Last Man Standing, a male-knucklehead comedy starring Tim Allen, left, was cancelled by ABC then promptly picked up by Fox, which will promote it heavily on Thursday Night Football.Tony Rivetti/ABC
It’s alive! It’s alive! After the eye-watering ratings that accrued for the revival of Roseanne on ABC, all of network TV is refusing to die. It just won’t go away. It has, you might say, a reason to live.
This week, the traditional upfront presentations for ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox are taking place in New York – lavish parties at which advertising execs are flattered, coaxed and cajoled into committing money to shows that, well, hardly any cool publication will write about, ever. But that people will watch. Oh yes they will. About 18 million in the United States and 2.2 million in Canada watched weekly as the nine-episode Roseanne reboot rolled out.
Yep, while you were glued to some true-crime epic on Netflix or availing yourself of Scandinavian crime data in the original language, the proletariat was watching old-fashioned TV. Shows with cardboard characters and laugh tracks. Now, the beans can be spilled – it turns out these shows are both a vehicle for mindless escapism and a weirdly appropriate forum for characters to talk about the issues that simmer under the surface of the Donald Trump era.
So, you will have a chance to get to know Roseanne Connor even better this fall. ABC is bringing the series back for 13 episodes. Such is the giddiness at ABC that the network will air a total of 10 half-hour sitcoms every week in the coming fall season. Roseanne will be paired with a new comedy, a period piece called The Kids Are Alright: “Set in the 1970s, the ensemble, single-camera comedy follows a traditional Irish-Catholic family, the Clearys, as they navigate big and small changes during one of America’s most turbulent decades in a working-class neighbourhood outside Los Angeles.” Go ahead, roll your eyes. ABC isn’t caring much about scorn right now. It is cackling like Roseanne Connor in her kitchen.
There is an interesting twist to the current network-comedy scenario in the situation of Last Man Standing, the long-running series featuring the vocally conservative Tim Allen. The series isn’t remotely as political as Roseanne but it celebrated an old-fashioned male-knucklehead mentality, a premise that stood out. ABC cancelled it. Allen claimed it was because of his politics. Fox has picked it up and, executives say, will promote it heavily during Thursday Night Football. Meanwhile, Fox cancelled Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which was picked up by NBC about 36 hours later.
Blame Trump, of course, for the refusal of network TV to fade away. And it’s also possible to read a Trump-era theme and see a Roseanne effect in the new CBS series The Neighborhood. The traditional, multicamera comedy from Big Bang Theory writer Jim Reynolds is about “the nicest guy in the Midwest who moves his family into a tough neighbourhood in L.A. where not everyone appreciates his extreme neighbourliness.” Right, well, you and me, we can call it a culture-clash comedy courtesy of execs seeking the eyeballs of Trump voters.
Apart from convoluted and, in truth, untested theories about the influence of contemporary politics on American network TV, there is the simple reality that mainstream entertainment on conventional TV is just still going strong. NBC has not one but three dramas from Dick Wolf coming on Wednesdays this fall: Chicago Fire, Chicago Med and Chicago PD. This fact is neither a blemish on NBC nor a stain on the entire TV industry. It is just a fact that forces the brain to contemplate the sturdiness of TV storytelling that has a very small dramatic compass. There is shallowness and sentimentality, but there is a strong allure to reassuring TV drama.
Starting a few years ago, with the rise of streaming services and an increase in the number of cable channels, network TV seemed to fade away as a cultural force. Only niche, critically acclaimed network series such as 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community got serious attention. Coverage of the network upfront announcements was almost paltry. But reports of the death of network TV were an exaggeration. It’s alive. Place the blame where you like.