Jon Hamm in AMC’s brilliant “Mad Men,” Glenn Close in FX’s legal psycho-thriller, “Damages,” Christina Applegate in ABC’s winning “Samantha Who?” and Alec Baldwin in the stinging “30 Rock” — these are a few of our favorite things.
They were among the standouts of 2007, a mostly grim year for broadcast television.
At a time when a writers strike has paralyzed the industry and the networks are relying on low-rent “reality” fare to plug the holes, we look back fondly on these great scripted series, dramas and comedies, graced by outstanding individual performances.
In a year that brought too many supernatural, time-traveling and bionic “Heroes” wannabes to broadcast TV, it was a time for cable to shine. “The Riches” on FX; “The Sopranos,” “Tell Me You Love Me” and Larry David’s misanthropic comedy, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” on HBO; “The Closer” on TNT; and “Weeds” on Showtime — none of these draws the ratings numbers of a “CSI,” but they please discerning audiences.
HBO’s “Extras” ended its run this month, but the five-disc DVD collection starring Ricky Gervais (“The Office”) as an aspiring actor will be out Jan. 15. The set includes the concluding soliloquy: “Shame on you!” Gervais’ character tells viewers who eat up the mindless so-called reality fare dished out by the networks. It’s the best TV-wasteland speech since “Network’s” Howard Beale.
In ’07, “High School Musical 2” and Hannah Montana offered a glimpse into the workings of Disney’s marketing machine. “Lost” set the bar so high, we wonder if it can live up to the hype when it returns Jan. 31. “Brothers & Sisters” found its legs while the “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff “Private Practice,” a disastrous character rewrite, faltered badly. And “Dancing With the Stars” led ABC to ratings victory.
“The Sopranos” went wordlessly to black, but the creative decisions that went into David Chase’s open-to-interpretation finale are still cause for debate.
Rosie O’Donnell left “The View” a sadly tamer place.
The heralded “convergence” of television and Web came closer to actuality in 2007. Not only did a character from CBS’s “CSI” chase a killer in the virtual world of Second Life, but CW’s knowing “Gossip Girl” incorporated webchat, photo-file uploads and instant messaging into its running script. Next, “quarterlife,” the Marshall Herskowitz and Ed Zwick online series for 20somethings, will migrate from web to television on NBC. The YouTube/CNN candidate debate brought the political sphere closer to relevance for the Internet-only crowd. Everywhere we looked, “interactive” was the watchword as network websites took polls, counted votes and encouraged fan encounters.
The networks dove into streaming episodes, even releasing fall pilots online in advance of the season. The on- demand and downloaded world became a reality — even changing the way ratings are counted. (Now, “live plus seven days” is a standard measure, taking into account the original telecast plus DVR viewing within a week.)
On the news side, Katie Couric didn’t boost CBS’s ratings. In fact, that show dropped to a record low.
The diminished cable news outlets gave up trying to compete in terms of more complete coverage and switched to “branding” to stem the tide of declining viewership. Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann tried to stand out by claiming particular viewpoints. “Brand extension,” an industry buzz phrase, meant blogs, podcasts, e-mail alerts and reporter’s notebooks, all reaching out to viewers.
Celebrity footnotes (Paris Hilton’s jail stint, Britney’s custody case, Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy) threatened to eclipse actual news; news about the war in Iraq was notably in short supply. Tragedies from Virginia Tech to the Colorado slayings, with eerie reverberations of Columbine, tested the news media again.
Any accounting of TV’s 2007 low points wouldn’t be complete without shout- outs to a sort-of-singer named Sanjaya, who held 30 million American idolators hostage; the Geico cave men who went from commercial to failed sitcom; and Hugh Jackman’s “Viva Laughlin,” a bad translation of a British original that sang and danced its last after a mere two outings.
R.I.P.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
