The Joy Of The One-Season Wonder

It's generally accepted that television - and, in particular, American television - has been going through something of a renaissance for the past twenty years or so. After decades where mind-numbing soaps and formulaic procedurals had dominated prime time, the appearance of shows like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Twin Peaks — shows that genuinely challenged the viewer — heralded in a new era of television.

It's not that the shows that preceded these were genuinely bad; it's just that, in order to remain competitive, networks relied upon the tried and true. There was no reason to deliver complicated, multi-threaded dramatic plots or scathing social satire to an audience that would be just as happy with the comfortable moralising of Diff'rent Strokes and the frustratingly linear narrative of Columbo.

But as the nineties approached, things gradually began to change. The biting satire of The Simpsons proved an instant hit; the "show about nothing", Seinfeld, proved to be genuinely something in the Nielsens; and the complex and surreal Twin Peaks became appointment viewing. Suddenly, the game was on: while lowest-common-denominator shows remained a mainstay (and still do), challenging, intellectual fare was recognised as more than able to hold its own.

The network upfronts would never be the same again, as more and more challenging, creative, and genre-bending shows were commissioned: Northern Exposure, Picket Fences, and thirtysomething in the earlier part of the decade; The West Wing, Sports Night, and Buffy as the new millennium approached. Cable became a breeding ground of television that could genuinely be considered art: HBO were undoubtedly the frontrunners, The Sopranos, The Wire, and Six Feet Under consistently rating atop critics' choice lists; but FX, Showtime, and AMC have got in on the act too, with the likes of The Shield, Dexter, and Mad Men, respectively. The networks continue to raise their game too: the likes of Lost, Scrubs, Friday Night Lights, and How I Met Your Mother prove even among the most mainstream channels, there's a home for inventive, cross-genre programming.

But any TV critic across the land can reel off all of these examples. These are the success stories, the shows that stayed on air for season after season - or, if not quite managing that, garnered significant hype during their first run. It's my hypothesis that there are a number of less successful shows - in many cases not even managing to last one full season - that had just as profound an effect on the televisual landscape, largely thanks to the effect they had on screenwriters-to-be.

Article Author: Wesley Mead

Wesley Mead is a politics student from England. He spends far too much time and money on DVDs. You can catch up with a range of his content from around the Internet, including lists and articles, here.

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