Word: hbo
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...drug use, its heavy violence and its protagonist, a Mexican crime lord shipping coke and crystal meth to American kids. But its greatest liability may be today's yes-you-can-do-that-on-TV culture. In the wake of R-rated, critically acclaimed and successful cable shows like HBO's The Sopranos and FX's The Shield, network TV has found audiences increasingly blase about sex and violence. This season Jack Bauer killed and decapitated a prisoner on 24, and a helicopter blade lopped off Dr. Romano's arm on E.R., while on Friends, married couple Monica and Chandler...
...Kingpin is the most obvious effort so far to see if a network can re-create HBO's success, it also raises the question of what makes an HBO success. It's not just blood, the F word and nudie shots: even if you stripped Jill Hennessy naked and had her kill men with piano wire, Crossing Jordan would still not be an HBO show. Brad Grey, who produces The Sopranos and several network series, says the difference is a strong point of view and subtle, adult storytelling. "At times that calls for looser standards and practices than the networks...
...dramas, people talk like they do, well, on TV: they say exactly what they're thinking and have crystal-clear motives. Swear words and skin rarely cost viewers or ad revenue anymore, but complex stories and strong points of view are polarizing. Love-'em-or-hate-'em shows fit HBO's business model: the gleefully misanthropic Curb Your Enthusiasm is a hit for HBO because a few million people like it intensely enough to pay for it. But a network, which needs lots of eyeballs to sell to advertisers, would prefer 25 million viewers who don't dislike a show...
...ABSTAIN HBO announced last week that Sex and the City will air for only one more season. But fans have a long time before they can roll over and go to sleep. The final season will consist of 20 episodes, with 12 to begin airing in June and the rest next January. Of the show's stars--from left, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis--the middle two recently had babies and presumably now need sleep more than...
...more down-home John Ashcroft?) Hollywood's crime stories were neither uniformly authoritarian nor bleeding heart. FX's cop drama The Shield introduced Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), a crooked, brutal--and extremely effective--L.A. cop, and left it up to us to decide whether his results justified his means. HBO's The Wire used the story of a single Baltimore drug investigation as a parable for the crisis of confidence in American institutions. Its conflicted, bureaucracy-ridden cops could just as well have been wearing priests' collars or Enron workers' pinstripes. And in Minority Report, we learned that a futuristic...