May 2001 Archives

Over the years, TV's standards have eroded. To many people -- including the Parents Television Council -- this means that TV is playing to our baser natures, sullying the airwaves with wanton depictions of sex and violence. To me, it means that TV is dropping barriers that prevent the medium from accurately reflecting many aspects of the real world.

We're both right.

The real world has ugly violence (blood and gore and pain, not the video-game stuff of The A-Team), nasty language aplenty (no, "freakin'" is not a nasty word), and sex galore (and not the kind where everybody's got a blanket covering them up). But the networks must pretend that a lot of stuff that's part of everyday life doesn't really happen, because to show it would be to violate the standards of broadcast television.

The PTC's name indicates its position: its members believe that kids shouldn't be exposed to such things. And they're somewhat right, although the PTC's standards don't match mine. For example, they red-light Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I'd recommend to any teenager, especially teenaged girls.

Broadcast television's "standards" result in a jarring disconnect between what would happen in real life and what has to happen on television. Sure, I can accept the existence of vampires when I'm watching Buffy -- but it's harder to accept that an extremely angry person would say "damn" or "crap" instead of stronger language. Sometimes I'm completely thrown by something on network TV because they clearly want to use a swear word, or they're clearly hiding someone's nipple, or they've clearly cut away from something violent -- just because of broadcast standards.

This is not to say that I'm advocating the transformation of Fox into HBO. (Although check back in 10 years, and it may be there.) But I am arguing that by adhering to these standards, no matter how tenuously, the entertainment products on network television shear even further away from reality and into a sanitized (but only slightly) fantasy world where bad words are never heard.

Apparently NBC president Bob Wright is chafing at these restrictions, too. That's why he frisbeed a letter to other Hollywood big shots about what The Sopranos means for the future TV content.

The question is, why now? After all, even if broadcast standards aren't as far down the road as me and my fellow libertines might prefer, they sure ain't what they used to be. We don't see Buffy's nipples, but we do see her moaning and groaning and having sex with her boyfriend. Yes, we hear someone on The West Wing call someone else a son-of-a-bitch, but we don't ever hear Toby curse a blue streak, which seems to be consistent with his character. We see all sorts of crazy shit on NYPD Blue, but that's Bochco, and what'cha gonna do about him?

No, what's got Bob Wright in a tizzy is all the attention being lavished on The Sopranos, a violent, profane, nasty show that gets away with murder (ho, ho) because it's on pay cable and has no standards police (except for grumpy Italian-American groups).

HBO folks think it's just sour grapes on Wright's part, but let's face it: Even those of us who aren't Mafiosi live in an HBO world, not an NBC world... at least to a point. The networks will always be hampered by "standards" that place a veil of artificiality over everything they produce. The veil has gotten thinner, but it's still there. And it probably always will be, because at some point you've gotta figure that the American viewing public -- I mean, people with a bit more sense than ultra-conservative groups like the Parents' Television Council -- would eventually complain if every TV show on television featured nudity, repeated use of the word motherfucker, and graphic violence.

Then again, the Fox network has succeeded, so perhaps not.

Ultimately, Bob Wright is upset because he sees HBO producing shows that are edgy, violent, profane, and critically acclaimed -- meanwhile, he's getting shat upon on a regular basis by people like the Parents' Television Council.

Well, boo hoo, Bob. The Sopranos may be a critical darling, but it gets a fraction of the ratings of your worst show -- excepting the XFL, of course. Either deal with the disappointment or invest in a cable channel all your own. What's that you say? You own several cable channels?

Well, that's different, then. Coming soon: MSNBC presents Nude Dateline with Fuckin' Stone Phillips.

You and I are living in a golden age, my friend, unless you're a fan of minor league football or ER. Other than that, it's a grand time to be alive... especially if you like cartoons. Today's animators and falling-anvil-gag writers are churning out more top-quality product now than at any other time in history. It's not just for us animation fetishists either. The cartoon genre as a whole is a better group of series than any other of prime time's weary old collections.

Tally up the number of good cop shows left. There's Law and Order, which only counts for half, and CSI, which isn't really about cops. Lawyer TV? Again, half Law and Order. Decent sitcoms? Raymond, Malcolm and maybe Drew Carey fill a pretty short list. Meanwhile, Fox's Sunday night cartoon block alone offers three of the best shows on television.

Animation has long been a staple of human entertainment. From the very earliest cave drawings depicting a Neanderthal getting a piano dropped on his head, crudely drawn characters have amused commoner and king alike. Recently, archaeologists discovered strange hieroglyphics on the base of the Great Pyramid. Turns out, if you run around the structure really fast, you'll be treated to the uproarious story of Giza Bob and Stinky the talking scarab beetle.

If you're about my age, you attended middle school believing Scooby Doo was the pinnacle of animated achievement. We were idiots. Have you actually seen a Scooby Doo episode lately? The only redeeming quality to the show is that it was a cartoon before it had its own line of action figures.

Even the vaunted Superfriends was pathetic. The Wonder Twins? Saps. Their pet monkey was a far better superhero than either of the twins. Or Aquaman, for that matter. Besides, the Superfriends always seemed incredibly inefficient and bloated. What's the point of having an entire group of superheroes if one of them is Superman? Somehow I doubt Robin's going to kick the crap out of some hideous space mutant that beat the hell out of the Man of Steel.

Aquaman may be able to talk to fish, but unless you're looking for lunch, what's a sea bass going to do that Superman can't? At least Wonder Woman has some minor super powers. Batman, on the other hand, is just a regular schlub. How did he ever get invited to the party?

Today's cartoons are so superior to years gone by, it's not even worth mentioning Underdog or The Transformers. Fox's Sunday night offers the best 90 minutes of pencil and ink people that anyone has ever seen. Futurama stepped out of The Simpsons' shadow last year, King of the Hill just finished its best season since its second and The Simpsons is quite simply the greatest television show the world has ever known.

Network series are just the tip of the iceberg. Everybody knows South Park is the reason cable television was invented, but Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are cable's real animation heavyweights. The best Elvis on TV is actually Johnny Bravo, the idiotic, buffed-up, skirt-chasing star of his own show. Nickelodeon's SpongeBob Squarepants just might be the goofiest show on the air. You simply can not call yourself a couch potato until you've seen a talking sponge transmogrify into a sea snail that meows like a kitten.

Cartoon Network's biggest stars are the Powerpuff Girls, a trio of crime-fighting sisters named Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. These kindergartners probably couldn't take out Superman, but they'll sure as hell open up a can of whoop-ass on the Wonder Twins. Created from sugar, spice, everything nice and a dash of Chemical X, the Powerpuff Girls spend their mornings learning cursive writing and their evenings saving the city of Townsville from super villans, monsters and Satan himself.

While Blossom is the group's leader and Buttercup is the toughest one of the three, everybody's clear favorite is blonde, blue-eyed Bubbles. Bubbles is the Powerpuff equivalent to Cartman, minus the swearing and obesity. She's the character with the best lines who is destined to steal every scene she's in. It doesn't hurt that she's gifted with the best voice in prime time, a voice she sometimes uses to talk to squirrels.

The Powerpuff Girls are about more than cute and cuddly. Its simple animation style might remind you of Flash-enabled web sites, but the stories have an almost Simpsons-like sophistication. One recent episode, entitled "Meet the Beat-Alls" featured villains that would be very familiar to anyone who knew the names John, Paul, George and Ringo.

One of the show's best episodes is about an inept jewel thief who loses a huge diamond in a box of breakfast cereal popular with certain large rabbits. The box ends up in the Powerpuff home and the thief spends the episode recreating a famous series of commercials where a certain rabbit tries to trick children into giving him cereal. Unlike the ad campaign, each and every time this happens, the girls knock the snot out of the rabbit while joyfully reciting the mantra about how certain cereals are meant only for youthful consumers.

With the exception of the Sunday night Fox cartoons and an occasional South Park, no one on television does a better job of skewering adult pop culture than the six-year old Powerpuff Girls. It's obvious series creator Craig McCracken spent as much time in front of after-school TV as the rest of us.

While SpongeBob may be king over at Nickelodeon, the Nick cartoon those over 12 will get the biggest kick out of is Invader Zim. Created by underground comic book artist Jhonen Vasquez, Invader Zim tells the story of an alien sent to Earth to prepare our planet for invasion. In order to facilitate his plans, Zim dons blue contact lenses and a jet black pompadour in order to masquerade as an eighth grader. Apparently his school is near a nuclear power plant since no one seems to mind his skin is still green.

Zim's nemesis is a middle school Mulder named Dib, an obnoxious brat who knows what Zim is up to but can't convince anyone else of the truth. Our conquering hero is aided in his quest by a robot named Grrr who is dressed in a dog costume, complete with zipper up the front. Also assigned to the invasion effort are two low-quality robots disguised as Zim's parents. In the series' best episode, Zim takes his parental droids to parent-teacher night, where they immediately go berserk in front of the real parents.

The writing on Invader Zim is very sharp and the acting talent is top-notch, especially Zim himself, whose frequent proclamations of Earth's impending doom are delivered in the best cartoon voice this side of Bubbles.

What really sets Invader Zim above the crowd is its artwork, which is a style the likes of which you've never seen before on TV. Zim and his classmates all have watermelon-like heads on top of tennis-ball size bodies. They have foot-long tongues for slurping and rows of squared-off fangs instead of normal animated teeth. Frankly, if I were six, the show would terrify me.

Especially Zim's teacher. In a stroke of pure character design genius, the old lady is shaped like a snake. She slithers standing up and rattles when she talks. Often times she'll magically appear by blotting out the scene, leaving just a pair of glowing eyes peering out from a black cloak while her body slowly materializes like some kind of demonic cheshire cat.

It's a brilliantly conceived and completely addictive look. From darkened cityscapes to Zim's mechanical spider legs to radical camera moves, Invader Zim leaves older cartoons such as Scooby Doo looking like a four year-old's attempt at paint-by-numbers.

There isn't a whole lot to love about TV these days. Plenty of critics and industry insiders talk about a sudden drought of good television people. They blame the lack of good prime time fare on some sort of show business Bermuda Triangle that sucks up all the good writers and producers and dumps them in some parallel dimension, never to be heard from again. Take a closer look, Hollywood: your most creative people aren't disappearing into some mystery dimension, they're working in cartoons.

It's May, and you know what that means -- time for May sweeps, when the great community of television viewers is tormented by a process that is outmoded, silly, ineffective, and horribly wasteful.

No, not sweeps themselves, although they are a silly addiction that's going to drive the networks to their death. I'm talking about season-ending cliffhangers.

Watch enough TV, and you'll tremble with fear at the mention of the words "season-ending cliffhanger." Every year, the last episode of just about every series on television -- be it drama or sitcom -- ends with a purportedly shocking conclusion that leaves the storylines up in the air until the season premiere in the fall.

Or until someone leaks the spoilers to Entertainment Weekly. Whichever comes first.

Television producers will explain their rationale to you -- so long as you go and visit them in their small padded rooms. "We need a way to entice our viewers back to our shows in the fall, after our long summer breaks," they'll mumble into their drool cups. "Without cliffhangers, the audience might never come back!"

That's right. TV producers give you cliffhangers because they think that you're ready to abandon their shows for other pursuits -- other shows, movies, even outdoor activities, God forbid -- but will be hoodwinked into staying around because you just can't resist finding out whether Daphne and Niles hook up, if Ross really will marry what's-her-name, if Mulder really is dead, if a member of the president's staff was killed by those fiendish skinheads in the building across the street, ad infinitum.

Because you're really that stupid, apparently.

There was a time when nothing like this ever happened -- or, at the very least, happened only rarely. Time was, series episodes were interchangeable from one another. Once a series went into syndication, the theory went, the episodes could be mixed around in any order with no fear of confusion. Viewers could drop in, watch an episode of Magnum P.I., and not have to worry whether this was the early 1980s Tom Selleck or the older-but-wiser version. The exception to the rule? Soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty, because they were all about the continuing story.

Me, I blame Star Trek for this latest wave of cliffhanger-itis. The first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation ended with Captain Picard giving a pep talk about how exciting it was to go exploring the far reaches of the galaxy. The second ended with a clip show. But the third... well, that one ended with Picard turned into an automaton by the evil Borg, and with Commander Riker ordering the firing of a weapon that would surely bring about Picard's demise.

It was great! It brought buzz to the series like never before. But since then, with each passing year, the TV world's addiction to cliffhangers has continued to grow. Even sitcoms do cliffhangers now, usually with ridiculous premises and predictably poor results.

I'm looking in your direction, Ross and Rachel.

"But sometimes the cliffhangers are really great!" the producers shout from behind the double-locked doors. Of that, there is no doubt.

But even the best cliffhangers are often cheats. Because how ground-shattering can the cliffhanger's results be when you've got an entire hour to fill, not to mention a whole season of episodes to produce? Star Trek's excellent cliffhanger ended up being resolved by having Riker's ultimate weapon sputter and fail after five seconds of use. D'oh!

(Speaking of which, yes, The Simpsons did a cliffhanger one year. But it was a parody of cliffhangers, especially the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. And it still sucked.)

"But... the ratings!" the insane shouts continue. "By leading up to a shocking development, we guarantee Event Television and bigger ratings!"

There's some truth in that. However, having your season's ongoing plot climax in May doesn't necessitate a cliffhanger ending.

The best recent example of this thinking is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Creator Joss Whedon had no idea, when he was producing the show's short first season of episodes, whether his series had even a snowball's chance in hell of coming back for a second year. So he decided to create a story arc that concluded in the season's climactic last episode. In the final episode, the year's archenemy was defeated with enough time for a pleasant conclusion in which all our characters went off into their summer vacations. It was exciting, dramatic... and when it was done, nobody felt ripped off.

Cliffhangers, on the other hand, are rip-offs. You end up spending three months waiting for the plot to resolve itself, and it's almost always disappointing (see Riker, Inability to Fire Ultimate Weapons). And some times, it's an extra special rip-off. Because, as Joss Whedon knows, sometimes shows don't come back. You see, there's this little phenomenon called cancellation, and it happens to the best of shows.

Too many series have ended their runs with never-to-be-resolved cliffhangers. The excellent Now and Again concluded last year with the main characters on the run from a government committed to finding them and executing them. What happens next? Ask the Fan Fiction writers, because there will never be an official answer.

Just this past Friday, The Lone Gunmen -- an excellent series that was much, much better than its pilot episode (but that's another story) -- aired a cliffhanger episode. Pretty ballsy, given the reportedly poor chance the show has of coming back this fall.

My advice to you TV producers, before my tranquilizer blow dart kicks in: Don't do it. Make your season finale a special event, a la Everybody Loves Raymond (flashbacks) or NewsRadio (silly modifications of the series premise). Can't come up with a clever last episode? Just end with a strong one, and your viewers will find you in the fall.

And if you must end with a bang, do us all a favor -- end with the bang and the aftermath. Oh, go ahead, give us some loose plot threads if you must. But enough with the suspense already. We don't need it. It needlessly harms your series, and cripples the opening episode of your next season. It's not worth it.

And be careful to heed my advice. If you don't, you risk winding up in terrible, terrible trouble. If you don't listen to what I'm telling you, if you laugh in the face of my warnings, you could end up just like the one series whose cliffhanger episode led directly to its downfall. You know the show I'm talking about. It was a little show named...

TO BE CONTINUED...

In the big leagues of television criticism, reviewers get showered with videotapes of upcoming shows. They recline on velvet pillows and get fed grapes direct from the hands of the likes of Jeff Zucker and Steven Bornnstein. Or so I assume.

But for those of us on the bottom of the television-reviewing food chain, we take what we can get. So when I got a chance to go to a "television preview screening", I leapt at the chance. It's not every day that I, or more accurately, one of my co-workers who had a prior engagement, get selected to help represent the television viewing preferences of the entire country. Emphasis theirs. I apologize to the 99.9 percent of the population whose tastes I emphatically do not represent, but if it makes you feel any better, I got a friend to come with me to the screening, so my particular quirks would be lessened.

This particular television preview screening was being presented by a company with the innovative moniker of "Television Preview." They present "screenings of pre-recorded 1/2 hour television segments (including programs and commercials)". I figured that if I was lucky, I'd get to be a test audience for some terrible future show. If I was unlucky, I'd get to be a test audience for commercials.

And if I was extremely unlucky, I'd get to be brainwashed and sold into a life of menial labor in Antarctica.

I knew the odds were low that I'd see a show that was being considered for actual airing. But no matter what happened, I'd get to see something even worse: programs that had already been rejected or even a program that had never been intended to air. I'm always curious to see what got rejected so that Cleopatra 2525 could live.

In real test screenings, they usually bar members of the media, so I had to be ready with a cover story. I planned to say that I was but a humble shoemaker. And my friend planned to say that she'd never seen me before in her life. That's the gratitude I get.

The screening took place in a hotel conference room, and I can pretty definitively say that my friend and I were the hippest people in the room. Apparently, the only people they can lure out to these things are retirees and the occasional Internet-based television mocker. As far as I can tell, people that have lives are not invited.

The first thing they had us do was go through a booklet of "prizes" and circle the ones we most wanted to receive. This process was very similar to picking your favorite brand of peanut butter, nail polish, and cake frosting, so it was pretty clear that they were going to show us commercials in what they called a "natural viewing environment", assuming you always watch television in a darkened hotel conference room, surrounded by strangers.

However, they couldn't just admit that they were here to test the power of commercials, so they tried to maintain the illusion that we were going to see potential television series. And since they didn't have us sign anything (and even forgot to ask me what my profession was, which is the only reason the powerful Shoemaker's Union isn't breaking down my door right now), I am now prepared to review the terrible shows they showed us.

The first show was a one-hour paranormal drama called Soulmates. The premise, as far as could be made out, was that Kim Raver (now appearing as Kim on Third Watch, unless that's been cancelled) is a hypnotherapist who finds a man she may have loved in a past life. Unfortunately, said man (who goes by the unlikely name of Gabriel London) is a part of the mysterious Consortium.

It wasn't very good.

Let me expand on that last sentence, because I'm not sure it had the right impact. Soulmates looked to have been shot on cheap videotape, and never once looked like something that might appear on network television. Or syndicated television. Or late at night on public access. And not only that, but the paranormal part bugged me.

I'll put up with a lot of unconvincing hoo-ha in my science-fiction/fantasy/paranormal television, as evidenced by the fact that I've seen every episode of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. But I don't understand how the "previous lives" of the main characters took place during World War II. Unless they died very soon after the flashbacks, it seems like their current lives must have overlapped with the past ones. Also, Kim Raver's chin looks really weird.

At any rate, the commercials shown us during the drama were for medical problems. They believed we suffered from bladder control problems, depression, acne, armpit odor, and fallen arches. By this time, I'd figured out that they were going to give us another "prize booklet" at the end of the evening to see if the products we wanted had magically changed through the power of advertising. My clever plan was to select things as far as possible from the advertised products. Yeah, I stuck it to the man, all right. That'll learn 'em.

The second show was a half-hour sitcom called City that looked for all the world like an actual pilot. It starred Valerie Harper (from Rhoda!), Tyra Ferrell (from several of Spike Lee's early movies and Tapeheads!), and Tod Susman. I love Todd Susman! He was Officer Shifflett on Newhart and he was the PA announcer on M*A*S*H. He's great.

So it looked like an actual pilot, but it looked like an actual pilot that was at least a decade old, what with the Teddy Ruxpin jokes. Judging by the IMDB entry, the good people at Television Preview have been showing City since at least 1999, so I expect that they picked it up for a song after it wasn't picked up. And it wasn't terrible, but it's clearly not going to be made into a series at this point. The plot had something to do with Valerie Harper's character (a city manager) dealing with a cemetery literally overflowing. Somewhere off-screen, cadavers were sliding down the hill.

During City, most of the commercials were for food, including charcoal, bagels, and biologically engineered insects. The latter would appear to have been one of the big sponsors of the evening, because I was called two nights later by somebody whose script said he was very interested in my opinion of biotechnology. I didn't tell him that I was pretty sure biotechnology is the division that Paul Reiser works for in Aliens.

I also didn't tell him that I thought Television Preview put on a fine evening of surrealist theatre. I didn't tell him much of anything, really, because I was determined to hang up the phone before I found myself buying a time-share vacation home or agreeing to be surgically altered into some kind of enormous Octopus-man or something.

That's what happened to Tom Shales, you know. One second, he was watching a preview of Murder, She Wrote, the next second he'd turned into a freakish cephalopod.

Making the Band is gone, and I am poorer for it. Last week, ABC announced that the Pubescent Pygmalion had been pulled from the network's current lineup. Though it might finish its run sometime this summer, we apparently shouldn't be holding our breath for new episodes. (On the other hand, they also announced the official death of The Geena Davis Show, so one can't be too snippy about cosmic justice.)

Making the Band caused me no small amount of embarrassment among my friends, family, and co-workers; my admission that I actually watched a show featuring the writhing, shrieking, spandex-clad teenage boys of O-Town was often received as though I had admitted to bestiality. Come to think of it, they would have treated bestiality with more understanding.

"But the whole band is fake," they would say, somehow believing that this fact had escaped me. "Can't you see that these kids are just being told what to do? How can you watch such pre-fabricated, manipulative pap?"

And that, my friends, was the deceptive brilliance of Making the Band. We were shown -- almost gleefully -- that the fix was in, and were never meant to believe otherwise. We were given all the evidence we'd ever need to condemn boy bands as artificial, callow marketing shills. When three of the five members displayed an almost surreal inability to sing, Making the Band cheerfully showed how studio "sweetening" transformed them into Mario Lanza. When the time came for press ops and photo shoots, we saw each member assigned a "stylist", whose job it was to create that member's image. Voila! Clean-cut Valley kid Jacob is suddenly Edgy Guy, with dreadlocks, goatee, and a pair of blue jeans straight from a threshing machine. Presto Change-o! Groggy, talentless Trevor is now The Soulful One, sporting oversize aviator glasses and looking like an underfed Lenny Kravitz. At no point was any of this purported to be a natural or personal evolution. We were here to watch five young men fill five preconceived roles, and they didn't care if we knew it; in fact they wanted us to know it. We were privy to every cynical, staged, factory-molded moment of this band's development.

Why the full disclosure? Why would any manager reveal, in no uncertain terms, a band's complete lack of participation in their own careers?

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Lou Pearlman. The string-puller behind both 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys, Pearlman was left high and dry after both groups sued to be released from their contracts in the late '90s. The two bands went on to greater fame and fortune elsewhere; Pearlman was left holding a handful of what-ifs. Vowing to rise again, the vaguely-reptilian mogul followed a familiar tactic, assembling five pleasant-looking young men, all of whom could shuffle on cue and look dreamy on command. There would be just one catch this time: with O-Town, everyone would know who the real talent was. By showing the group's assembly, training, and rollout on national TV, it would be clear that Pearlman, not the band, was the creative force at work. He would decide the group's final lineup. He would pick the songs. He would decide how "street" each member should look. And when the band members got uppity or out of line, he would smack them down in front of the whole audience. This would be his final revenge against 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys. By showing how utterly irrelevant the group's members actually were, Pearlman would accomplish the one-two punch of shaming his former charges while establishing himself as a genius -- a Malcolm McLaren for the new century.

And it worked, kind of. The Friday-night show had an almost fanatical following among my musician friends, as well as the many "High Fidelity"-type wonks who populate the local record stores. They reveled in every gory detail of the band's adventures, often sending long emails to each other, recounting that week's shameless manipulation of the five youths. "This is great," said my friend Clyde, commenting on a recording session that proved Trevor to be wholly incapable of staying on key. "I always knew these kids couldn't really sing, but this is amazing." Another acquaintance, commenting on O-Town's overnight image makeover, noted, "This is so formulaic as to be unbelievable. I keep waiting for one of them to start wearing a woolen cap."

In the end, though, it was this warts-and-all depiction that doomed Making the Band. No 12-year-old wants to think of her favorite group as a sham; the success of boy bands depends on blind, defiant belief in their legitimacy as artists. With Making the Band, that was impossible; no amount of naiveté could hide the astounding lack of talent possessed by the five members of O-Town. No glowing profile in Tiger Beat would counteract the irrefutable truth: that O-Town (and, by extension, every other teen-pop act) are a bunch of kids doing exactly what adults tell them to do. For Making the Band, -- and for O-Town -- this would be a mortal wound. Record sales were lukewarm, and ABC was sharpening their swords.

By pulling back the curtain on his operation, Pearlman may have accomplished his goal of devaluing boy bands -- the charts show a recent drop-off in their sales -- but he did so at his own expense. Lou Pearlman has alienated the demographic that Making the Band most needed to survive. A legion of 20-something fans may be nice, but it won't keep you on the air at The House of Mouse. The name of their game is youngsters, and revealing their idols as gawky, untalented mooks who just follow orders isn't really a winning strategy.

So, goodbye, Ashley, Jacob, Erik, Dan, and Trevor. Your records may have flopped, your show may have been cancelled, and any promise you held as professional musicians may have vaporized long ago, but you'll live on in our hearts as a constant reminder of what happens when reality threatens commerce. And Jacob, cut off those dreadlocks; you look like a putz.

Denis Leary should have gone away. He exploded onto MTV in the early 1990s with his trademark "two words" and followed that up with a live video and CD of his performance art piece "No Cure for Cancer" and a hit song, the unforgettable "Asshole." Then MTV chewed Leary up and spit him out and he should have gone away like so many others, like all the other little pop confections the MTV candy factory churns out every month and then is done with when they've lost their flavor.

But Denis Leary didn't go away. He went on to star in films -- some underrated ("The Ref"), some just plain bad ("Operation Dumbo Drop," "Two If By Sea") -- perform voice work ("A Bug's Life"), and emcee stand-up comedy shows which end up airing on Comedy Central (like many before him, Leary found that the line between performance art and stand-up comedy is a thin one; cf. Henry Rollins). In other words, Denis Leary spent a few years noodling, taking odd jobs and showing up in some capacity in nearly 40 movies.

Now Denis Leary is back, even though he never went away. He has arrived with his labor of love, the midseason replacement series The Job which finished its first run on ABC in mid-April. I call it a labor of love because Leary is listed, not just as the star, but also as the co-creator, co-writer, and executive producer.

Denis Leary may just have found his vehicle -- finally. Assuming the show isn't cancelled already.

If it isn't cancelled, The Job is going to have to find a solid audience. And it might have trouble doing that. A quick synopsis will explain why: Leary plays Mike McNeil, a New York City detective who has a drinking problem, a smoking problem, a heart problem, a drug problem, a wife, a girlfriend, and who is hitting on his female co-worker. McNeil is not your most lovable, huggable character.

Which might be okay if this were a drama. And there is going to be confusion about that. What kind of show is The Job really? While watching the pilot, you might think: It's a half-hour, so it's a comedy. But there's no laugh track, so it's a drama. But it's funny as hell, so it's a comedy. But the main character is a boozing, pill-popping, adulterous cop on the edge, so it's a drama.

I smell confused audience. Perhaps I'm not giving TV viewers enough credit; but then, these are the same people who have failed to watch a lot of very good shows almost entirely because they were too confusing, from Police Squad! to SportsNight.

Heck, even I didn't quite catch on that the camera work is a shot-for-shot parody of NYPD Blue. A friend of mine had to point it out. After that, I had trouble not laughing for the entire half-hour, watching the camera do that little zoom-in-zoom-out-n-shake thing it always does when it's in front of Dennis Franz. But if I, TV sophisticate that I am, missed any of the humor in this series, what hope does the average peon have?

Both fortunately and unfortunately, as the half-season wore on, The Job came down more decidedly on the side of comedy. McNeil's drinking, smoking, pills and so forth began to wane in importance as the episodes progressed, being replaced by more sitcom-style plot developments and workplace humor. The edge dulled a little, but not much; by the last episode this was still a sharp, sharp show.

The pilot was, to my mind, one of the most realistic cop shows I've ever seen -- not that I've ever been an actual cop to know. But it deftly avoided many of the pitfalls of other cop shows like Blue by failing to make the job into some sort of holy calling, some sort of mythic home to Job-like characters moving through archetypal dramas. During the pilot, the cops are chasing a guy whose crime is unspecified, and when he is finally caught, it isn't by Our Hero, but happens off-screen. At the end of the episode, if we're quick, we learn what he did. At no point is catching this criminal made out to look like some holy crusade -- it's just, you know, the Job.

In the meantime, the humor is in the details. The fat cop who steals other cops' muffins. The lieutenant who can't remember the names of his two Hispanic detectives so he just calls them "Rice and Beans." The serious-looking gentlemen from Nintendo who have come to give a seminar in how to spot fake Pokémon cards, because, after all, the NYPD has so little else to keep it occupied.

Denis Leary is surrounded by a great supporting cast, too. Perennial black cop Bill Nunn ("Sister Act," "True Crime," "Save Me," "White Lie," "The Affair," "Extreme Measures," just to cover his time behind the badge) stretches his acting muscles as Pip, McNeil's black cop partner. Pip is everything McNeil isn't: He is upstanding, faithful to his wife, drug-free. He is also neurotic about his weight and his partner -- and envies McNeil a little bit, too. The word "foil" is sadly shaded with diminutive tones, but Nunn is Leary's perfect foil. You need someone like Nunn to state, "One of these days I'm gonna take your pills away," so someone like Leary can reply, "Those pills and a bottle of Bushmills are the only things stopping me from taking a hostage."

Diane Farr, late of MTV's Loveline, shows that she has skills other than holding down a couch -- she can act, too, and carry a Long Island accent like a buzzsaw. Her role involves a careful balance of love for McNeil, concern for him, and distaste for the way he runs his life. Farr nails it. And she's damned funny, too.

The other detectives rounding out the office all have impeccable comic timing coupled with a dramatic depth often missing from sitcoms assembled from off-the-shelf parts. This ain't "Hamlet" (not even "Mel Gibson's Hamlet") but it ain't Wings, either.

Like any good show, though, the real star is the writing. And the writing here is fantastic. Real, hilarious, serious, painful, everything -- these scripts are the real deal, solid work by true writers. And they've been given exceptional freedom by ABC -- no doubt feeling the Sopranos pressure -- to cuss and talk openly about sex, drugs, and racism, without a hint of moralizing. When a suspect accuses Pip and McNeil of racial profiling and McNeil delivers a rant on how on March 17th, when he's looking for someone disturbing the peace by beating up his cousin and throwing up green beer on the street, he won't be looking for Puerto Ricans -- that's more real than anything I've heard from one of the "good guys" on TV in a long, long while, and that includes Sipowicz's convenient on-again off-again racism.

In short, The Job is a great show. One of the best. With any amount of luck, it will be back in full force for the fall of 2001.

No, Denis Leary didn't go away. Instead, he brought us The Job. Let's hope he gets to stay for good this time.