July 2001 Archives

Television is a funny beast. If you were to take the typical networks' portrayal of moronic fathers as typical of real-life dads, you'd be amazed the human species continues to exist. Yet if some unenlightened producer created a TV mom half as bumbling and scatter-brained as most Hollywood pops, now would be screaming for his head on a pike before the first commercial break. As a result of this boob tube double standard, being a TV dad is easy. Feed set-up lines to your wise-ass kids, screw things up with your battleaxe of a wife and swoop in just before the final commercial with a couple of hackneyed words of wisdom.

Being a good TV dad, one actually worth watching, is a lot tougher. It's so tough that until recently, only animated television fathers were capable of carrying creative family comedies. We all love Ray Romano and Everybody Loves Raymond, but it's hardly a groundbreaking burst of originality. The only major difference between Romano's Ray Barone and Tim Allen's Home Improvement character is that Romano is actually funny.

Then along came a little show called Malcolm in the Middle and a fatherhood revolution was born. Even with an entire family of breakout characters, it's Bryan Cranston's Hal, the long suffering patriarch of the surname-deprived family, that consistently steals every scene he's in. For his rubber-faced portrayal that finally injected some life into the stagnant realm of TV dads, we bestow upon Cranston the TeeVee Award for Best Actor in a Half-Hour Show.

To be sure, Cranston's character is a TV dad like many other TV dads: bratty kids, domineering wife, complete lack of skill with power tools. But Hal, like every other member of the family, is the sitcom cliche multiplied to the nth degree. The result is a turbocharged vehicle for Cranston to showcase what just might be the most expressive mug on television. Make no mistake, we're not heaping praise on Cranston for the subtle nuances he brings to fatherhood, we're cheering for a performance so broad and over-the-top it's a miracle they don't have to shoot Malcolm on an aircraft carrier.

The best thing about Cranston is that he's not a former stand-up comedian. As a result, Hal is the exact opposite of the Tim Tayloresque, wise-cracking sarcasm machine. He's so earnest it's painful. Whether it's the stark terror of facing hundreds of bats he accidentally released into the house or the unadulterated thrill of quitting his job to pursue painting, Hal never jumps off his emotional roller-coaster. He's the Buddha of bipolar, the Prozac poster boy.

As a result, many of Cranston's funniest moments are the ones where he doesn't say a word. His performance in the bowling episode where Hal is within reach of a 300-game before having it torn from his grasp on the last frame is a monument to body language and the entire spectrum of human facial expression.

Nobody else on television does world-weary like Bryan Cranston: he hates his job with a passion, he forgets his wife's birthday, he tries to fix the roof despite a paralyzing fear of heights, his son Reese is a blockheaded bully who poisons his cooking class in order to win first prize in a souffle contest. Every day seems like it's the end of the world for Hal, which make his little triumphs just that much sweeter. And no one else in recent TV history has turned sneaking a cigar, discovering a hidden toilet or painting abstract art into as joyous an occasion as Cranston does every week.

We here at TeeVee are a cynical bunch. Before Malcolm, it's not likely any television father would have even been nominated for Best Actor, let alone walked away with a first-ballot slam dunk. It's no small feat, then, for Bryan Cranston to convince us of the joys of family TV. We can only hope Hal's tortured existence continues to plague him for years.

Additional contributions to this article by: Gregg Wrenn.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. We're not sure which gray-haired sage came up with that particular hoary chestnut, but whoever it was probably had a pretty good idea about what your TeeVee pals do for a living. Each fall, you probably turn on the TV and groan at the sight of Geena Davis slumming it on the small screen or Michael Richards proving that Kramer without Jerry, George and Elaine is just some big doofus who falls down a lot. You see NBC's latest offering in the 8:30-p.m.-on-Thursdays time slot -- the Widowmaker of modern prime time scheduling -- and have to suppress your gag reflex. You catch a glimpse of Becker or Norm or 3rd Rock from the Sun without benefit of protective safety goggles, and you spend the rest of the evening clawing at your eye sockets and begging to God for a merciful death.

Us? We see the shit that passes for sitcoms these days and become positively giddy. Because we know that fishing season is on, we've got our rifles loaded and aimed, and somebody's just pried open the barrel.

Don't get us wrong -- heaping accolades upon praiseworthy shows is life-affirming and all. But raising aloft the arm of Futurama, giving a respectful nod in the direction of The Simpsons, laying an encouraging slap on the back of Malcolm in the Middle -- they just don't give us the same visceral thrill as watching some labored star-driven car wreck with a script from the bargain bin at Hacks 'R Us and the unmistakable stench of failure, unsheathing the long knives, and carving up the carcass before the body even cools. There's something unmistakably gratifying about loosing your venom on unfettered hackery, and the recent half-hour offerings from the major broadcast networks have given us plenty of opportunity to feel gratified.

It's almost like waking up Christmas morning and coming downstairs to a roomful of presents. Presents that are broken or require some assembly or don't fit quite right or make you break out in hives -- but presents, nevertheless.

But lately, the networks have been piling on the slop rather thickly, even for connoisseurs of crap such as ourselves. Too much of a good thing -- or a bad thing, in our case. We're also not sure which gray-haired sage thought up that turn of phrase. But it's a pretty good bet he or she was watching a lot of half-hour sitcoms during the 2000-01 TV season.

And that's a thorny problem if you ever find yourself assigned to the monumental task of picking out the Worst Half-Hour Show of the year. It should be a breeze -- thumb through a couple of back issues of TV Guide, pick the real clunkers from the prime time schedule and set phasers on eviscerate. In 15 minutes -- 20 if you're thorough and need to consult a thesaurus so that you don't wind up using the word "awful" in every paragraph -- you'll have a finished article and it's back to playing solitaire or hanging out in chat rooms or whatever it is you do when you're not tearing Tucker a new poop-chute.

Which is exactly what we started to do -- just compile a list of the worst 30-minute programs that TV had to offer this season. And when we were done, we had a list roughly the size of the Greater Baltimore yellow pages.

When all is said and done, the 2000-01 season could very well go down as the gurgling death rattle of the television sitcom. Situation comedies have been limping along for years, but this season in particular stands out as a beacon of banality on the shores of sameness. Try as we might, we can barely distinguish between the sitcoms that populate the airwaves. It's as if they came from the same malformed cookie-cutter, spouting the same insipid dialogue churned out by the same creatively bankrupt Harvard Lampoon alumns. It leads us to suspect that perhaps, as a cost-saving measure, there only is one sitcom. Same plot, same jokes, same unsatisfying denouement. They only change the casting to throw us off the scent.

What it'll be tonight, honey? Upscale Twentysomethings Sitcom on NBC? Obnoxious Twentysomethings Sitcom on Fox? Fish-Out-of-Water Twentysomethings Sitcom on CBS? Or, just for variety's sake, that new Bickering, Mismatched Twentysomethings Sitcom on ABC? Don't put too much thought into it -- it's all the same flavorless mush.

Which, again, is great if you're trying to lend some sort of historical perspective to the season just concluded. But we've got to pick the worst of the worst, the one ugly dog that stands out from all the other mutts and mongrels. Faced with a similar choice, even someone as wise as Solomon would have thrown himself upon the most jagged of rocks rather than render a verdict -- especially if he had to watch Bette and Welcome to New York back-to-back.

It's sort of like being the first paramedic on the scene of an accident, only to find that the entire population of Medford, Oregon has been felled by a nuclear blast. You're forced to confront some horrible, haunting questions -- How do you separate the living from the dead? What attention do you give the walking wounded versus the critically injured? Just how in the name of a merciful God did Yes, Dear live to see a second season? -- questions that make even the steeliest among us wake up at night in a cold, trembling sweat.

Who, then, to damn as the worst show of 2000-01?

Shall we loose our venom on those wretched star-driven sitcoms that infested the prime time schedule last fall like polyps in a cancer patient's colon? Michael Richards, Geena Davis, Bette Milder, David Alan Grier, Christine Baranski, Steven Weber, Gabriel Bryne and John Goodman all headlined sitcoms whose only justification for existence was the fame and public acclaim enjoyed by their titular stars. Not surprisingly, all eight shows went straight off the cliff -- with the efforts of Davis, Richards and Goodman bursting into particularly fiery explosions before crashing into terra firma.

Yes, any one of these shows -- and we choose not to repeat their names for fear that it will summon their ghosts -- would be a worthy candidate for Worst Half-Hour Show of the Year. Then again, since all eight have been unceremoniously canceled, whatever damage they did will be confined to the poor unfortunates who tuned in last fall. Future generations will be spared the sight of John Goodman as a mordantly obese gay man showing us all the lighter side of homophobia.

Then, there's Tucker, a big ball of suck that saw shamelessly aping Malcolm in the Middle as its formula for success. "People sure do love that smart-alecky Malcolm," Tucker's producers doubtlessly said to themselves. "Imagine how much they'll love Tucker when we make him ten times as smart alecky."

It's thinking like this, incidentally, which is why it's good that some people wind up programming TV shows as opposed to, say, crafting foreign policy.

Yes, Tucker had everything that Malcolm brought to the table last year -- with the notable exceptions of pacing, charm and wit. For being crass and derivative, it more than deserves the distinction of the Worst Half-Hour Show of the Year. Then again, NBC canceled the show in less than a month -- a humanitarian gesture so great that the network nearly captured this year's Nobel Peace Prize. That is, until the Nobel committee realized that NBC was also responsible for The Steven Weber Show, at which time Garth Ancier was hauled before the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

He hasn't been seen since.

If only the same could be said of Yes, Dear, a sitcom that took the unconventional approach of not actually being funny. It paired Anthony Clarke with Mike O'Malley, who knows from bad sitcoms, and Jean Louisa Kelly, who once starred in a shampoo commercial.

Frankly, we long for the days when she was telling us about dry, itchy scalps.

Yes, Dear is tedium incarnate, a one-show recycling program for every tired parenting and mismatched buddy joke of the last millennium. That it will live to dull audiences into a slack-jawed stupor for a second season is testimony to the strength of two stellar shows it's wedged between, King of Queens and Everybody Loves Raymond. It's also proof that the lessons taught by Warren Littlefield -- if you serve 'em superior bread, they won't notice the shit in the middle of the sandwich -- have been well-learned by Les Moonves.

Still, Yes, Dear can't be the Worst Half-Hour Show of 2000-01. So long as Becker draws breath, it's not even the worst show on CBS's Monday night lineup.

Contractual obligations require us to mention the WB's failed sketch comedy show Hype. You probably didn't see it. You really shouldn't want to.

3rd Rock, Norm, and the what-in-the-name-of-Christ-is-this-still-doing-on-the-air Two Guys and a Girl always merit consideration in any of Worst Of... category. But this was the year the axe finally fell on all three shows. And frankly, that merits thanks, not condemnation.

Friends merits nothing. The one-time jewel of NBC's sitcom crown, the show has played every possible card in its hand, resorting to such blatant cries for help as stunt casting, sweeps month weddings and -- that most desperate of plot line contrivances -- a surprise pregnancy. The only reason to tune in to Friends now is if you're a scientist charting the precipitous decline in the cast's weight as part of your research on wasting diseases.

Well, that, and the hilarious antics of Joey.

There you have it -- the contenders for our Worst Half-Hour Show dishonors. You try to pick out the worst show from that pack. Chances are you'll wind up like us -- bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed with a pounding headache and a dull throb where your heart used to beat.

And we haven't even mentioned Arli$$.

How in the hell did this happen? In the world of television, sitcoms used be where the all the creative action was at. Catch a Cheers rerun. Pop an old Seinfeld tape into the VCR. Tune into A&E and watch NewsRadio. Even if you can recite the episode line by line, you'll still probably enjoy a chuckle or two. Your sides will hurt from laughter, not retching. You'll notice this strange thing forming across your face -- scientists tell us it's called a smile.

We experience none of that watching the live-action sitcoms of today. In addition to sharing the same premises, plot lines, and jokes, they also share an equal amount of dreadfulness.

We've looked far and wide to find a culprit, someone or something responsible for driving a stake into the heart of the live-action sitcom format. And we keep coming back to three simple letters -- N-B-C.

Think about it. All the troubles in all the shows listed above can be traced in some way to the doings of the Peacock network. You want to talk about bland sameness? The three powerhouse shows that make up NBC's Thursday night Must-See lineup -- Friends, Will & Grace and Just Shoot Me -- feature the same interchangeable premise: a group of beautiful young professionals who are hornier than a troop ship after three months at sea experience life and love in New York City. Really, we have no other way of distinguishing between the three shows except that one has a flamboyant gay supporting character. We think it's David Spade.

Bugged by lifeless, laughless star vehicles? NBC's responsible for three of them this season, including the runt of the litter, The Michael Richards Show. And this coming fall, it's building an entire sitcom around celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse for the sole reason that he's more recognizable than, say, the kid who served you an Egg McMuffin this morning.

Hate knockoffs with the fire of a thousand burning suns? Arguably, the most successful show on NBC, both in terms of ratings and creative achievement, is Frasier -- basically a spin-off of Cheers, After-M*A*S*H* with better writing. Then there's that whole Tucker atrocity NBC has to account for.

And -- just to put the sour icing on the rancid cake -- NBC pioneered the innovative good show-bad show-good show programming formula that will allow Yes, Dear to torment audiences well into 2002.

Add it all up, and it's an impressive record of achievement for the boys from Burbank, a trail of human misery and woe that the judges just simply couldn't overlook. For lifetime achievement in churning out one bad half-hour of programming after another, NBC takes the Worst Half-Hour prize this season. So Warren Littlefield and Garth Ancier -- from your remote mountain exiles, we salute you and offer you this dented trophy, this withered laurel and this lukewarm handshake. Thank you for all you've done for the once-proud tradition of the sitcom, for kicking comedy when it was down and for inspiring future generations to flee to animated series and cable for anything resembling entertainment.

May you never darken our TVs with this embarrassment of Bad Sitcom riches ever again.

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.

Owing to publications such as InStyle and Us, television actresses now have to double as models and all-around embodiments of Hollywood Glamour. This explains why half-hour stalwarts such as Debra Messing, Jennifer Aniston and Jenna Elfman are now better-known for their couture than their comedy; these are women who have become marketable brands, and their participation on their respective shows reflects that.

As a result, the half-hour actress field has thinned considerably -- and we're not just talking dress size. For a while, we were bandying about characters on animated shows; one of the wonderful things about being Daria Morgendorfer or Peggy Hill is that you're never held accountable for what you wore to the Emmys, and thus you can concentrate on being a funny, well-rounded, evolving character.

But, lucky for us, there are still live-action actresses who blow all others out of the water. We have a fond place in our hearts for Debra Jo Rupp and Laura Prepon on That '70s Show, but it's their Fox cohort Jane Kaczmarek who takes home the award as Best Half-Hour Actress for an unprecedented second time.

Kaczmarek wins in part because we really do worry that she'll hunt us all down and hurt us if she doesn't, but also because she added depth to Lois's character this year.

"How?" you're asking. "How can a character who spends most of her time dispensing casual cruelty at the top of her lungs actually grow as a character?"

Because she let us see how people handle dreams deferred. Sure, Lorraine Hansberry can write about it all poignant-like in Raisin in the Sun, but Kaczmarek made it funny. The season finale was a showcase for Kaczmarek; over the course of 22 minutes, she showed how much Lois changed in response to her growing role as a mother, and how much of herself she kept hanging on to.

This was the capstone to a season where the writers kept alluding to who Lois used to be: on her birthday, she fumed about all the things she could have done if she didn't have kids; when her parents visited, we see what kind of warped people were responsible for bringing her into the world; when her coworker Craig declared his moist and undying love for her, she looked at him for a moment with empathy, then ruthlessly destroyed his dreams.

But good writing only goes so far; it takes Kaczmarek -- whose delightful expressions and bravura delivery broadcast everything Lois is -- to breathe life into the role. So she wins again, for giving a performance that's more beautiful than any we're likely to see on the red carpet.

Additional contributions to this article by: Lisa Schmeiser.

At TeeVee, we like to prove that we're freakishly proficient television watchers by giving acting awards to actors you might not have considered twice. We argue for craftmanship that enhances a plot, acting talent that breathes life into implausible characters, or performances that leave us addicted to an otherwise average show.

We don't give the nods to the usual suspect. Heck, last year's winner, Martin Starr had to endure an entire essay wherein the writer kept assuring audiences that yes, we meant the kid on Freaks and Geeks, not the guy playing the President over on The West Wing.

So you might expect this year's Best Actor award to go to someone in a show that hasn't quite taken America by storm. For example: Ed is a wonderful little show, but it's no West Wing or Sopranos in terms of buzz. If someone was opening a pool on how we'd vote, the odds would be favorable for crowning Tom Cavanagh with the Best Actor honorific. Martin Starr was even on Ed this year -- surely that has to mean something in our quirky, elitist little voting system.

Except it really doesn't. And while Tom Cavanagh's name was bandied about early in the nomination process -- much the same way Bill Bradley enjoyed a brief flirtation as a presidential candidate -- he dropped out of the race quickly. His co-star, The State alumnus Michael Ian Black almost won for his portrayal of bowling-employee-cum-Dadaist-entrepreneur Phil Stubbs.

Black played Phil as the secular equivalent of a fast-talking circuit preacher, drowning would-be marks in a fusillade of oratory that made no sense if you actually tried to listen to the words. Phil Stubbs was all about fine Corinthian turkeys and the Tao of bowling, and it took Black's fine absurdist timing to make it believable.

But in the end, Black got beaten. And -- in a shocking deviation from a group that has a thing for doomed causes among its Best Actor awards, not to mention that it's a group that contains several cheap bastards who won't pay for HBO -- we gave the awards to a Sopranos cast member. Ostensibly, this would be our equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

Except we didn't give the award to James Gandolfini. Don't get us wrong -- Gandolfini gives a fine, fine, super-fine performance as the middle-managing Mafia don; he is the living metaphor for all the themes of familial conflict and class warfare that play out across each season of The Sopranos. Jimmy G put in his usual good work, but our eyes were elsewhere this season.

They were on Ralphie Cifaretto's appallingly bad hair. Ralphie, who is the walking, talking embodiment of a migraine headache, has hair from eighties -- long in the front, orange and overprocessed. It's goofball hair. But the face that peers out beneath it -- Joe Pantoliano's mug -- radiates evil.

The genius behind Pantoliano's portrayal of Ralphie lays not in flamboyant, cape-swirling, moustache-twirling evil, but in how quickly he switches between seeming ordinariness and sheer sociopathy. Pantoliano gave a full-bodied performance of someone who is incapable of thinking about anyone else; in the episode after he arranges to have his fiancee Rosalie's son hit, he grumbles that he's going to go spend the night at his goomah's house because Rosalie's grief is annoying him.

Ralphie understands cause and effect only as they apply to him, and we know that he knows that because Pantoliano shows us how Ralphie thinks -- the careful aversion of his gaze when Tony looks at him too long, the sudden fury that twists his features when he perceives himself getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop, the careful mask he assembles when he's placating his fiancee or chatting over dinner at the Sopranos' place.

Pantoliano's careful characterization of Ralphie -- his portrayal of someone who embodies Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" -- will probably be overshadowed by the one episode in which he beat his pregnant stripper girlfriend to death. It's a pity, because that one episode was only a flashpoint, a warning that this is a character whose mind works best when it's skittering quietly through the dank places other, better psyches rarely go. For showing us the way ordinary evil works, Joe Pantoliano takes the prize.

Additional contributions to this article by: Lisa Schmeiser.

OK, we admit it, we've got a thing for Sarah Michelle Gellar. Unfortunately, now she's playing hard to get and wearing a ring from Freddie Prinze, Jr. This despite the fact we had already reserved the Tri-County Elks Lodge for the ceremony -- the Bull Moose Room, no less. We even booked Chip Hastings and the Hep Cats to play the reception, and you know how difficult it is to get the Hep Cats for a June wedding.

Despite our broken hearts, we here at TeeVee are responsible reporters, literally brimming over with journalistic integrity. And booze. Therefore, we have cast aside our one true hope of domestic bliss and do hereby confer upon Sarah Michelle Gellar the title of Best Actress in an Hour Series for the 2000-2001 television season.

Truth be told, it's not like Gellar had wheelbarrows full of competition. Former winner Allison Janney is still drawing breath over on The West Wing. Unfortunately, this season Janney has had to deal with the mushroom-induced paroxysms of stupidity foisted upon her by creator Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin, who manages to write a few West Wing scripts in between smuggling hallucinogens through airports, shafting co-workers out of credit, attacking unsuspecting fans on the Internet, building a rocket ship out of popsicle sticks and protecting himself from germs and mind rays, has turned Janney's C.J. character into a mere shell of her former self. It doesn't matter how good the actress is if the words coming out of her mouth were written by chimps. Suddenly Susan starring Dame Judi Dench is just a crappy sitcom with a nice accent.

Gellar's toughest foe was one of the Gilmore Girls, Alexis Bledel. Her portrayal of a high school girl dealing with her not-much-more-mature mother and rebelling by actually getting along with her upper crust grandparents was that rarest of television performances: a teenager you didn't wish dead by the first commercial.

As for our winner, Gellar is no stranger to the TeeVee Awards. She has already picked up a trophy for her portrayal of the title role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and has been such a solid performer throughout the life of the series that she could have easily taken home the trophy every year of the show's five-year run. This year, however, was something special. While debate continues to rage around TeeVee World Headquarters about the quality of Buffy as a whole this season, there was never a doubt about Gellar's work.

Buffy's sudden emergence as big sister to troubled sibling Dawn gave Gellar a perfect opportunity to showcase a deeper side to the Slayer. The actress pulled viewers in with a string of performances that convinced us the toughest girl in the world was just as vulnerable as the rest of us. Buffy's boyfriend left her, her mom had a brain tumor, her mortal enemy had a crush on her and her sister was a vessel of pure energy being hunted by a full-fledged, if incredibly incompetent, god. You know, all the typical college sophomore issues.

Then came "The Body." The fact that this episode was not nominated for any Emmy awards is all the proof you need that the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is comprised of a half-dozen drooling, comatose octogenarians. In what may be the best single hour of network drama in the past five years, Buffy returned home to find her mother dead from a brain aneurysm. Gellar's performance was positively searing, especially the opening ten minutes when the Slayer finds her mom splayed out on the couch. Buffy aged twenty years before the hour was over and Gellar pulled off a minor miracle in turning her snappy but weary twentysomething into a crushed soul.

"The Body" was the springboard to a new Buffy, one who now had to be a twenty-year old mother while still going through the yearly ritual of saving the world from Armageddon. Gellar attacked the new Slayer, taking advantage of every opportunity to push her dual role farther with each episode. In the hands of a lesser actress, Buffy's death in the season finale could have been a hackneyed farewell straight out of a Hallmark card. Sarah Michelle Gellar, on the other hand, had convinced viewers that not only did Buffy need to sacrifice herself, it was something of a relief as well.

We have no doubt that even with Buffy dead, Gellar will have no trouble contending for Best Actress honors in the future. As long as Buffy creator Joss Whedon can figure out a way to keep the Slayer in the show -- maybe the Scooby Gang can ask Miss Cleo for help with keeping in touch -- Sarah Michelle Gellar will continue to show the actors on so-called "serious dramas" what it means to be an actress.

Additional contributions to this article by: Gregg Wrenn.

Your TeeVee pals are old, decaying fogies. Most of us are on the unhappy side of 30, and those who aren't will be watching the numbers on the ol' odometer speed past 29 in short order. Any physical exertion that entails more than going to the icebox and getting another beer leaves us sore for more than a week. Parts of us are breaking and spraining with alarming frequency. We find ourselves complaining about "those damned kids and their crazy music" on an almost daily basis.

Hope I die before I get old... Roger Daltrey once sang that. And the fact that The Who are still out there performing "Talking 'Bout My Generation" at the cumulative age of 1,086 years just serves as proof that God does not take requests.

But the truly unsettling thing about getting on in years -- more alarming than the gray hairs and the wrinkles and the shattered hips -- is the fact that we have crystal-clear memories of a world that no longer exists. We can vividly recall a time when if you wanted music, you got it in vinyl form, when National League and American League teams only played each other in October, when 64K was RAM enough for us and 128K -- well, that was simply decadent.

But most of all, we remember a world without cable TV.

Yes, children -- we did not always have 60-plus channels of programming to choose from. Once upon a time, when monstrous thunder lizards roamed the planet and Jimmy Carter was elected head of our tribe, we could get only 5, maybe 6 channels -- and that was if Dad made Uncle Fred go stand out on the patio wearing a tin foil hat. You wanted high-quality dramas and laugh-out-loud sitcoms? You had three networks to pick from. Other than that, your choices ran the gamut from PBS to maybe an edited Clint Eastwood movie on one of the local channels to whatever rerun the UHF outlet had lined up that night.

We remember when cable made its triumphant debut on the scene, ushering in the promise of round-the-clock Mayberry R.F.D reruns and all-access coverage of America's Team, your Atlanta Braves. We yawned, we admit it. Because if you've seen George "Goober" Lindsey's antics, you've seen them enough, superstation or no.

Cable eventually began beefing up its offerings -- restored classic movies, baseball games featuring franchises other than those owned by Ted Turner, the tasteful, not-at-all gratuitous nudity of Cinemax. But if you wanted high-quality original programming, and not something that looked like it was shot on super-8 in some would-be Fellini's garage, you were pretty much stuck scouring the three networks. Cable TV need not apply.

That started changing as the 1980s began fading in the rear view mirror. Suddenly, cable TV began to shrug its shoulders, roll its eyes and shoot everyone a "Why the hell not?" kind of look. A laugh track-free comedy about an unlikable late night talk show host? Run that sucker. A show about a guy who watches really terrible movies with a pair of wisecracking puppets? Well... we gotta stick something in between the Saturday Night Live reruns. Cable channels seemed to come to the delirious conclusion that not that many people were watching; those hardy souls brave enough to tune in at least deserved to have something worth watching.

While cable was taking chances, the networks were playing it safe, churning out third-generation copies of shows that weren't all that original in the first place. After several dozen Seinfeld knockoffs and a slew of interchangeable workplace dramas (he's a cop/lawyer/cop-lawyer who doesn't play by the rules -- this week on Bochco! The Series), we find ABC, CBS and NBC in their current sorry state. Tired and wheezing as an asthmatic forced to sprint up twelve flights of stairs, the networks find themselves plumb out of ideas and coasting on inertia. Cable TV, on the other hand -- that's the place to be.

It's been that way for several years, of course, and we can't pretend that it's a development we're entirely happy about. The best shows on TV are on channels we have to pay to watch? It sounds like something out of a horrible communist dystopia, a sinister world where your viewing choices are at the mercy of some faceless cable monolith that's decided no, you don't really need Turner Classic Movies or the Food Network... but three different home shopping channels? Sign 'em up for that, Clem.

Still, if it gives us something to watch other than The Weber Show, then horrible dystopias and faceless cable monoliths it is.

Ah, cable -- sweet, delicious, chocolatey cable. Never before have we felt so warmly toward those wires snaking their way through our wall than this year when it came time to hand out our annual TeeVee Awards. Scanning the dial for the best TV had to offer, we found ourselves gravitating toward the channels far away from the stultifying world of network TV. Just a quick scan of a partial list of our favorite shows -- The Sopranos, Good Eats, Junkyard Wars, Daria, ESPN's SportsCentury series -- and you'll find yourself watching cable, cable and more of the same.

And that just burns the collective asses of the folks who head the major broadcast networks. Robert Wright, the president of NBC, was so incensed that cable was getting all the critical laurels while his channel was left with the raspberries that he wrote a letter decrying the treacherous tactics of those sneaks at HBO. Well, of course, The Sopranos is a critical darling, Wright cried -- it gets to use violence and nudity and foul language. The most obscene thing NBC can get away with is giving Michael Richards his own show.

Which misses the point entirely. The Sopranos is an eminently watchable program because it takes risks and defies conventions -- something an NBC executive wouldn't do for a closet full of Armani. NBC is the network home of a never-ending army of Friends clones, tape-delayed Olympics telecasts and The Weakest Link -- a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire carbon copy that arrived on the scene only a year after the game show craze peaked.

Compare that to what cable's been doing. The cable shows we like are successful because they offer us something different, 30 to 60 minutes of programming we won't find elsewhere instead of another evening of the same ol' same old.

After all, can you imagine a show like Junkyard Wars -- in essence a game show where contestants have to draw on their knowledge of physics and basic engineering to cobble together a contraption out of refuse and scrap metal -- ever appearing on NBC? Maybe if there was less physics and engineering. And if the contestants all were pretty. And if, instead of building things, they just spent the entire show talking about sex. Then you'd have something.

Ah, but Bob Wright shouldn't feel too badly. When it came time to find the worst TV shows, the foulest performances, and the most awful ideas that TV had to offer, the networks came through like champions. And NBC had more than its share of mutts to enter into this particular dog show.

This wasn't the worst TV season in a good, long while -- that honor goes to the 1998-99 class, which made us question the existence of a loving God (as would you if you had to watch Bo Derek act). But 2000-01 yielded a bumper crop of crap, a cornucopia of tired premises, wooden acting and woeful shows.

How bad was the worst of this season? Maybe you remember Big Brother, the CBS reality show that redefined tedium. Taking 10 of the most boring, least worthwhile human beings that could be found in the English-speaking world, sticking them in a house and flicking on the camera, Big Brother was a soul-crushing exercise in tedium. If this is the future of TV -- and the fact that there's now a Big Brother 2 suggests that it is -- then best just to pull the plug and move on to another medium.

And yet, as bad as Big Brother was, it didn't win any of our "Worst Of" awards. Not even a sniff. Then again, in a season that gave us a surplus of star-driven sitcoms, an overdose of quirky David E. Kelley plots and Tony Danza, that isn't hard to figure.

Of the twoscore or so shows that debuted this past season, we can only think of four -- Ed, Gilmore Girls, CSI, and The Job -- that deserve your full and complete attention. Most of the freshman shows were snuffed out within weeks of their premieres. At this point, lolling about in the midsummer sun, we would be hard-pressed to name hardly any of the clunkers that appeared with great fanfare last fall only to vanish without a trace before the Thanksgiving turkey was in the oven.

Our psychiatrist says it's better that we don't try and remember, anyway.

That's not to say the entire season was a loss. There's all that great cable programming we mentioned. And even the networks pitched in with some stellar shows -- Futurama, Malcolm in the Middle and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are all programs that represent network TV at the top of its game.

But look where you'll find those shows -- not on any of the Big Three networks, but on the upstart Fox and WB. And with "Buffy" changing networks next season, that means one of the best shows on television will now be on -- gulp -- UPN, whose only claims to fame up until now have been professional wrestling, Seven of Nine, and the late, lamented Homeboys in Outer Space.

And that's where we stand as the last dying ember of the 2000-01 season burns away. The traditional powerhouse networks are relying on a steady diet of reality shows and retreads to keep from hemorrhaging more viewers. The cable channels, despite their small audiences, are sitting in the catbird seat. And UPN boasts one of the higher-quality programs on the ol' boob tube.

It's crazy. It's backward. It's nothing we could have imagined back in the days of 5 channels and a lot of static.

And that just makes us feel really, really old.

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.