The regular broadcast season has ended and the summer shows are in full swing, so this is probably a decent time to reflect a little on the last nine months.
Generally, I was quite pleased. A few shows I wasn’t even really expecting anything out of (e.g., Modern Family, Justified) turned out to be among my favorites. I have mixed feelings about the final season of Lost, but I still love the show overall. I never got into FlashForward or V.
Mostly, this past season drove home again the critical role of good writing.
It’s not terribly original to note that television really is a writer’s medium, as opposed to film. I’d go further and argue that good acting is important and a production budget can affect quality, but great writing can cover for those deficiencies, while the opposite is not true.
Much as I love Chuck, I finally grew weary of the way that show would tread the same ground over and over and then suddenly burst forward with dramatic change. The dialogue was too often “on the nose,” with the word “spy” appearing so often in the scripts that it would have made for a deadly drinking game. (Castle also got terribly slack, with the possible exception of the two-part episode about a serial killer stalking Detective Beckett.)
In comparison, look at The Good Wife or Lost, which generally trusted their viewers to get things without being beaten over the head.
In the past, I’ve written about the challenges of writing a show with a big mythological arc, and Fringe got even better this year at telling individual episodes that also feed into the larger narrative. For example, they did a quasi-musical noir pastiche (“Brown Betty”) that would normally have felt totally separate from the regular episodes (and a bit of filler, to boot). But instead, it illuminated Walter Bishop’s sense of guilt and gave a glimpse of potential reconciliation.
Television writing is at its best when the producers have a clear vision of what the show is supposed to be. Glee was quite inconsistent, ranging from smarmy and soapy to subtle and inventive. At the same time, while the writing on The Big Bang Theory is consistently funny, even though I wish the show were more ambitious.
I hope that’s what we can see more of next season: shows that are more ambitious, that trust their viewers more, that aren’t afraid to switch things up. There’s a difference between television that entertains and that which just kills time.