Last week, I blogged about the re-emergence of sit-coms.  Today I wanted to give equal time to the new hour-long network shows, aka episodics.  Because of their length, these shows don’t have as much in common with the web show form.  Just ask any web show content creator how tough it is to try to produce an engaging dramatic series that doesn’t rely on some kind of humor or special effects.  But the following new network shows are out there and an undeniable part of the American Cultural Conversation right now.

While women generally have had a substantial success rate with 30-minute comedies this fall, the same cannot be said for hour-long shows.  The bunnies have already been cancelled, and the angels will need a miracle to keep them on the air.  NBC is trying to find Maria Bello a new home before they surrender her Prime Suspect.   It’s hardly Maria’s fault; maybe it’s hard to erase Helen Mirren’s indelible work, maybe it was just a bad idea for all the right reasons.   

For the younger demographic,  Hart of Dixie is as generic as it sounds: Providence in the South for teens.   And Fringe has the opposite problem:  The Parent Trap for grow-ups.   The Secret Circle may hang in there;  aside from some fancy special effects (True Blood lite) don’t expect those teen witches to come close to competing with the guilty pleasures of The Vampire Diaries before them.   If televison programming were a science, it wouldn’t be TV. 

There  have been a few female-driven shows that are succeeding.  Unforgettable is one of those exceptions.  It takes its cues from The Mentalist.   Structure the show around a detective with a special talent -in this case,  photographic memory – surround her with interesting characters including a possible handsome love interest, and hire an enigmatic actress like Poppy Montgomery to play the lead.  It’s a standard procedural, but the special effects involving the photographic memory are visually interesting.  It’s well executed and works like a Swiss clock. 

The other female-driven show that seems to be hanging in there is Pan Am.  But don’t expect a Mad Men for women.  Pan Am is more closely aligned to soap opera than the Golden Age of Cable.  It’s also beautifully designed and stylishly shot.  If they could only give Christina Ricci a character that matches the depth of her acting.  Each week Pan Am flies us to a different destination.  It’s never silly like The Love Boat.   The cocktail of Cold War politics and earnest stewardess sensibilities are pure escapism for those who still believe the past is time of lost innocence.

My favorite of the new female-driven hour-long shows is Revenge - and not just because PERKS DP David Kagen is working on it.   It verges nicely on camp (unlike the Charlie’s Angels’ update) with a tender ”eat the rich” angle.  It’s not over-the-top camp like Dynasty, but there’s enough champagne wishing and  caviar dreaming to lassure us there’s life for the well-to-do beyond the Upper East Side of Gossip Girl.  Revenge  does have pretensions to be about class.  But it’s TV’s idea of a class war; you hear about potential foreclosures, but you won’t ever see any starving infants in the Hamptons.  Not having a state of the art computer is enough to lower anyone’s self-esteem, right?  Revenge does some fabulous literary referencing.  Buying a house on Long Island to be close to an obsession is right out of The Great Gatsby, only this obsession is the vengeful destruction of lives.  Each week we see Emily VanCamp’s character go through her to do list of people’s lives to destroy, people who had destroyed her father.  It’s curiously the opposite premise from My Name is Earl.   In post-9/11 America where justice and revenge are easily confused,  we can all identify with a character actively pursuing bad karma in the name of justice.  And of course, Revenge‘s daddy retribution storyline owes an undeniable debt to Hamlet.  Madeline Stowe gives a formidable performance as the Queen Bee of the Hamptons.  If Revenge sticks around and the writers continue to give her deliciously nasty  scenes to play, look for a possible Emmy nomination for Ms. Stowe in about a year.    

Revenge  is one of the two shows to borrow  from the Bernie Madoff narrative, the other being the comic hit 2 Broke Girls.    There’s something to be said for letting the cultural  conversation include themes of the zeitgeist.  The time  between writing and launching television episodes is only a few months, so the Madoff storylines doesn’t yet feel dated.

New male-driven episodic shows have not been so lucky.  Trying to re-create a Lost should no longer be on any TV executives’ bucket list anymore.  The verdict’s still not in on Person of Interest.  The episodes I saw have been a little too cool and enigmatic for their own good – or to sustain my interest.  A Gifted Man should have worked as a high concept show – Ghost with a top doctor.  Taking its casting cue from The Good Wife, they hired some of the best NY actors around.  But I had to stop watching after the second episode when poor Patrick Wilson’s character had to deliver a baby while he simultaneously removed the pregnant woman’s brain tumor.  If the show were high camp, maybe, but it is dead serious.  And what kind of show kills off a great actor like Bill Irwin in the pilot? 

We’re about to be inundated with fantasy-based shows.  American Horror Story on FX got the numbers, but it’s logistically a muddle.   Terra Nova arrived with the Spielberg imprimatur.  While the numbers weren’t spectacular -  and it’s hard not to feel it’s just a little too close to Jurassic Park – you never know what deals were made with Fox and Spielberg.  Of the other upcoming fantasy shows, Once Upon a Time will attempt to take us back to a Pushing Daisies sensibility where TV and fairy tale merge, and we shall see if Grimm can scare, entertain, and sustain.  

The best new show of the 2011 fall season is hands-down Homeland.  Claire Danes knows Emmy-bait when she sees it.  Her character is smart, complex, troubled, and driven.  It’s a well-produced show, deftly acted, and brilliantly written.   Homeland is one of the few shows on the air that is not only great television, but also feels relevant to my life.  The Golden Age of Cable keeps on shining. 

Except for Homeland  and the zeitgeist “eat the rich” connections to Madoff in Revenge, there are very few revelations so far this year when it comes to new hour-long network shows.  But keep in mind, television must always tread a fine line when it comes to getting too close to real issues like corporate greed, i.e., Emily VanCamp’s character in Revenge  isn’t some poor little match girl; she seems to had vast amounts of wealth at her disposal.  The networks are no more going to bite the hand that feeds them than they’re going to bite or show their own corporate hand.

The new Original Series on network television have begun to roll out.  As a content producer of Original Series for the web, I do my best to learn from the pros.  Here’s what the new season of sit coms (and old templates) have taught me so far.

In the old days at UCLA, they used to teach that successful sitcoms needed a “franchise.”  Frasier’s radio station, Cheer’s bar, or Just Shoot Me’s magazine.  But the franchise just becomes set dressing for the bones of a show.   There are really only three kinds of successful sitcom templates: The Odd Couple, Friends and All in the Family.  Sitcoms can include other elements, like rom-com, mocumentary, and fish-out-of-water scenarios, but most shows that usually get renewed owe a deep debt to The Odd Couple, Friends, and All in the Family.     

So far, 2 Broke Girls falls perfectly into The Odd Couple paradigm.  It’s no surprise that it just got a full season order.  It’s also no accident that it comes right before one of the most successful other Odd Couple shows of recent years, Two and a Half Men.  TV snobs bemoan the success of Two and a Half Men.   And yet it’s still the #1 sitcom in America.  (My own mother laughs out loud when she watches it.  Many times.)  Another show in the Odd Couple model is How To Be  A Gentleman.  It doesn’t quite have the numbers yet.  One problem might be it follows Big Bang Theory, which more closely adheres to the Friends model.  Odd Couple shows might work better side-by-side.

The Friends  model is the most common type of successful sitcom these days.  5-6 twenty-somethings hanging out together bein’ wacky just bein’ friends.  Lots of air quotes in their chatter.  It helps if there’s some romance in the air, and it helps even more if they like to talk about sex alot.  Not gross/dirty porno sex, but cute/fun sitcom sex.  Of special note, there are more vagina jokes this year with all the female protagonists on sitcoms, and the word “masturbation” is thrown around more casually too.  Masturbation jokes probably have more to do with unemployment rates than female-driven sitcoms.   How I Met Your Mother is in its 7th season and doing better in the ratings than ever.  The Friends model is clearly durable: Happy Endings, Whitney, New Girl, Entourage, Big Bang Theory, Seinfeld, and South Park. 

When All Night Long follows the Friends  model, it is much more enagaging and interesting than when it follows the family model.  That’s generally true of the the family model, except for The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Modern Family,  a few of the exceptions.  Many family sitcoms feel anemic – even in a premiere episode – we feel we’re watching something that’s been in syndication for a while.  When I hear mother-in-law jokes, I start to look for Kaye Ballard, Eve Arden, and Apollo space travel.   I’m clearly prejudiced against a certain type of family sitcom.  But what do I know?   My DVR can’t logistically record all the King of Queens re-runs playing today.   Bixby Elliott in the last writing group suggested, “All TV shows are about family in the end.”  Glee  is a great example. When it’s on track, it’s about father Will Schuester trying to raise his motley Glee Club family.  Traditional family sitcoms were responsible for the near death knell of sitcoms a few years back.  I keep seeing previews for Last Man Standing and get a bad feeling in my stomach …

I believe one of the reasons NBC’s Thursday night’s current comedy line-up has never hit must-see numbers is because those shows have never really committed to one template.  By making them all a little like Friends and a little like a Family throwing in a few Odd Couplings - oh, yeah, and make them mocumentaries so they remind us a little of Christopher Guest – they end up very unfocused.  It takes them a few seasons to find their voices – so much for a first impression.  They eventually survive and find their niche audiences, but they never realize their potential as authentic television phenomena. 

So how does this all relate to PERKS?   If PERKS continues as a DIY web series, we can happily do what we please as we play to our niche audience.  We raise the money, we get to make what we want.  But we have also had a few meetings about putting PERKS in a television format. The question is which one?  

Of the three, a variation of the Friends ensemble makes the most sense – with school as the surrogate family.  However, Friends  shows rely heavily on a lot of sexy banter, which is still considered a little creepy coming out of the mouths of teens.  Especially since we’re skewing towards a younger audience.  We’ve considered ageing the kids up to adulthood, but then Josh’s shyness becomes a bit pathological.  

It’s an interesting problem.  It’s even more interesting to watch and pay attention to what’s working when the stakes get raised.