In 1993, 42.4 million households tuned in to the series finale of Cheers. Last Friday, almost 42 million people tuned in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC to watch the last hour of the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old who today was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death in the bombings a week ago of the Boston Marathon. There’s no question that a national news event, particularly one centered on a spectacular and seemingly inexplicable crime, would draw an enormous audience. But the juxtaposition of those figures from twenty years apart serves to illustrate a useful point: national tragedies, particularly crime stories, are perhaps the last form of television that has a truly mass audience.

The extent to which the American television audience has fragmented is extraordinary, and not entirely a bad thing, driven as it has been by dramatic increases in the numer of offerings available to viewers, and a dramatic increase in their quality. In the 1952-1953 second season of I Love Lucy, for example, the show averaged a 67.3 rating, meaning 67.3 percent of American television households were tuned into the show during its time slot. It’s hard to come up with a directly comparable number for Friday night’s news coverage because ratings are done by show rather than in the aggregate, but if 42 million households tuned in to watch the manhunt, that would represent 36.8 percent of America’s 114.2 million television households. Similarly, n Cheers’ fifth season, its highest-rated, the show, which aired from 1986-1987, pulled in an average rating of 27.2, which averaged out to 23.77 million viewers per episode. Friends pulled in an average of 24.50 million viewers per episode in its eighth season, which aired in 2001-2002. But the last year a show that won the Nielsen ratings had a rating of above 20 was 1997-1998, when Seinfeld pulled in a 21.7 rating. In 2011-2012, NBC Sunday Night Football pulled in the crown with a mere 12.9 rating.

I’m not sad that we have so much tremendous television on the airwaves these days, and that people have so many options for terrific viewing that are specific to their interests. But I am sorry that there’s nothing narrative that unites us as much as television viewers as a manhunt like this did. The reasons we tune into events like the chase after Tsarnaev are clear. The crimes he is accused of committing are real, rather than fictional, which raises the stakes on our desire for resolution and closure. The events are unscripted—unlike crime shows, where familiar detectives have a particular knack of ending standoffs, real life encounters between criminals and the police are far more volatile. And this is programming with great potential for further violence that could be aired live. Particularly given the recent death of fugitive former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Dorner in a standoff with police at a remote cabin, and the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s brother, in a fight with police earlier in the day, the chase for Tsarnaev seemed like it could easily have ended in a bombing or a shootout, rather than with the surrender that eventually took place.

It’s fear and morbid curiosity—neither of which are unjustified emotions—that draw us to this kind of chase. In the past it was possible to create enormous audiences through compelling characters and long-established relationships. Now, that seems impossible, and the reactions that bring us together are darker. That doesn’t mean our responses aren’t genuine or valid. But it’s a shame that we’re sharing collective terror and anxiety on a greater scale than we’re sharing joy, transport, and simple humor.

I am, and I suspect many of you are, excited for Community’s return to NBC’s airwaves tonight and for the possibility of a fourth season of the much-adored, little-watched experimental sitcom. But a dissenting voice comes from Larry Fitzmaurice in GQ:

In real life, the desire to have friends doesn’t excuse decaying, bigoted excuses for human beings. Yes, this is television. It’s unreasonable to expect a portrayal of real life from a show that considers zombie outbreaks and runaway monkeys a part of its balanced breakfast. Still, for a show as episodically self-contained as Community, watching these characters step on the same rake over and again has devolved into pure frustration. In “Comparative Ecology” the beloved study group were branded the “Mean Clique.” But, more accurately, it exposed their toxic, mob-mentality inertia. A frequent third-act gambit involves Jeff, the group’s alpha male, giving a clear-hearts-full-assholes speech about how all conflict must be resolved with the group dynamic fully restored and faults forgiven because it’s essentially better that way. That’s it.

This is a fairly succinct recapitulation of the reason most of Community‘s critics can’t find a way to emotionally attach to the show, and it’s one I can kind of understand. But I think there’s something interesting about the fact that we’ve had a decade of television in which we told ourselves we were morally sophisticated for sympathizing with monsters on dramas, and yet anyone would object to the idea that a comedy isn’t working because its characters are merely stuck or unlikable.

That’s part of what I like about Community, actually, the prospect that this is essentially as good as it gets. Abed is probably not going to grow up to make nationally-distributed movies. Troy seems likely to go into a trade. Shirley’s never going to open her brownie business—she’s returned to her husband rather than getting some sort of revenge on him. Jeff may return to his swinging lawyer ways, but it’s not really clear that he was genuinely happy in that life, either. Pierce is a fixed curmudgeon. Annie and Britta’s destinations have yet to be determined, which does mean the show’s invested its potential for fully surprising trajectories in two women, one who returned college sadder and somewhat wiser from her jaunt into the world, another of whom never even got out into it before heading to rehab. Not everyone gets their dream job, and an apartment with a lot of brushed steel and big windows, and the perfect relationship. Everyone plateaus at some point.

And if that’s not the narrative of most sitcoms, that doesn’t make it untrue, or uninteresting. Norm is not less funny or less warm on Cheers for essentially being the same person over the course of the show’s run. Ron Swanson plateaued at a place that’s very, very funny and complex but that doesn’t exactly open up enormous potential for emotional growth. That doesn’t mean I’m bored with them and their flaws and virtues—just that the writers have to be very smart about a very narrow window they’ve been given. Community‘s wild inventiveness is a testament to how that show’s writers have found their lanes and are working miracles within them.

Regular-schedule blogging commences tomorrow. But while I was making personal resolutions, I thought of a couple of cultural ones I want to take care of, too.

1. Get over my anxiety about getting stuck on levels and finish playing Portal.

2. Film school: lots of Kurosawa. Lots of Truffaut.

3. Catch up on or finish: Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Cheers, The X-Files, Enlightened, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, Misfits.

4. See John Lithgow in The Columnist and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman,” “Chinese Art in the Age of Revolution” and “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum, “Strange Interlude” at the Shakespeare Theater Company, “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980″ and “Zarina” at the Hammer Museum.

5. Read: a lot of Judge Dredd. Barchester Towers. Play It As It Lays. Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi. Manning Marable on Malcolm X. Swamplandia.

What’s everyone else working on?

Jamie Weinman makes what I think is a good point—the essentially centrist perspectives of mass-market television don’t mean that characters can’t have opinions or that shows can’t portray political debates:

There are certain issues mainstream TV will always have trouble addressing, and there’s no use complaining about it; TV is basically a centrist medium, held back from taking a definitive stand on almost anything divisive. But that doesn’t mean every character has to be completely without defined political views. It’s often hard to tell what political affiliation a character has—even when that character is a politician. In an era when almost everything is politicized in one way or another, and even a schoolgirl’s tweet can lead to an incident with the governor of Kansas, it can be limiting for characters to be without opinions on these things. We don’t need to know who every character votes for, but there are story possibilities when some of them are Republican or Democrat or Tory or NDP. After all, when families get together, one of the things they argue about is politics; if you take that away, you’ve mostly got arguments about technology and sex. And as TV is currently proving, there are only so many stories you can get from technology and sex.

While I’d prefer a world where television programs weren’t afraid to have clear worldviews that settled somewhere other than the absolute center of the political spectrum, I’d rather shows have characters who represent a range of definitive political opinions than that they have no politics whatsoever. The idea that political neutrality or uncertainty is a default position, and that viewers will identify more with characters who have no politics whatsoever, strikes me as rather strange. Sure, when it comes to opinion polling, people may pick at random to avoid admitting that they’re underinformed or haven’t reached clear opinions on issues or candidates. But that indicates at least a sense that having an opinion is more desirable than not. If people are having even cursory conversations in their own lives about politics, there’s no reason to believe that they’d shy away from watching such conversations on screen—people both watch television and talk about current events for pleasure, so there’s no reason to believe they’re mutually exclusive.

And at the end of the day, viewers are going to like some characters more than others for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t seem to be a vastly greater risk to float a character who has definitive political views than to put one out there who is so gratingly annoying (a la many of the supporting characters in Whitney, for example) as to be unbearable. The more television from the eighties and nineties I watch, the more convinced I become that the “technology and sex” problem Jamie’s describing is real: the aperture of what non-cable networks seem to think they can portray is narrower now than it was when Tip O’Neill swung by Cheers or Max ran for borough council on Living Single:

That’s a shame, and I think it’s one of the reasons the networks have lost so much critical ground to cable. It’s not just a sex and violence differential.

The bridge is yours.

-I’m not a huge short story person, but the new Don DeLillo sounds fantastic.

-Michael Fassbender has ideas for a new X-Men movie, but I just want to see Wolverine fight the Spanish Civil War.

-I wonder what it would mean for TV storytelling if the Supreme Court dramatically limited indecency regulation.

-The IMDb age discrimination suit heats up.

-I can retire now. I have everything I’ve ever wanted:

I like Tim Carmody’s piece on the value of old television shows for consumers:

It’s one of the few things that is an order of magnitude easier on a digital service like Netflix than actually popping in a DVD or managing a folder full of torrented movie files: the service perfectly maintains your place in the series, no matter what device you’re using, and you can just hit “play next episode” over and over again. Or you can easily scan for a rewatchable favorite. (Readers with kids know this is particularly useful.)

Full seasons of old television shows perfectly suit the pseudo-ownership viewers have with streaming video. You might keep DVD box sets of some of your favorite series, but you’re not going to buy the complete run of Cheers just to see what the fuss was about. At the same time, you’re unlikely to wait to bittorrent the entire thing or see every episode in syndication, either. It offers a service above and beyond what you can get with a cable subscription or internet broadband alone, for which a broad base of viewer are happy to pay a small sum.

But I think he could have taken this a step further: these services are particularly appealing and valuable because they allow you to do a big-gulp catchup on things you might have missed. If you’re like me and grew up without a television; if you’re an immigrant trying to pick up a bunch of American culture all at once; if your tastes changed over time and where you once cared about 90210 you now care about Roseanne, the ability to sit down and watch all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Cheers in an extended gulp rather than spread out over the years is invaluable. There’s no question that the Internet’s sped up and fractured the conversation around culture, as it has with politics and almost everything else. But it’s also given us tools that let us catch up to and participate in that conversation. Services like Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime serve up nostalgia, but they also let people join in a set of references that would have been inaccessible to them before.

A good post from Nikki, in response to some of my writing, saying that it’s not enough to want more women writing and directing television episodes. She writes:

If we suggest that increasing the number of women ON television might increase the number of women BEHIND television, thereby effecting a change in how sexist or feminist television shows might be, we excuse men from the process entirely, except as Upholders of the Status Quo. Set aside the question about women behind the scenes and focus on the men behind the scenes, who are definitely still in power in the media and it’s that power structure that should be held accountable for the current portrayal of women on TV.

Amen. I’m a pretty firm believer in the carrot-and-stick thing, though, because it’s relatively easy for male creators to clap their hands over their ears when they’re being criticized for not giving us wonderful, developed female characters and just not listen. And it’s much easier to get people to listen when you’re praising, and for other people to see that praise and think “I want that!” So without further ado and in no particular order, 10 fantastic female characters on television who were created by men.

1. Trixie, Deadwood, David Milch: I know this list isn’t in order, but if it was, I’d still put it at the top. Milch’s prostitute-turned-accountant, pimp’s-trick-turned-Jewish-businessman’s-girlfriend would still be at the top. We meet Trixie at the beginning of the show when she’s been accused of murder, and watch her help another woman beat a drug addiction even when it means defying her employer’s orders; seek out an education no one ever gave her so she can have more options in life; stand up for her friends when they get married and grieve for them when they bury their children; and develop a new relationship. She’s always making choices. And when she takes steps backwards, we understand why, at the gut level. She’s empowered, but the show doesn’t fall prey to the trap that strong female characters created by men often do — that women’s liberation is purely a matter of will, not circumstance.

2. Alice Morgan, Luther, Neil Cross: Alice, who enters the scene when she murders her parents, melts down the gun, and feeds the remaining parts to her dog, is a certified crazy person, but she’s not a victim. Her attraction to John Luther doesn’t make her a nymphomaniac. And her decision to work cases comes out of a clearly defined alternate morality and worldview. Rather than setting her up to be judged by the audience, she’s a compelling — and sometimes very scary — way to see the universe.
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I know I fell off the Cheers blogging over the summer in favor of catching up on Breaking Bad and Deadwood, for which I sincerely apologize. But it felt sort of appropriate that I started up again the same day that Scott Lemieux wrote this post about the bizarre impermissibility of abortion in romantic comedies and pop culture in general.

I’ve written repeatedly about the ways Cheers feels ahead of its time — in fact, the ways it feels ahead of the television of our time, whether it’s trusting the audience to get highly intellectual humor, or addressing the issue of gay athletes in the midst of the AIDS crisis. But one area it feels fairly conventional is on the subject of abortion. I understand that part of what’s funny about Carla is her enormous pack of kids. And it says good things about the bar’s community that in “Father Knows Last,” that everyone takes up a collection to help her support the latest baby. But it would have been interesting if that collection had gone towards her having an abortion, a prospect the show never really considers.

Similarly, in the fourth season episode “Fools and Their Money,” there’s this interesting little moment when Sam is trying to confess one thing to Diane and she thinks she’s gotten someone pregnant. “What’s her name and so many months?” she asks. It would have been fascinating to see those two have a conversation about how Sam feels about fatherhood, and how he’d handle a pregnancy that he didn’t want to see go through. Instead, it’s a misunderstanding, and they move on to the topic of how Sam will tell Woody that he didn’t place a bet that would have made Woody a great deal of money. And I wish it wasn’t another missed opportunity. But I suppose you can’t ask one show to do all the work. I just wish any piece of pop culture would take this bit of work on.

-This would be better news if it was an announcement of a show about how Sam Malone turned Cheers into a detective agency. Norm and Cliff as partners, Carla as the tough interrogator who prefers to work alone, Diane as a brilliant but annoying lab tech…

-USA Network execs discuss their show-design jujitsu.

-A first-hand account of what it was like to work at News of the World.

-How to fix the All-Star game.

-Table-flipping and weave-pulling for Jesus:

I’ve just finished the third season of Cheers, and while I know the big thing this season is the introduction of Fraisier, and to a certain extent Sam and Diane’s reunion, for me, the huge standout of the arc is George Wendt’s work as Norm. It’s kind of remarkable how, in two seasons, Wendt takes on both the psychological weight of long-term unemployment and the challenge of infertility. And he does it all in a performance that’s essentially the equivalent of the episode of Community where Abed delivers a baby in the background of the action.

I’ve found lots of the show quite impressively progressive, including the fact that Norm loses his job in the first place when he stops his boss from sexually assaulting Diane. In a contemporary movie or television show, he would be rewarded for that, and fairly quickly: one of his coworkers would be bolting to start a new firm or something, and would be impressed by Norm’s integrity, and his firing would be truly momentary. Instead, his suddenly former coworkers cheer, and Norm’s left to face unemployment alone. There’s real pathos in watching a man who’s worked most of his life at one company try to revise his resume, or calculate how much beer he can afford to drink on his unemployment check. It’s not as if Norm’s struggle to find work is always delivered in jokes and asides. It’s the A story in the second-season episode “No Help Wanted,” where Norm secretly starts washing dishes at Melville’s until Diane convinces Sam to hire Norm as his accountant. But rather than having that episode and being done with it, Norm’s unemployment is a constant if low-boil factor in his presence at the bar until he finally finds a new job, and Wendt really shows the toll it takes on Norm. Late in the third season when, finally reemployed, Norm’s new company asks him to become their layoff man, it’s clear how scary the experience of unemployment was for him. He may be collecting a paycheck again, but it’s clear how traumatic not having a job was for him.

I’ll be curious to see, if the job market stays stagnant and unemployment stays relatively high, if more shows and movies start incorporating characters who have been unemployed for a long time into their storylines. Obviously shows like the Real Housewives franchise haven’t suffered during the recession, even though the lifestyles they portray are more out of reach than ever, but I think that’s because they provide a convenient opportunity to judge the rich. But if persistent long-tem unemployment becomes a more prevalent part of the American experience, giving people reflections of their own struggles seems like a good to way to be responsive to audiences and maybe lock in a little audience loyalty while you’re at it.

It’s interesting to me that, having gotten Norm back on his feet financially, the show chose to saddle him with the equally intimate and manhood-implicating problem of infertility. That’s a lot to lay on a guy in a period of a couple years! Not being able to get Vera pregnant appears to weigh a little less heavily on Norm, but again, it’s something that the show keeps running rather than mentioning it once and forgetting about it. I think that’s one of the reasons the show is so good: it remembers that its characters are real people with ongoing problems and concerns, and that most of the things people discuss with their friends are sort of circular and repetitive because that’s what it takes to work big things out. But even though Norm treats their ongoing fertility problems with his usual jocular humor, the whole incident strikes me as a very real way people use their primary group of friends. Sometimes you’re vulnerable, but these are the people with whom you rehearse the stories and self-presentation that get you through the day when things are hard.