The Year Of Television Definitely Had Its Ups And Downs

Early in 1996, a White House conference ended with the promise of something new for television: an industry-created ratings system that would help parents be better monitors of their children’s viewing.

Late in the year, an industry group presented a system resembling the one that had been used with movies for decades, and the promise was quickly of something not so new: deep division over whether shows should be labeled only according to age appropriateness or according to levels of violence, sex and coarse language.

In the meantime, the broadcast networks continued to lose viewers to the ever-proliferating (and, as Ted Turner merged his empire with Time Warner, ever-consolidating) cable industry. And television - even with ratings, and the V-chip, still a ways off - became a bit more like well-traveled terrain that suddenly transforms into an uncharted landscape.

Although “ER,” NBC’s hit medical series, won the Emmy for best drama that many people had expected it to receive in 1995, the awards ceremony was more notable for the success of cable films like HBO’s “Rasputin” and TNT’s “Andersonville.”

And though the networks persuaded well-known figures like Bill Cosby, Ted Danson and Michael J. Fox to return to prime time in new sitcoms, none of the shows featuring these stars turned into a full-fledged hit.

In fact, the only new network show that has come close to being a hit is the NBC comedy “Third Rock From the Sun,” starring John Lithgow as a lovable alien and Jane Curtin as the human who loves him. It had its premiere last January.

(Off-screen developments for two older sitcoms made headlines briefly but fast turned into footnotes: The six stars of NBC’s “Friends” did show up for work after a collective push for a raise. And Ellen DeGeneres’ character on ABC’s “Ellen” did not break new ground by coming out as a lesbian, although who knows what the new year will bring?)

There were a couple of daytime surprises. The sweet-hearted Rosie O’Donnell proved to have the magic touch needed to be a talk-show host. And Oprah Winfrey had the radical idea to merge two genres usually at war with each other: She introduced into her afternoon show a monthly segment called Oprah’s Book Club, and took on even a difficult novel like Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.”

Part of the sense of television as a strange new land had to do with the departure of familiar faces. George Burns, once the personification of television as America’s shared living room, died in March at the age of 100. After 12 seasons, Angela Lansbury solved her final mystery in “Murder, She Wrote,” a Sunday night staple. And in November, after a post-Election Day interview with President Clinton, David Brinkley retired from full-time duty at ABC, signaling a generational shift in news broadcasting.

It was, of course, a presidential election year, which used to be a time for lively, unpredictable television. But in 1996, perpetuating a now longstanding trend, the party conventions were unabashedly stagemanaged affairs. The networks (and even cable’s all-news channels, including the brand-new MSNBC) were widely criticized for allowing their coverage to follow the parties’ scripts too closely.

The debates, moderated by Jim Lehrer of PBS, were similarly criticized for being more like orchestrated entertainment than forums for productive conflict. Likewise NBC’s super-smooth handling of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, though many more people watched the Games than viewed the debates.

Oddly or not, the events of the year that proved to be the most authentic television events were the Blizzard of ‘96 and Hurricane Bertha. Americans young and old were glued to the screen, united. Weather, after all, will never need a rating.