Penguin on the Telly

“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” – Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

In the world of television appreciation, there exist a few seemingly magical terms which, when uttered, will almost always yield a passionate outcry, complete with hand gesturing, raised voices, and the occasional shedding of tears.  Included among these extraordinary words are “Firefly,” “Arrested Development,” and “Freaks and Geeks.”  Each of these represents a show that was fervently beloved by its fans, including even some of the most cynical of professional bloggers, but cruelly cut down by networks due to a lack of ratings success.  These shows have since achieved the status of legends, spoken of alternatively in hushed, reverent tones and impassioned speeches by those who loved them best.  It is almost impossible to have a conversation that includes the words “brilliant, but cancelled” and not have at least one of these come up.  Some dark days, we the television cognoscenti swear to never love a niche show again, so we might never feel the same pain of its loss.  In our more optimistic moods, we thank the television gods that we got to know them at all, and recognize that they will always live on in our hearts and our DVD collections. 

These shows have come to emblematize a seemingly eternal story in television: a cutting-edge show comes along which yields brilliant writing and unforgettable characters, but it fails to strike a chord with the general public because of its niche nature, often because its concept is too specific or humor too nuanced.  The networks can’t justify keeping a show that doesn’t bring in advertisers, so they cut it after one or two seasons, leaving the fans bitter and regretful.  They turn these fallen soldiers into heroes and enshrine them in a pantheon of shows just too good for the public to understand.  Moreover, they spend time speculating about the kind of marvelous wonders subsequent seasons would have brought with them had the public been smart enough to embrace them as their fans had. 

There’s just one problem with the assumption that had the public accepted these shows, we would have been treated to years of brilliant material: the evidence doesn’t support it.  We have a reasonable sample size to examine, since quite a few former cult shows have been lucky enough to take off in their second or third season and gain enough mainstream success to stay on the air for five or more seasons.  Unfortunately, almost all of these shows accompany their upturn in ratings with a sharp downturn in quality. 

A prime example of this unfortunate truth in television is How I Met Your Mother.  Many episodes from the first two seasons of the show, especially “The Pineapple Incident” and “Slap Bet” still remain some of my favorite sitcom offerings of all time.  They felt crafted as opposed to slapped together, playing with narrative devices while still offering subtle characterization, many hilarious moments, and plenty of genuine heart.  Although never a ratings flop, How I Met Your Mother spent its first few seasons as a perpetual bubble show, just good enough for powerhouse CBS to renew it for another season; as a huge fan of the show, I remember thinking at the time that if only other people started watching it, all the problems would be solved.  I realized this point of view was wildly naive when I got to simultaneously experience the elation of seeing How I Met Your Mother get an early renewal last year and feel the disappointment of seeing my favorite show descend into an abyss of guest stars and broad humor.  The How I Met Your Mother I saw in Season 5 didn’t have half the heart of the one I fell in love with in Season 1, and I genuinely feel that this can be blamed at least partially on a desire of the producers to appeal to the broader CBS audience that makes Two and a Half Men one of the most watched shows every week.  By making the show broader, the producers turned it into the kind of generic sitcom I have no interest in watching.  I loved How I Met Your Mother because it didn’t pander for easy laughs the way other shows did; it wasn’t afraid of continuity-based humor or having genuine emotional stakes behind the humor.  Although I believe the show is headed back in the right direction with Season 6, it’s going to take a lot of work for them to reach the kind of brilliant work they were churning out week after week when they weren’t sure if every season would be the last. 

How I Met Your Mother is by no means the only example of this phenomenon, and indeed was not so affected that I actually stopped watching it.  House, on the other hand, began as a darkly comic show with a groundbreakingly misanthropic protagonist and has strayed so far from its original premise and vibe at this point that plotlines seem like they would fit better in a romantic comedy than a medical mystery; I took it off my weekly roster last year and never looked back.  Grey’s Anatomy, too, started its life as a midseason replacement with intriguing characters and a great soundtrack and spiraled quickly into a full-fledged primetime soap with no time for subtlety when it began pulling hoards of viewers. 

This brings me to the quote headlining this article, from The Dark Knight’s Harvey Dent: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”  It occurs to me that this maxim, while undoubtedly originally intended for people and not TV shows, applies quite aptly to the two possible fates of cult TV shows.  Some die heroic deaths and become martyrs to the cause of cult television, living on forever as examples of what was wrong with the system.  Others survive their initial period of danger to go on to become primetime hits, but in doing so evolve into the kind of mindless, crowd-pleasing show that is responsible for the deaths of cult television programs. 

I’ll close with a question: which path is the better one?  Is it more preferable to have a good show cancelled while it was still on the top of its game or to see it continue as a shadow of its former self, creatively hobbled by network and public pressures?  If so, perhaps fans of “Firefly” and other such cult classics can take comfort that while they never got a second season, they will always be left with a view of their favorite show untainted by mediocrity.  By canceling the show, FOX created a phenomenon which would be as famous for what it could have been than what it was; maybe in the long run this was a greater gift to “Firefly” and its legacy than renewing it could have hoped to be.