Mediacrity!
by William Ham
illustration by Michael Corcoran
Well, another nine months of failed premises, hollow laughs, and massive, crushing banality has concluded once again. But enough about this column… The TV season is over as well, and with it, another raft of cold, hard lessons which the big four (and the two Fisher-Price “Baby’s First Network” play sets) have learned, noted and run through the shredder alongside all pilot scripts received from Roseanne’s production company. Thanks to our strategically-placed mole in Hollywood (which happens to reside on the lower zygomatic arch of a certain spokesmodel-turned-featured-extra who goes on a lot of post-midnight “auditions”), Mediacrity! has gotten hold of sixteen secret network documents. Granted, fifteen of them are Xeroxed government faxes detailing the twenty-seven different synthetics and polymers hitherto unknown to man that have turned up in the torsos and cheekbone regions of the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210, but the other one has some bearing on the networks’ strategies for next season, so let’s look at that instead.
Following the revolutionary decision by ABC to make the lead character of one of their sitcoms a lesbian (albeit one that took longer to come out of the closet than a one-winged moth with Parkinson’s Syndrome), the other networks are looking to break new ground of their own in ’97-’98. On tap for CBS’ fall lineup: A wacky, somewhat confused Catholic priest brings new meaning to the word “cross-dressing” in My Father, The Sister (formerly Is That a Rosary in Your Habit or…?), starring Sean Young… Fox continues to combine the supernatural with the unnatural in the latest hour-long drama from Chris Carter, The Fetishist Bureau of Investigation, about a team of extra-special agents who can see into the minds of murderers by sucking on their victims’ toes and wearing their underwear… NBC, the number-one network, intends to add no new irregular programming to their hit lineup, though they are considering adding a hermaphrodite to each of their Thursday night shows and intend to have Tom Brokaw reveal what’s he’s really wearing under his desk sometime during sweeps… As for the network that started it all, “ABCDeviance” is currently developing The Love Morgue with executive producer Aaron Spelling. No further details were available at press time, thank God…
And in a related story, plans for the first Showtime/ESPN co-production, Red Sox Diaries, a series based on the erotic fantasies of major league baseball players, has been scrapped after the first scripts, “A Different Kind of Bat Day” and one involving some very unorthodox uses for chewing tobacco, have been deemed far too bizarre and disturbing, even for cable.
Watch this space for further developments in the broadcast world. And when you finally realize that the text doesn’t actually change, maybe you’ll buy the next issue and look there.
