I never begin watching a new TV season without a pious acknowledgment of how hard it must be to make a series–any series. It’s a rare show these days that carries itself with any grace. There aren’t even all that many shows on the air right now that look professional. The new shows are as lame a collection of befuddled losers as I can remember, and several of the returning elite shows, the ones you figure should at least have some passing idea of what they’re doing, have exploded in midair. Is it really such a challenge to turn out a competent product that’s at least slightly more involving than the Weather Channel? Judging by this past premiere month, it’s damn near impossible.
You may recall it from last season: Seinfeld’s writers thought it would be hilarious to free George from his impending marriage by visiting an absurdist death on his horrible fiancee Susan. (She was fatally poisoned by toxic envelope glue.) Then they capped the joke in typical style: the gang received the bad news with the same uncomfortable diffidence they might feel at hearing that a dry cleaner has ruined a coat they didn’t much like. That was where we left them at the season finale: awkwardly drifting out of the hospital in search of a cup of coffee.
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I don’t know when I’ve seen a show that seemed so much like an invitation to a fistfight. If Americans really gave a damn about our history, the producers seem to be taunting us, we’d be livid about a TV series that trashes public tragedies for the sake of a jokey exercise in conspiracy mongering. But Dark Skies knows perfectly well that we don’t care. Who out there in the audience even knows enough about our past to call them wrong? American politics is run wholly by assassination, the Challenger disaster was a CIA black-box program gone wrong–why not? It’s probably what most voters think anyway.
The original Baywatch, of course, has grown so happy it can barely be bothered with its ostensible premise anymore. These days the lifeguards don’t save people from drowning; that’s just too heavy for them. One recent, wholly typical episode found them lusting after a new generation of high-tech jet skis. Lesser park-district employees might have asked the local city council for an appropriation; our aerodynamic chums raised the money themselves, by the simple expedient of staging a nationally televised pay-per-view bikini contest. (The entrants were seen posing against palm trees and roiling flames–sort of like the napalmed jungle in Apocalypse Now, only with silicone.) Is it too much to ask that they would then be shown using their new fleet to rescue endangered swimmers? Of course it is: the final scene showed them miles away from shore, not another human being in sight, doing flips and barrel rolls with their toys as giddily as dolphins.
