Premiere month is the most depressing part of the TV year. The new shows are inevitably such a dismal flock of malformed freaks, of mutants and abominations blinking feebly in the brief glare of public exposure before they meet their merciful doom, that I start to feel like a health inspector on the island of Doctor Moreau. But this current crop worries me more than usual. I’m starting to get the feeling that instead of a brief parade of weirdness before the tedium sets back in again, what we’ve gotten from TV this past month is only a foretaste of a deeper, blacker mood of horror and contempt.
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It’s insulting on the face of it how many of last season’s worst shows have been renewed–I mean, Hope & Gloria is back, and it remains the only show I’ve ever seen where the actors are plainly having a worse time than the audience (Cynthia Stevenson’s perky routine has gotten so edgy, I swear she’s about to go after somebody with a knife). But if NBC felt obliged to renew SeaQuest DSV, why bring it back with yet another new premise? It’s as though NBC can’t be bothered to cancel it, but they are willing to go out of their way to sneer at those few lingering viewers (and I’m sure they must exist) who’ve been sticking with it through its hard times. Offhandedly, as though announcing a revision of the duty roster, the season premiere informed the audience that another damn undersea disaster, or some kind of unfortunate summer vacation on an alien planet, had carried off yet more of the original cast and whatever was left of the original idea. I can’t say I watched the show often enough to tell who was missing; but I was alarmed to see that all the survivors were just as indifferent to the news as I was. The vampire cop on Forever Knight was more broken up when his dumb cluck of a partner was written out in a plane crash (it was a brutal summer for supporting players). I know the future according to SeaQuest has always been pretty gray; but is it really going to be wholly indifferent to human emotions?
Evidently so, judging by a strange change in the SeaQuest’s captaincy. This is part of the season’s most ominous new trend. Nice guys are out as heroes; in are eerie thugs. The star of ABC’s inexplicably renewed The Marshal, for instance, is Jeff Fahey, an actor who’s played so many occult villains in direct-to-cable movies that his face seems frozen in a mask of supernatural dread (you get the feeling on his show that he’s just transferred in from The X-Files and is inspecting the crime scenes for werewolf spoor). So, on SeaQuest, that hammy old sweetheart Roy Scheider has been replaced; the new hero is the ineffably spooky Michael Ironside, still indelible as the psychotic telepath in Scanners. Ironside immediately made it plain he wasn’t going to be any Picard-ish wimp who took part in those saccharine Next Generation parables that SeaQuest used to do so badly. He was so stern and creepy, in fact, that you could tell he was gearing up to provide a new role model for the 90s–Captain Ahab.
Granted, the workplace atmosphere on Central Park West turned out to be as poisonous as the last days of the Manchu dynasty–so Hemingway was probably just trying to stay grounded. But that’s exactly where Central Park West goes irrevocably wrong for me: its assumption that anybody would put up with so much nastiness just for the sake of the glamour. Glamour is no longer a positive value in America. Once Donald and Ivana started doing Pizza Hut commercials, the dream was over. Darren should have understood his own previous hits: the success of Melrose Place proves that Americans are perfectly able now to transpose the weirdest old melodramas and fairy tales about the aristocracy down the social scale onto the lives of a bunch of boring middle-class civilians. So on Central Park West when Hemingway endures yet another chic party where the glam guests are all snarling and clawing and leaping for her throat like rabid weasels, you can’t help wondering why she bothers. If we can see what worthless scum they are, then why doesn’t she wise up, hop on a down elevator, and head straight to that Central Park coffeehouse where the Friends are palling around?
This is what’s new and alarming about Murder One: if a lawyer on any TV show ten years ago had made that speech, you would have instantly known he was the villain. And Murder One does everything possible to make you think the hero is the villain. Otherwise why cast Daniel Benzali in the role? He’s the eeriest thug I’ve ever seen: he looks like a hobbit gone over to the dark side and talks at all times in a chilling murmur, as though he’s explaining his master plot just before he flips the switch and dumps James Bond into the piranha tank. Throughout the pilot I was somehow hoping against hope that a traditional, morally impregnable hero would turn up just to tell Benzali off. Then I got to the episode’s tag, when our weary hero returned home at the end of the day. He didn’t live in Dracula’s castle; instead the show conjured up a dazzlingly bland suburban family scene for him straight out of The Donna Reed Show. That’s when I realized that if TV iconography still means anything at all anymore, we’re supposed to think this guy actually is morally impregnable.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Kurt Mitchell.
