Here’s to the Death of Broadcast

When ER goes off the air April 2, we will say goodbye to more than the medical staffers who have lived, loved and been tragically killed off for sweeps over the years. We will also say goodbye to the era of broadcast TV it represented: the era of big shows, big audiences and big money.

In 1994, when ER debuted, NBC, CBS and ABC ruled TV. The fourth network, Fox, had no top-20 shows. Cable was flourishing but was hardly a threat. Only a handful of dorks (like me) were using “graphical user interfaces” like Netscape to look at something called the World Wide Web. (See pictures of ER‘s long goodbye.)

Fifteen years later, the networks are, as the TV docs say, crashing. In the 1994-95 season, 43% of U.S. households, on average, watched the Big Four at a given moment in prime time. Now it’s 27%.

With more viewers drifting to cable and going online, the formerly mass networks are losing money and cultural clout. Next fall NBC will give Jay Leno five hours of prime time a week because he’s cheaper than producing Medium. Programmers and cultural critics are warning of the end of the mass-media era, when shows from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld joined tens of millions of Americans in a common experience.

I say they’re right. And I say hooray.

The decline of the networks is of course a bad thing. For the networks. But for me as a critic and you as a viewer, the important question is, Are there better shows on TV or not? The answer is — and has been for years — yes. More important, the answer is yes for precisely the same reasons that the big broadcast networks are fading. (There’s also more bad TV on the air because there’s more of everything. Unless it bothers you that other people are watching bad TV, this is also not your problem.)

The most obvious reason the small-TV era has made television better is the rise of cable. Even as Fox finds new hours on the clock to air American Idol, brilliant comedies and (especially) dramas on cable are flourishing — Breaking Bad, United States of Tara, In Treatment, Rescue Me and The Colbert Report, just for starters.

These shows are wonderful and ambitious not just because they can get away with sex and swearing (though it helps). They are able to aim high, and thrive, precisely because the economics of cable allow them to succeed with smaller audiences that want to be challenged. FX’s Emmy-winning thriller Damages never would have made it on broadcast because of its byzantine twists and turns; it would have to be simplified, Law & Order -ized. Ditto HBO’s and Showtime’s hits: an audience intensely interested enough to pay to watch TV will reward risk, not caution.

As networks cut costs, they’re less likely to make the next West Wing (or Knight Rider). But smaller shows survive that once wouldn’t have lasted a season. Take NBC’s finely detailed small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which draws as few as 4 million viewers a week. It was able to air a third season this year because NBC signed a cost-sharing deal with DirecTV — one of the very satellite providers that have helped atomize the audience.

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Broadcast’s new enemy is digital media, including venues like Hulu that were created by the networks themselves, which cut into their ad dollars. Last year Heroes creator Tim Kring gave a legendary rant about how viewers using TiVo or DVDs or downloading — legally or not — cut into the show’s audience, leaving “the saps and dips____ who can’t figure out how to watch it in a superior way” to watch live TV (which still counts most for ad dollars). In one sense he was right, if undiplomatic. But only half right, because technology also makes it possible for Heroes to exist at all. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Before the Internet boom, elaborate mysteries like Heroes and Lost were rare and short-lived (think Twin Peaks). The reason: they ask a lot of you. You have to be attentive to tiny details. If you miss an episode, you’re off the train. Now when fans can rewind and rewatch and discuss endlessly in blogs and chat rooms, these shows can be more challenging, sprawling and complex. And Internet buzz is crucial to their success. The Web taketh from Heroes, no question, but it also giveth considerably.

Purists may say that in an era of niche hits, we are losing our cultural lingua franca, our national watercooler. In the New York Times, SUNY Buffalo American-studies professor Elayne Rapping wrote that the fracturing of TV has created a “craving for the culture that used to unify us as a nation.” But really the watercooler has just moved. Online, fans can bond with thousands of like-minded viewers rather than just a few co-workers. We don’t all sit en masse for Must-See TV, but cultural moments — from late-night TV to the news to American Idol — are disseminated widely through YouTube and cable.

Our truly mass experiences — Olympics, elections, the Super Bowl — still play out on TV, even if “TV” now includes computers and phones. As for the loss of being able to make small talk with the mailman over who shot J.R. — I’ll trade it for Mad Men and the ability to skip ads with TiVo. We’ll find something else to talk about. (See the best and worst Super Bowl commercials of 2009.)

See, the irony of the nostalgia for TV’s “golden age” is that it romanticizes the very things people used to condemn. Mass media were once homogenizing; now we miss how they unified us. Culture critics once said TV appealed to the lowest common denominator; now cable’s ambitious niche shows cater to élitists. Some even romanticize commercials — commercials! — as making TV for the masses possible.

No doubt, TV is changing, and fast. Free TV will become more cut-rate; quality will cost, as movies and books do. There will be more rarefied TV and more craptastic dreck. There will be less middle-of-the-road TV for everybody but more venues for telling stories that don’t have to please 30 million people. The old networks (and the people who make shows for them) will struggle to make a buck, but new outlets will rise and thrive. ER will pass, but hospital dramas have birth stories as well as death stories. Broadcast TV may be flatlining. But its offspring are doing just fine.

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