Television thinks outside the box

If Hollywood is high school with money, as the old quip goes, then this fall TV season is one whopping schoolyard game of "top this." If you liked that sexy mystery in "Desperate Housewives" and that crazy polar bear in the middle of the "Lost" tropics, get ready for a blizzard of aliens and monsters, romances and intrigues, unmatched in popular media since Rod Serling first put the Twilight Zone up for our national consideration.

Now that ABC's two monster hits have dominated TV ratings, writers in every genre of television are reporting that networks have thrown open the doors, even to the craziest ideas. In recent years, television dramas have been narrowly focused on tidy shows about grizzled investigators in lab coats and trench coats who solved each case before the end of the hour. Procedural shows like "CSI" are as popular as ever. But this fall, serials are making a comeback. Networks are embracing high-concept premises, large ensemble casts, multiple plotlines, parabolic character arcs, and cliffhanger episodes that demand viewer patience from week to week - a kind of storytelling that has been distinctly out of fashion since the era of "Twin Peaks."

"The procedural or closed-end mode of storytelling has dominated for many years," says producer Shaun Cassidy. But now, he says, it has finally given way to a broader canvas. Cassidy's "Invasion," a new ABC drama about an alien invasion amid a hurricane in Florida, layers hints about body snatching on top of a community's struggle to rebuild and a family's effort to reunite after divorce and devastation.

Writer Paul Scheuring says when he pitched a TV show two years ago about a mild-mannered engineer who gets himself thrown in jail in order to break out his wrongfully convicted brother, network executives said, "Next." Fox later greenlit the show, titled "Prison Break," after "Lost" became a huge hit.

"Prison Break" and "Invasion" are just two of nearly a dozen dramas capitalizing on the new trends, including CBS's "Threshold," ABC's "Night Stalker," WB's "Supernatural," and CBS's "Ghost Whisperer."

To be sure, the procedurals haven't been buried. Veteran crime show producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("CSI," "Without a Trace,") is back with a 10th series, "E-Ring," set in the Pentagon. And audiences as well as networks still warm to programs that start with a dead body and conclude with a body of evidence against the killer. They're easy to dive into for first-time viewers and they do well in reruns.

But the eagerness to own the next hit has everyone from writers on the new shows to producers of ongoing dramas drinking from Hollywood's heady new brew. Even stalwart procedurals are tipping their tales more in the direction of stories that don't wrap into neat body bags each week.

Page: 1 | 2