wings to compensate along with an array of particularly lethal cocktails to bitch slap your brain toward ruin.

As long as you stay away from selected areas where the populace are deeply racist, appallingly homophobic, hopelessly inbred or just plain dumb as a bag of spanners – in much the same way that visitors to this country should keenly avoid East London, Essex, most of the Black Country and Newcastle – things should work out reasonably well. In fact, as I found out, if you avoid calling New Jersey “The Toilet State”, don’t get stuck behind a bunch of lardy-assed out-of-towners on the final ascent inside the State of Liberty, and stay the hell away from Texas, things should work out just fine.

While there were so many things about the country that I could embrace, like Philly cheesesteaks and watching the sunset from the Mallory Square Dock and the BART, the one thing I simply couldn’t take to my heart whenever I was over there was The Tonight Show. I simply didn’t get its appeal. Johnny Carson may have been a national institution but he always left me unimpressed, whether it was the opening monologue or the tame interviews that followed. Once Jay Leno took over behind the desk, after enduring a couple minutes of his shtick, I always had the urge to run out and fuck a woman who had coated the inside of her vagina with stinging nettles.

So when I read Bill Carter’s article on The New York Times’ website that once Leno steps down when his contract expires, rather than have him jump ship to another network, NBC was offering him five nights a week in prime time come Fall 2009, I felt like I had been dealt a massive cock punch from which I’m only just recovering. Obviously since I’m not decamped over there, why should I really care. Actually, in one respect I don’t. The problem is that with Leno moving to the ten o’clock slot is that five hours of drama will be tossed from the schedule.

In the past I’ve had some Patriot Weasels have a pop at me for not supporting British drama. Yes, the broadcasters come up with a few cracking ones a year, whether it’s a one-off from Stephen Poliakoff or a serial like the utterly stupendous Little Dorrit, but there’s always a nagging lack of inconsistency across the months. With more money and more of, well, everything to throw at the productions, American drama has come on in leaps and bounds for the last three decades, making it almost unrecognizable from the formulaic, hermetically-sealed stories of the 1970s and early 80s.

Over the past few weeks I’ve wondered whether the party isn’t over. With The Sopranos long gone and The Wire finishing this year, the HBO cupboard is bare. The Shield reached one of the most devastatingly delicious climaxes in television history last month. When The SciFi Channel decided to break the final season of Battlestar Galactica in two it unleashed a wave of outrage, but now it looks like a blessing in disguise. Without those upcoming episodes there would be little to look forward to next year, especially with the future of Matthew Weiner’s involvement in Mad Men hanging in the balance.

You’ll notice those were the US cable channels mentioned because the networks have either lost it or are playing safe with well made, but still somewhat formulaic CSI-style dramas. Lost may be picking up now that an end date has been finalised, but everything else either appears tired and flaccid or has gone off the rails. Compare the current slate of shows to those scheduled five or ten years ago and there’s definitely a marked drop in quality and inventiveness, especially since so many shows current shows are losing their way so quickly.

Maybe resting prime time drama for a while is the way to go, especially in NBC’s case. Once ER comes to an end after fifteen seasons, the remaining long-running shows are part of Dick Wolf’s Law & Order franchise. Nothing else seems to be built to last. After a pretty disastrous new season, almost all the high-level network programmers at NBC Universal have been given the boot. Strangely enough Ben Silverman, a former agent who was made co-chairman of NBC Entertainment even though he had no experience of programming a network, still remains at his desk.

Worse, Silverman is expected to have his contract renewed, showing that nothing today succeeds better than failure. Together with Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s chief executive, still has some way to dismantling all the good work Grant Tinker did almost thirty years ago.