2021-2022 TV Season in Review

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, network television did not have a good year in 2021-2022.  But at this point, basically nobody including myself expected that it would.  Live-viewing audience numbers are dropping to levels that would have been unthinkable even five years ago, with viewership in the 3-4 million range now being considered impressive for the launch of a new series.  The broadcast networks seem increasingly resigned to being the home entertainment ghetto and are spreading themselves thin with a relatively small number of expansion-pack franchises that keep spawning uninspired sequels.  The result is a broadcast TV landscape that's becoming the lowest-denominator flavor of risk-averse comfort food for its shrinking and aging audience.  Some would say network TV has always been like this, and in various years in the past it has been, but one would be guilty of recency bias if they said network TV never colored outside the lines. 

The more interesting complication is that the sociopolitical values of those who make network TV are diverging with the values of those who still watch network TV a little more every day.  The dead-enders still watching the 31 flavors of "NCIS," "Law and Order," and "FBI" skew disproportionately older, white, and rural while the networks are now mandating that 50% of the cast and crew of their series be some combination of gay, transgender, or people of color.  In other words, the highly educated nonwhite professional class, who tends to traffic in unrelenting wokeism with a religious zealotry, are writing, producing, and directing the entertainment that's being marketed to an increasingly conservative audience.  To put it mildly, this constitutes a substantial mismatch between the content creators and the content consumers, and it will likely hasten the erosion of the existing network television audience by viewers uncomfortable getting preached at about issues they disagree with. 

All of that points to a network television landscape on the near-term horizon where I'll be one of the very last remaining foot soldiers.  Will they lose me too?  Probably not entirely but I'll be less likely to sample new series if I'm suspicious they're simply test-driving it for a season 2 pay-per-view run, as was done by CBS last year with the avant garde horror series "Evil".  I'd bet that I consumed about a third fewer hours of television this past season than I did last, so if this attrition continues I'll become part of the very problem I've been grumbling about in recent years....the erasure of the broadcast model for television.  But at least for now, I'm still onboard, so without further adieu, here's my annual review of the shows I watched this year....

9-1-1--This first responder series has just finished its fifth season and the formula still works reasonably well thanks to a strong cast and a mix of humor, suspense, and drama that remains more effective than not.  Not every story idea they explore lands like an Olympic gymnast and the CGI sometimes falls short of the mark, but "9-1-1" has proven itself capable of hitting you square in the gut on occasion.  I dare anybody to hold the tears in after watching the recent episode where a young mother, riddled with internal injuries after a fall through a sinkhole, makes her final call to her daughters waiting on the surface who are expecting her imminent rescue.  Moments that impactful might be less frequent than in earlier seasons, but even when the series follows a more standard procedural formula, it manages to entertain more consistently than its peers.  One thing the series needs to work on though is its audio mix.  I routinely fail to pick up on the dialogue whenever there's blaring music in the background, which happens nearly every episode.  Grade:  B

9-1-1: Lone Star--Rob Lowe's Texas-based "9-1-1" spinoff keeps bouncing me around like a yo-yo.  Its first season pretty much left me numb.  In season 2, it showed a burst of life with some solidly crafted stories that were at least as strong as some of the best episodes of its predecessor.  And then in season 3 this past year, it unfortunately validated my original suspicions about the series.  Things got off to a really bad start with a four-part season premiere where the Lone Star State was struck with a massive blizzard.  Even without accounting for the fact that an extended story about a blizzard was being produced by showrunners who'd clearly never experienced winter weather in their lives, there were moments so dreadful that they played like a "Saturday Night Live" parody.  Only in the fourth and final episode of the blizzard arc did they manage some clever writing reminiscent of what's kept me plugged in to the "9-1-1" franchise for the last five years.  And it was an uneven Texas backroad for the rest of the season as well.  Rob Lowe's Owen Strand character had an interesting lapse into escalating anger issues capstoned in the excellent episode "Impulse Control" but the momentum was squandered with the absurdly lackluster follow-up episode "Down to Clown" the following week.  Beyond that, too many of the other characters remain quite flat and the amount of time spent on TK and his boyfriend Carlos is excessive by orders of magnitude.  If a given series' inspirational flourishes get fewer and further between as it proceeds, even a loyal viewer like myself can sometimes decide to walk away.  Given my preexisting skepticism about this uninspired spinoff, I could envision this happening if "9-1-1: Lone Star" gets picked up for season 4.  But at least for now, I long to experience more of the soaring narrative highs this show took me on in season 2 and will hold my nose and work through the manure to find it.  Grade:  C

The Cleaning Lady--I went into Fox's rookie Monday night suspense thriller with elevated hopes.  After all, back in 2014, Fox brought us the mind-blowingly excellent 13-episode masterpiece "Gang Related" featuring a cop with the LA gang unit working as a double agent for one of the city's nastiest gangs, and "The Cleaning Lady" came out eight years later with a similarly promising premise.  Set in Las Vegas, undocumented immigrant Thony was working as a free-lance custodian with a sick son in desperate need of medical care that she couldn't afford.  A chance encounter with a Vegas gangster whose "mess" Thony agreed to clean up led to a long-term partnership, but also an FBI investigation that forced Thony to work both sides.  It was a great premise that lent itself to the same kinds of highly intense plot twists and cliffhangers seen in shows like "Prison Break" and the aforementioned "Gang Related" that at least for me have always made for the most compelling television.  Throw in an interesting look at the subculture of undocumented immigrant families living in the shadows of Las Vegas glamour and it seemed like a can't-lose premise.  And indeed, the first several episodes lived up to the series' potential.  But at some point in the course of the series' 10-episode first season, "The Cleaning Lady" felt like it was at least partially going off the rails with some bizarre character decisions, confusing plot twists, and flat narrative pivots.  By the time of its March season finale, I was nowhere near as electrified as I'd hoped to be based on the early episodes.  Still, "The Cleaning Lady" found a decent-sized audience by today's standards and has been renewed for season 2.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit disappointed by where things left off compared to where they started, but I'm still eager to follow this series into its second season and see what they do with it.  And I even have a reasonable measure of confidence that they'll find their footing again when they return.  There are so few serialized shows on today's primetime network schedule that deviate from the procedural boilerplate that viewers should latch on to those that do with their fingernails.  Grade:  B

FBI--As soon as this Dick Wolf procedural began to expand to multiple franchises, as Dick Wolf procedurals always seem to do, I had a nagging feeling that they would attempt to bridge crossover storylines from one series to the next.  And sure enough, CBS chose to do that with with the season opener of the franchise's flagship series.  That was it for me...sort of.  I decided to be an "occasional" viewer of "FBI" from that point forward, catching it when I had an hour free on Tuesday evening but not sweating it if I happened to miss it.  And I've followed through on that, catching "FBI" about a half dozen times in season 4.  It remains a pretty solid procedural with effective dramatic build-up and suspense, but I have no interest in watching three consecutive hours of it on Tuesday nights or to be baited by showrunners into sampling the series with semiregular "crossover episodes" put forward in the hopes of getting me hooked.  Network television is currently beset by the worst "cloning" problem in the medium's history and I'm less likely than ever to indulge this cynical tactic at a time when fresh ideas are so desperately needed.  Grade:  C+

The Wonder Years--As can be attested by those who've read this site in the past, I remain a huge fan of the original "Wonder Years" series nearly three decades after it rode off into the sunset.  I also remain vulnerable to network TV's persistent efforts to reboot beloved franchises of my childhood, particularly when there's enough of a twist to the concept to potentially breathe new life into the format.  And for better or worse, a version of "The Wonder Years" featuring a black family from Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968 with narration from Don Cheadle was definitely poised to diverge from the original.  And I must admit I've been very pleasantly surprised with what they've done. The spirit of the original remains but the characters are originals with a vastly different spectrum of motivations and crossroads to encounter.  I really hoped the series wouldn't lean too heavily into a one-dimensional racial guilt narrative but it's also exceeded my expectations on that front, doing so right from the get-go where pre-teen protagonist Dean actually manipulated the recent death of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a shameless and immature attempt to engender racial sympathy for himself amongst white teachers.  It was the kind of interesting narrative angle that I'd hoped to see given the racial and regional perspective being drawn upon.  The stories have generally been on-point all season, and the series pulled off a very effective hat tip to the original in a recent episode with the return of son Jimmy from Vietnam.  Unfortunately, as of this writing, drama on the set has apparently reached critical mass with the termination of director/producer Fred Savage (the star of the original series) based on harassment charges that have been ruled credible.  It's a highly unfortunate headline that may well endanger the series' prospects for a second season, but if it returns, I definitely plan to continue watching to see how the series progresses with the calendar into 1969 and beyond.  Grade:  B+

The Conners--I can't put a finger on why the cynical, blue-collar "Conners" didn't quite capture me this season the way it has in previous seasons, but I walk away from its fourth season feeling a bit weary.  The series, along with its 90s predecessor, has always infused plenty of topical social issue themes into its stories, but this year it felt more artificial when Darlene's son Mark became a drug dealer or when the neighbor was killed in a hail of gunfire on live TV.  The treatment is never as mawkish on this series as the typical "very special episode" of sitcoms of another era, but I still didn't think it was handled all that convincingly this year.  I'm likewise not overly captivated with the current ongoing storyline of Darlene and Becky moving into a fixer-upper.  The fact that John Goodman's Dan Conner character is clearly a senior citizen yet still can't seem to discover the easy solution to his incessant financial woes (retirement) or pay the mortgage despite fully employed live-in adult daughters paying him rent begins to strain credibility over time.  I salute the showrunners for their effort to portray the escalating vulnerabilities of working-class life in America, but attempting to shoehorn all of these issues to fit the Conner family's reality increasingly comes off as contrived.  With that said, there are still an above-average quotient of laughs each week along with an impressive selection of guest stars (Joe Walsh, Christopher Lloyd) to help bring most episodes up on their feet to some extent.  They also continue to do a nice job with callbacks to the original "Roseanne" series that gives it a sense of continuity that's very rare with reboots and sequels.  I'll continue to watch "The Conners" and enjoy it more weeks than not, but they should nonetheless consider either winding things down or at least allowing geriatric Dan and Jackie the opportunity to retire rather than pretending they still need to work 80 hours a week to put food on the table.  Grade:  B-

The Blacklist--I've defended the veteran James Spader series season after season for aging relatively well, but after nearly 200 episodes this series needs to wrap things up.  It's quite astonishing that it's still on the air, in the final weeks of its ninth season and already renewed for a tenth.  I'd have figured Spader would have gotten bored with this show years ago, along with audiences, but Spader is hanging in there and the audience remains remarkably resilient, routinely exceeding downgraded viewership expectations in its forgotten Friday time slot.  Unfortunately, "The Blacklist" lost a lot of credibility for me late last season.  Its final batch of episodes aired in June and they were incoherent disasters, rendering all events preceding them in season 8 to be nonsensical.  I wasn't the only fan who was disgruntled either, and I expected to see a higher rate of fan attrition going into season 9....but I was wrong.  To be fair, the series did manage a few solid episodes early in the season dealing with the aftermath of Agent Keen's death and its effect on her fellow agents, but particularly in the second half of the season currently airing on Friday nights, the series has been spinning its wheels creatively.  That's not to say I don't have confidence that "The Blacklist" won't come up with some additional compelling episodes as it continues its spectacular decadelong run as this series always manages some excellent hours of television every year, but last year's jump-the-shark embarrassments to wrap up the season was a full realization of the risk that comes for a series to run past its expiration date and make things up as they go every step of the way into old age.  I'm sure I'll continue to indulge "The Blacklist" as a Friday night guilty pleasure for as long as it continues, but the bloom is long ago off the flower and I'd prefer it save face and wrap things up.  Grade:  C+

Big Sky--David E. Kelley's Gothic, Montana-based murder mystery series had flashes of brilliance in its inaugural season but suffered a pretty severe sophomore slump in its second season.  It was clear that showrunners were making just about everything up as they went along and most creative choices reflected that lack of long-term vision.  For every plot twist that successfully landed, there seemed to be three that fell flat.  I'll give them credit for an exciting plot device launching the new season where a group of teenagers got a hold of a bag full of money and stolen drugs, raising the ire of out-of-town crime bosses who the money and drugs belonged to.  But momentum was lost pretty quickly after this promising start, especially with the low-energy Bhullar crime family that has since taken center stage.  Even less effective was the attempt to revive John Carroll Lynch's sinister Rick Legarski character from season 1 in the form of his backwoods brother Wolf, holding delusional fugitives Ronald and Scarlet hostage in his barn.  It's hard to overstate how much of a bust that story was.  There are still flashes of solid storytelling and some interesting exchanges of dialogue to be found in "Big Sky" that keep me on the reservation, but it wouldn't break my heart if ABC decided to pull the plug and not bring it back for season 3.  Right now, it's on the bubble but my money is on it getting picked up whether it deserves to be or not.  Grade:  C

SWAT--When I watched the pilot episode of "SWAT" back in 2017, I wasn't entirely sold, but I stuck with the show and I'm glad because it's without question the strongest and most action-packed procedural on CBS's long roster.  It's been a tough road getting to 100 episodes but "SWAT" pulled off that feat during its fifth season which just ended, easily eclipsing the original version from the mid-70s which didn't even last two full seasons.  It seems that "SWAT" has found its audience as well, seeing its numbers go up and easily renewed for season 6 after spending the previous couple of seasons "on the bubble" at renewal time.  Just like all CBS procedurals, not every episode of "SWAT" sticks the landing but it has a pretty good batting average, maintaining the zippy pace of 80s-era action shows like "The A-Team" without sacrificing character or (usually) plot development.  This year's season premiere, filmed in Mexico, was an excellent example of "SWAT" at its best, featuring fast action, interesting characters, and a highly engaging story.  The 100th episode, where Hondo was the victim of a deep fake in a video where he appeared to be executing another cop, was another outstanding entry.  Not every episode was as memorable as those two but there weren't many episodes where I walked away feeling like I wasted an hour, which can't be said for some of the other series in this review.  It's getting harder and harder to make 22 episodes per season but "SWAT" pulled it off this year and it did so without obvious budgetary skimping or half-assed backdoor pilots introducing new characters.  "SWAT" can be a little too "woke" just as everything coming out of Hollywood is lately but they do a pretty good job of offering conflicting perspectives.  I wouldn't have figured this show had five seasons in it but it's still going strong and I'm eager to see if they can maintain the quality for season 6.  Grade:  B

Magnum P.I.--When it comes to breezy procedural reboots, nothing compares to the half-assed reimagining of "Magnum, P.I.", which keeps trudging on despite the termination of one-time showrunner Peter Lenkov.  With four seasons in the rearview mirror and more likely on the way, "Magnum" and its legion of "fans" know exactly what they're getting into every Friday night when they tune in....a barely coherent detective show plot with terrible writing, weaker-yet secondary stories, and even worse CGI special effects.  With that said, those Hawaiian visuals, some solid location work, and the occasional humorous exchange are quite helpful in allowing the viewer to paper over all that is lackluster about the series and just be content that you have an action show to watch on Friday night while digesting your delicious frozen pizza dinner.  In the past I believed Jay Hernandez was miscast as Thomas Magnum but he's growing on me.  I've always found him charismatic and capable of carrying a series but "Magnum" didn't feel like the right fit.  The character's more human moments--such as his deathbed persuasion of a crusty old Vietnam vet to make peace with his estranged brother before he passed--came across as authentic enough to where Hernandez pulled it off.  Most of the series' supporting players are stiffs, but I occasionally take an interest in Rick and Detective Katsumoto even though their material is mostly pretty maudlin.  I'm not at all invested in Magnum and Higgins' budding romance though and see that as a risky pivot for the series to consummate, as seems poised to happen in season 5.  I wouldn't lose one moment's sleep if the "Magnum, P.I." reboot went away forever, but unless the series goes into the kind of death spiral we saw in season 4 of "Scorpion" several years ago, I'll probably keep wasting an hour of my Friday night watching it just as I did with "Hawaii Five-O" all those years.  In this case, not being the horrific "MacGyver" reboot is about the best thing "Magnum P.I." has going for it, and whatever one may say about the latter, it's not as bad as the former!   Grade:  C-

The Equalizer--Fully half of the shows I currently watch are either reboots or spinoffs, which is certainly a depressing testimonial to the state of network television.  But it does help when the reboots are well-done hat tips to some of my favorite series from my childhood, as is the case with Queen Latifah's version of "The Equalizer".  The original "Equalizer" excelled at giving a dark visual and narrative edge to rather conventional crimefighter series plots set in New York City's gritty, high-crime years of the 80s.  I was skeptical that the reboot would be able to maintain the original's spirit, but it does a pretty good job more weeks than not.  I was even more skeptical that Queen Latifah would be a credible stand-in for either Edward Woodward (from the original series) or Denzel Washington (from the movies) but she serves up just the right blend of honey and vinegar to pull off the role.  "The Equalizer's" scripts delivered roughly half of the time in the series' second season.  Just as was the case with most CBS procedurals, some episodes of "The Equalizer" fell flat, but when the show was on it could be very engaging.  Predictably, the show occasionally suffers from being overly woke, in one episode unhelpfully perpetuating the myth that white supremacists are the driving force behind the surge of attacks on Asians during the pandemic rather than the mentally ill.  And real-life wokeness cost them a cast member as McCall's mentor William Bishop was abruptly written out of the show after actor Chris Noth got MeTooed last fall.  Noth's role in the series was nominal and not central to the show's formula, but the "guilty unless proven innocent" cultural climate we live in that led to his termination left a bad taste in my mouth.  It would be nice if "The Equalizer" and other series would be less aggressive about its politics moving forward but that seems unlikely.  I'll continue to watch as long as the stories are good and the spirit of the original "Equalizer" persists.  Grade:  B

The Rookie--Yikes!  It would have been hard to imagine after my glowing review of this Nathan Filion cop show at this time in 2018 that "The Rookie" would fall from grace as far as it has.  The series' shortcomings became especially clear this season as it went forward with its first 22-episode season.  The burnout was abundantly clear with several extremely weak entries.  The series' mix of humor, action, and drama that was so effectively fused together in season 1 has grown stale and lifeless, bogged down by multiple pointless subplots added in to cut camera time for the actors.  To be fair, "The Rookie" still hit the mark a few times this year, most recently with the reclamation of respect from one-time guest star Greg Grunberg dismissed as a clownish rookie recruit and shuttled off to be a traffic cop until he proved his mettle as a worthy detective in his encore performance, doing the leg work to figure out what his tormentors could not.  There was some impressive location work in the action-packed season premiere as well, but even that seemed needlessly rushed and beset by the awkward disappearing act of a popular character played a mercurial actor who abruptly wanted out.  But far more often than not, "The Rookie" just seems tired, plodding along week after week to fill its episode order and hoping to get to 100 episodes, of which it will fall a couple of episodes short even if it gets picked up for another 22 episodes next season.  Ratings have been satisfactory for ABC, however, with "The Rookie" holding its audience better than I'd have imagined possible and assuring it of a fifth season.  Perhaps I'm being harder on this show than it deserves, but it's primarily due to the fact that it was so deft and enjoyable in its first season but has slumped so badly in the last couple of seasons.  Here's hoping they find their footing again, but generally when a show starts losing its inspiration it is very difficult to get it back.  Grade:  C-

It was quite a wake-up call for me last month when a statistic was cited on the news that 85% of Americans were now subscribed to at least one streaming service.  That's an astonishing number....a good 20 points larger than I'd have expected.  I asked some others who are a bit more plugged into this sort of thing than I am if they thought this number was viable and they seemed to agree that it was.  I'd have figured that the people who couldn't care less about TV would alone account for more than 15% of households.  The figure certainly explains why live viewing of primetime network television has declined to the point where "The Cleaning Lady" is now considered a hit show with 3.3 million viewers.

Obviously, you never say never in this life, but I'm so fundamentally opposed to the notion of the pay-per-view television model, and the inevitable proliferation of streaming services that followed the original surge of the now-ebbing Netflix, that I seriously doubt I'll join the 85%  That means I'm likely to be back next year with reviews of network television mediocrities being watched by fewer and fewer people.  That's highly disappointing for someone personally invested in both the broadcast model of free television as well as the shared cultural experiences that comes with television consumed over the airwaves by tens of millions of people at the same time.  But I've never been bashful when it comes to staging a one-man crusade against mainstream orthodoxy, so rewarding risk-averse network television will continue to be my incoherent way of sticking it to the man.