It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was Garry Shandling’s first big break, and it was a weird one. The show was a traditional multi-camera sitcom except that the characters on the show were aware they were on a show, Garry opened every episode with a monologue to the live studio audience and the audience was encouraged from time to time to interact with the cast and the set. In other words, it was not a traditional multi-camera sitcom.

The show broke the fourth wall at every opportunity and shattered virtually every convention of traditional sitcoms, it set a bizarre precedent and its influence on sitcoms can still be felt today. In short, it was one of those gloriously weird ahead-of-its-time shows whose existence we tend to mourn after a pitifully short life in recent years. But It’s Garry Shandling’s Show lasted for four years, first on Showtime and eventually being rebroadcast on a prime time network. I don’t know if it got cancelled at that point or he chose to end it so he could go do something else, but either way four years is a respectable run for a show as strange as this one.

In today’s market there are so many more channels, offering such a wide variety of niche entertainment; weird shows that used to survive by virtue of a lack of competition are now being supplanted by stuff people want to watch. The truth is that most of the time, weird experimental shows have an audience of a few million at the most. A few million is the very peak, and anything less than that is rarely considered viable in our current market — even though with more than one channel per million people, having an audience of that size should be considered quite respectable.

I’m not sure I’ve articulated this before, but I think we’re coming to a point in modern time where the increased access to increasingly targeted material aimed at increasingly narrow niches will make most of that content too economically risky to produce, except in low budget fare produced cheaply perhaps on and for the Internet. This isn’t the end of this sort of content, but we might see networks taking fewer risks and producing blander content hoping to reach the greatest common overlap of audiences. Yes, they already do that, but they still experiment with genre shows, and weird meta-driven comedies, and rich character driven serials. All of that could be shunted away from television to the internet, where everything is cheaper to make.

And make no mistake, as shows budgets get slashed, their ability to tell large stories, the type of stories people want to see from expansive experimental television, will fall away. Sometimes a limited budget can produce beauteous brevity, see The Twilight Zone, but there are some things that simply can’t be done on a small budget. Lost, for example, could not be made on a small budget. A show that explored similar ideas, maybe even with similar characters, could be made but too much of the scale would be lost — the dangers would feel smaller, the climaxes less earned — the show would no longer be Lost.

(It’s possible with the recent success of True Blood and The Walking Dead — and one hopes similar success for Game of Thrones — we will see a renewal of interest in interesting genre storytelling from the cable channels, but even premium cable channels have their limits: HBO cancelled Carnivàle, one of the best and potentially expansive¹ shows they’ve ever made, because of ballooning costs due to the fantasy nature along with it being a period piece, which tends to require larger budgets for the props departments. So don’t expect the cable channels to rescue us from network television mediocrity forever.)

But if the market speaks, there’s not much we can do about it. People will watch what they want to watch. Enjoy the good times while they’re still here. Watch Fringe maybe?

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Footnotes

1. The show was cancelled before the scope of its story was fully widened, but from the rough sketches of the future of the show made available to fans, the story was headed to big places. [↩]

Fringe looks like it could be a great show. It also looks like it could be terrible. Here’s why. Spoilers ahead.

No Passion

These people aren’t driven by a desire to uncover the truth, or to find a sister taken from them years ago. Olivia Dunham is just another agent of the government doing her job. The closest we get to her having real passion for her new position investigating “fringe science” is her interest in the fucked up cases Lance Reddick’s character lists off. Which is really more of a “wow that’s pretty fucked up” interest than a “the world deserves to know the truth and I need to try to find proof” interest.

This lack of passion can be good if you take the show in a different route, but right now the show isn’t like X-Files in that way. With the X-Files, the fantastic things Mulder investigated were, for the most part, real. Aliens were out there, Tooms really did eat peoples liver to live longer. Most of the cases had at least a smidgen of scientific basis behind them. But in the world of The X-Files, no-one believed them. In the world of Fringe, these modern-day miracles are no longer on the edge of science only accepted by wackos. People have robotic arms. Corporations resurrect people for interrogation. We are no longer in a world where science cannot explain the seemingly magical. We are in a world where science is indistinguishable from magic. Granted, the worlds of Fringe and X-Files aren’t too different in this respect, and as the world is developed in the coming episodes they may diverge or coalesce, but right now the world of Fringe is full of people who have no vested interest aside from solving the case. That might work for your basic procedural, but I’m pretty sure Fringe isn’t hoping to be your basic procedural.

No Red Tape

Olivia Dunham is described as an inter-agency liason, which basically means she’s everyone’s boss. So instead of the local sheriff busting their chops about jurisdiction, she can just pull rank and get shit done. That’s great because very often that seemed to me like an arbitrary limitation the writers introduced to elongate a story that could be told in less than an hour. But it’s also terrible because red tape and people incredulous of the truth make you empathise with the protagonists. Of course, this world seems to be filled with true believers. The closest the show got to a skeptical response in the pilot was Joshua Jackson’s character, who is really played off as comical. His doubts aren’t seen as those of a rational scientist, but those of someone blind to the obvious truth. Even when Scully was obviously fighting the truth of the situation, you could see that she wasn’t simply saying “Mulder that’s ridiculous.”

Missing Time

This is purely a complaint on my part. There is no positive side to this. Walter Bishop and William Bell worked together in the 70′s on these bizarre things. Then Bishop was put in an institution and Bell moved on to create the biggest company in the world. Now, Bishop is back helping out Dunham and his son on cases similar to things he worked on back then, and Bell seems to be related to it. So my question is this: in the intervening years, no one was able to move beyond the things Bell and Bishop were working on all those years ago? Bell himself did nothing to move the field beyond what was developed thirty years ago? It’s a leap that I’m not willing to take and I have to hope that in future episodes they’ll come upon things vastly more advanced that even Bishop cannot explain.

Kirk Acevedo is Sorely Underutilized

This is just a personal rant about the misuse of actors in general. Kirk Acevedo played Miguel Alvarez on Oz, one of the first critically acclaimed shows for HBO. On that show, he got an opportunity to play a complex disturbed character, and he played it superbly. Over the years on Oz, that character was one of the few to remain compelling and likeable despite the numerous unpleasant actions he commits over the years and that’s a testament to both the writing and the acting. And every single role I’ve seen Kirk Acevedo do since then has been painfully one dimensional. This isn’t a problem with Fringe per se but rather a problem inherent in television today. TV shows have been getting more respect in recent years, but it still has a long way to go before clearly, because most TV shows today still function with barely awake characters thrumming through dialogue meant to continue the plot rather than to drive the characters. Admittedly, this is a shallow judgement given that only one episode has aired so far, but at the moment I’m not optimistic.

Well that’s all I’ve got for now, and it’s not much. Most of my issues are primarily with the implications for the rest of the series that the pilot sets up. They could be handled well, and one of my favourite shows of all time had a very substandard first season so I’m not completely giving up on the show, but I’m not yet in the thrall of this show and they’re going to have to work to convince me.