In the search for good TV, it neglected what made TV great: Ambitious trash

TV is starting to learn some lessons from a misbegotten 20+ year adventure grappling with the integrity of premium dramas.

Back in 2003, NBC launched Kingpin, a crime drama created by David Mills (a damn good TV screenwriter with credits on shows like NYPD Blue, homicide: Life on The Street, ER, The Corner, The Wire, Treme…). The show wasn’t great and was clearly an effort to bring a show like The Sopranos to network television. The impression I had from what I saw of the show was that it was NBC wanting a show with high ambition to bring sophisticated and edgy drama to television, but there was friction with NBC realising what that actually meant.

Ever since then we have seen networks living in the shadow of premium dramas, the likes of which populated cable TV through the 2000s and early 2010s, then moved onto streaming services.

What TV has been missing for this past 20 years is ambitious trash.

Premium TV came off the back of a US network drama era which delivered great top-tier drama like the aforementioned Homicide, NYPD Blue, ER, and add in shows like The West Wing, Murder One, etc.

But, please remember what the biggest show in the world of the 90s actually was. It wasn’t Friends or ER or Seinfeld.

Baywatch, with its mix of tight bodies, light drama, and the weekly really dumb mid-episode music video montage, was also held together with some pretty decent surf lifesaving action in every episode. It was trash TV, but trash TV with some ambition.

Regularly enough on social media you will stumble upon a thread where someone comments about how all 80s TV shows would regularly have action sequences with helicopters, which is something that doesn’t seem to happen anymore for budgetary reasons.

But 80s shows had that ambition. Even the trashiest action shows would have helicopters and explosions, and stunt men jumping off buildings.

Ambitious trash TV. It made TV fun to watch and it really was taken for granted. In the decade since, we have seen a whole lot of pretty dull trash TV.

This weekend came two news items that speak to an audience hunger for trash TV.

The first is yet another effort to reboot Charlie’s Angels. The mistake being made here is that it’ll be yet another movie and not a TV series revival.

We’ve already seen two hugely successful action-comedy films, followed by a series reboot with a too-serious franchise reboot in 2019 which jettisoned a lot of the cheese. A 2011 TV series reboot made the same mistake.

What made the 2000-era films with Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz, and Drew Barrymore work?

Yeah, that’s pretty shameless. But I remember folks in the audience laughing pretty hard during what is a hugely memorable sequence for some very obvious reasons.

It wasn’t afraid to be true to a sense of the shameless flirtiness of Charlie’s Angels.

As per THR, the new film is reportedly being (maybe) produced through Drew Barrymore’s Flower Films, which is probably a good move.

The wrong lessons were applied to the 2017 Dwayne Johnson Baywatch movie where the cheese was amped up, while retaining the hard bodies.

The news this weekend is that leading the cast for the Fox Baywatch reboot set to debut later this year will be Arrow star Stephen Amell. He’ll be starring as Hobie Buchannon, reviving the teen character (son of David Hasselhoff’s Mitch) from the original series.

Stephen Amell

Amell brings with him the physical capability to be genuinely accepted as a working lifeguard, but is also an actor who tends to play things pretty straight. It doesn’t sound like they’re looking for the new show to be a goof. Instead, it seems like the mission statement for the new Baywatch is going to be tight bodies and light drama, along with what I am assuming to be pretty good surf lifesaving action sequences.

It’s ambitious trash. And gosh, have I been missing that from my screen for a while now.

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News Desk

• TV’s Madam Secretary is returning to her The Naked Truth sitcom roots as Tèa Leoni is set to lead the new NBC sitcom Newlyweds if the pilot is picked up. Read: Deadline

• RIP character actor Shelly Desai. He has appeared in almost everything, but was notably a recurring actor in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Men of a Certain Age. Read: THR

• The Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman says the final episode of the show will just be a regular episode (should it ever end). This is the sound of a showrunner with a limited imagination. Read: Deadline

• The New York Times spoke with Matt Groening ahead of the airing of the show’s 800th episode. I realise now that I watched the show for around 10 years and only ever saw maybe a quarter of the episodes made. Read: NYT

• With Disney reporting nearly 8m people watching the one-off special The Muppet Show across ABC and Disney+ (presumably this is just a US audience figure), that sounds to me like it’s not just a formality until Disney announces a return for the show as a series. Read: Deadline

• The Guardian has a list of TV’s greatest romances. Beyond the list just missing a whole lot of great TV romances, it misses the obvious heat of Miss Piggy and Kermit. Read: The Guardian

• Showrunner Mattson Tomlin has reported that Terminator Zero has been cancelled after a single season at Netflix. Read: THR

• The CW has cancelled Good Cop/Bad Cop after one season. The US-set series starring Leighton Meester, Luke Cook, and Clancy Brown was filmed in south-east Queensland. Read: Deadline

• As Polygon notes, All 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1 are now streaming on Netflix. The edit being streamed is the controversial version with the nudity present in the first episode.

• In the UK there has been a lot of discussion of late about a TV future where over-the-air broadcasting is shut off and streaming digital delivery is the default. Similar conversations are happening in France with Canal+ chief exec Maxime Saada predicting the end of digital terrestrial television in France within the next ten years. 40% of French households still use an antenna. Read: Broadband TV News

• Until today I had never heard of the live stage show George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure. The show brought together into one show elements of Star Wars, clearly, but also Indiana Jones, Willow, American Graffiti, and biopic Tucker: The Man and His Dream into a single narrative. Read: Screencrush

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Trailer Park

The Audacity debuts on AMC April 12.

Set inside the bubble of Silicon Valley, The Audacity takes on the warped dreams, outsized egos, and ethical lapses of the self-styled inventors of the future. In a world of jaded billionaires, psychiatrist-gurus, bio-hacked tech bros, AI labs and disillusioned teens being optimized in elite private schools, an audacious data-mining CEO (Billy Magnussen) strives to turn insight and influence into profit and power. The darkly comedic drama confronts reality, privacy, and the delusions fueling our ever-changing world.

Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen debuts on Netflix March 26.

"Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen" is an atmospheric horror series set at a wedding, following a bride and groom in the week leading up to their ill-fated nuptials.

Bridgerton returns for part 2 of season 4 on Netflix Feb 26.

CIA debuts on CBS Feb 23.

When by-the-book FBI Special Agent Bill Goodman (Nick Gehlfuss) is loaned out to a clandestine CIA/FBI task force, he finds himself teamed up with secretive and roguish CIA Agent Colin Glass (Tom Ellis).

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That’s the newsletter for the today.

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