Boomer auds coping with death in primetime
One of the reasons has to be the quiet preoccupation among boomer viewers (the bulk of the audience for primetime drama, after all), about the passing of their parents, or the care needed to succor them in their final years.
A lot of things were easy for the boomers, but, like every generation before them, they are discovering that this fact of life is not.
One of the current shows that has handled the theme movingly, and never cloyingly, is "Without a Trace."
The Dec. 8 episode involved the ministrations to his father by Detective Jack Malone, who is played with brooding aplomb by Anthony LaPaglia. Martin Landau is his crotchety dad, who, among other ailments, suffers from Alzheimer's.
The scenes between the two ran the gamut from solicitude to exasperation, from incomprehension to tenderness. The sequence in which the detective tries to have his dad committed to a hospital is harrowingly true-to-life; the final sequence in which Landau agrees to enter the hospital for tests but then quietly passes away is sadly satisfying.
All of this takes place as the other detectives go about solving a missing-person's case, and a distracted LaPaglia intermittently weighs in at work. Like real-life, the crosscutting between work and home is jarringly on-target.
Also from the Jerry Bruckheimer stable, the "CSI" franchise has death as an undercurrent in the lives of the main characters. In an episode of the Vegas-set series (also Dec. 8), lead character Gil Grissom played by William Petersen, who rarely shares his inner life with colleagues, unexpectedly, even to himself, opens up.
His father died while sitting on the couch at home when Grissom was 9. It was while his mother was bringing in a tray of cold lemonade. No one, he tells fellow forensic scientist Catherine Willows, ever explained to him what had happened.
In this almost offhand exchange lasting no more than a minute, (Marg Helgenberger's glance is all that's necessary to signal the import of this revelation), more is said about Petersen's character and about how children experience death than hours of inane psychologizing on daytime TV.
And now let's give it up for Hollywood chutzpah, good and bad.
First for Viacom's Tom Freston, whodecided to make his own play for DreamWorks.
And he did it the Tinseltown way: Just picked up the phone and set up that lunch date with Steven Spielberg, even though he hardly knew the director. Freston's apparent charm, and a few subsequent well-timed phone calls by his boss Sumner Redstone, and Viacom had lured the Dreamteam out from under GE's nose in a deal most opined would boost Paramount's chances of a quick turnaround.
Then there's Steve Case. The guy who convinced Jerry Levin to sell Time Warner to his upstart AOL, essentially engineering the costliest merger debacle in media history, is floating another idea.
Having finally stepped down from the TW board, the apparently unrepentant exec now thinks the company should be broken into four pieces -- AOL, the Time publishing unit, the TW cable unit and an entertainment division (Warner, New Line, HBO and Turner).
Whatever the merits of the proposal, a lot of folks in the ranks at TW are still feeling the effects of Case mace. They'd rather entertain stock boosting ideas from maverick raider Carl Icahn than the guy they blame for their sorry 401K performance.
The TW hierarchs on the board politely declined Case's suggestion.
