The Network TV Season That Was

Up to then, most shows came in batches of 13 episodes per season, so the season would start sometime in late September of early October and end sometime in January with time off for all the insipid Christmas specials.

But around this same time, something really significant happened, in that the so called cable networks, HBO most significant among them, which had been around but no big deal for that past 15 years or so, started airing The Sopranos.

The Sopranos was seen as the series that really put HBO on the map with mainstream audiences, and since then the rest is pretty much TV history right up to Game of Thrones, which just completed its life cycle a couple of weeks ago.

The key thing about The Sopranos was that for the first time the mainstream networks were faced with significant competition from what was, at least to them, a minor player.

One of their first reactions was to create more programming. This brought about the idea known as the Second Season of series that would start in January and February and run right through the spring.

Today with the most popular shows running 23 episode seasons, the Second Season now kinda starts in mid May and goes right through the summer with shows like So You Think You Can Dance and America’s Got Talent and a bunch of other competition shows that I couldn’t care less about.

Today, many of the regular season shows don’t re-run but, go to streaming services like Prime or Netflix or Crave, which are the three biggies here or get re-run on other specialty channels. So the fear of missing out on anything you really want to see has been drastically reduced by technology. The cable companies like Bell, Shaw, Cogeco and Rogers also archive many of the network shows so you can watch them on demand with little commercial breaks that are mostly just promos for other shows and generally only 30 to 60 seconds.

The Regular Season Shows I Liked Best (Top 5 and Honorable Mentions)

This is a fabulous vehicle for lead/character actor James Spader who plays a totally badass high-end criminal mastermind named Raymond Reddington, who turns himself into the FBI one day and makes a deal to exchange ratting out other badasses of his acquaintance in exchange for immunity.

This show is really a first class network TV drama. The individual episode story lines are fabulous and the over-arching relationships are mysterious and dark. For anyone who likes their drama on the heavy duty side, this is Valhalla.

This is an ensemble crimes series about a family named Reagan who are all involved in the criminal justice system in New York City.

They are tight knit and ruggedly individual, but they are also a devoted family. It sounds kinda soapy, but it’s really not. It’s good solid drama anchored by the great Tom Sellick as the NYPD Commissioner.

This series just wrapped up its 12th and final season, and will probably go down as the best ensemble comedy series since All In The Family.

There probably isn't anyone who hasn’t seen at least one episode of this series, which is all about a group of high end science nerds and their various better halves who work at a California Polytech. While all the performers are fabulous, Jim Parsons leads this pack with his portrayal of Sheldon Cooper, an innocently egocentric genius whose friends all love him in spite of himself.

This series was created by true comedy genius, Chuck Lorre. This is from his Wikipedia page.

“Called the "King of Sitcoms" during the 2010s, he has created and produced sitcoms including Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Mike & Molly, Mom, Young Sheldon, and The Kominsky Method. He also served as an executive producer of Roseanne. In 2019, he received his first Golden Globe Award for his series The Kominsky Method.”

That’s all you need to know.

First of all I don’t medical shows, because they were ruined for me by Hugh Laurie series House, which made most other medical shows like like docudramas in comparison. So I don't watch Chicago Med.

Chicago Fire is about a busy firehouse, and is one of the better ensemble shows on TV. It explores, and pretty completely the complex relationships these people have with each other really showcases the dedication that, I assume, most firefighters have to their work.

Both these series are products of the Dick Wolf Company, which over the years has produced some of the best TV cop dramas of all time.

This series is about what politics in Washington would be all about with virtually any president other than Trump. Tea Leoni plays a lady named Elizabeth McCord, who got promoted from the high end of the CIA to Secretary of State.

This is show is a little predictable and jingoistic, but what;’s interesting about it is really the two-family dynamic that in on display, and it’s done well. She has her own family, with 3 kids and a husband who is a religious scholar/CIA analyst, and she has her work family, which consists of a bunch of really smart Washington Insiders.

And even though she is using her ‘cleverness’ to solve all kinds of big time diplomatic problems, there’s a real feeling here that there are people in the vast army of the US bureaucracy who are genuinely dedicated to helping and protecting the US democracy, such as it is.

This is the first spinoff from The Big Bang Theory, which is all about Sheldon Cooper’s early life in his home state of Texas. This is an amazingly warm and funny ensemble show, about a regular southern family who just happens top have a genius for a son.

Everybody in this series is likeable in their own ways, especially the great Annie Potts who plays Sheldon’s grandmother (or MeMaw). This series is done without a laugh track, which makes it more of a dramady than a straight comedy and it is, of course produced by Chuck Lorre, of whom, if you haven’t already figured out, I am a big fan of.

The Honorable Mentions

I could go on profiling the shows I like but this post has enough narrative. So here’s a list of some of the other good stuff coming from the main networks.

The Enemy Within

FBI

Will & Grace

SWAT

Seal Team

Bull

The Orville

Star Trek Discovery

The Rookie

The Fix

For The People

Sorry but this list isn’t very long. Mainly because network TV like everything else falls into the 80/20 Differential.In the case of network TV, IMHO it’s more like 90/10.

Jim out

Jim is also an ex-ad agency writer and art director and has run his own creative consultancy, Onwords & Upwords, since 1989. He lives with his wife in the Niagara area of Ontario, and works with companies that are trying to make a difference in the world.

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