I have two theories about the way TV shows are made. I also have two theories about the way baby food is made. They’re the same two theories. In the first theory, the manufacturers start with wholesome and natural ingredients, which they proceed to blast, bleach, irradiate, colorize, and strain until the result is bland, featureless ooze. In the second theory, they do much the same thing with the same result, but they start with toxic waste.
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You might have supposed, for instance, that the old classic Barney Miller was born out of an acute case of agoraphobia. It confined itself obsessively to that dingy police squad room for years at a time. But the pilot, I once was startled to discover, was for a standard homebound sitcom about a cop’s family life. Barney’s scenes in the squad room were nothing more than local color; but as often happens during long runs, the local color took on a life of its own and swallowed up the rest of the show. Another big surprise was the pilot for Murphy Brown: not only was the script nothing more than a bad update of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (with a kitschy veneer of feminist consciousness), but I couldn’t begin to measure the depth of Candice Bergen’s stage fright. She recited every line as though praying for the camera to be turned off so she could bolt. After years of heavy-duty industrial processing, she has gotten better, or at least less tense–but the pilot did explain why, even now, everyone else on the set acts a little dazed by her.
But the most interesting pilots are for series that don’t get on the air. It might be news to you that there are any–that there’s any selection process at all. But the networks are constantly commissioning scripts for new series, and they shoot far more pilots than they ever schedule. Many of the also-rans do get shown on the air once, to fill holes in the program grid when the supply of regular product is running low. We are right now in prime unsold-pilot season, what with everything being in reruns except for Models Inc. (which only feels like it’s a rerun) and The People vs. O.J. (which is temporarily on hiatus). Here and there throughout the grid, in between the evidentiary hearings, unsold pilots have been popping up for the last few weeks on all the networks. I recommend watching one, no matter what it is. It’ll be terrible–I guarantee that–but it’ll tell you more about how TV works than a year’s worth of Nick at Night.
I’ll spare you what followed–it was so bleak the producers should have replaced the laugh track with the wails and groans of damned souls. The pit of hell finally yawned in the concluding moments, when the script (sensing, perhaps, that the executive screening room at Fox had emptied out) underwent a seizure of nihilistic self-loathing. Behind the credits, the cabdriver and somebody else attacked each other like rabid wolves, while the other characters, trapped within the dwindling reality of the town, became aware of the existence of the camera and desperately tried to horn in on the barber’s last soliloquy.
When a show has to introduce its real premise so patiently and insinuatingly as all that, then obviously the last thing Locals should have done is leap headlong into weirdness. It should have spent half a season pretending to be a 90s version of Mayberry R.F.D. before even mentioning those rakes and that monastery. It should have taken a lesson from the strangest fairy tale on the schedule: Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
