*Hidden Gem Alert* Party Down, Season 1
Starz? Who knew?
Let’s stop beating around the bush. When it comes to the “premier” cable channels, when it comes to *quality*, I think we can all agree on a pretty cemented hierarchy.
Anybody who knows me (or knows TV – zing!) knows that on the top of this tube totem I’m about to construct is going to be HBO. HBO is so good it’s silly. It’s like the paella of premier TV stations: with chopped up Sopranos; dashes of Six Feet Under; slices and hints of The Wire and Tell Me You Love Me; and just when you think you couldn’t fit any more onto your plate, robust and juicy chunks of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, In Treatment… The list goes on.
Showtime, then, would have to be #2. Dexter, Weeds (which everybody seems to love), This American Life, P & T, (and I still haven’t seen Nurse Jackie, or The United States of Tara, or The Tudors)….
Then, all the way down toward the bottom of the list are the channels you sometimes forget the names of. Your Cinemax–which I’m pretty sure is half-porn and original series-less. And Starz, which maybe I never gave enough credit.
Class is in session at the University of Life. Here’s a truth bomb: Nobody nowadays watches “movie channels” for the movies. Boom. Roasted.
It’s just the way it is. Red Box rentals cost a buck a piece; Netflix has in stock basically everything ever transferred to disc; and, most importantly, with any of these cheap and quick alternatives, You get to decide what’s on TV tonight. So the movie channel model has more or less become obselete. Which means that to be taken seriously in the market these days, channels like these have to prove that they can create quality original content, content that’s so good people will spring an extra 10 or 20 spot a month to see it–”premier content.”
What works with this model is, well, a ton of stuff. One thing: channels like HBO and Showtime aren’t bound by FCC regulations, so they can curse and cover their characters in blood and take off their clothes and no one bats an eye. Awesome. But what’s really the seller is the fact that they’re not bound by sponsors. They’re bound by you.
Shows on these channels don’t compete in the same way that shows on Fox or NBC do with other networks. These shows not only have cultivated an air of exclusivity about them, gathering a viewing base that’s willing to commit for 30min or an hour at a time without getting fidgety, but they’re able to do this because they’re able to tell their stories differently, construct differently the very base of their drama. Most shows, they have to prove to you in about 2minutes before the title sequence starts that this week’s episode is worth watching, or else you might change to something else or get up during commercial and forget to come back. So they have to be flashy and loud. These “high cable” channels, though, don’t have to do that. You’re on their time. And that means their plotlines can be more sprawling, less hot-and-cold and punchy. They don’t have to worry about commercial breaks and cliffhangers. They’re allowed to think less about holding your attention and more about keeping your interest. Which is an entirely different thing.
Like everything else, there are exceptions. And right now, the major network exception seems to be AMC. With only 2 original series to its name so far–Mad Men and Breaking Bad–they’re off to an amazing and focused start. And you almost have to wonder if this is so because they simply trust and respect the intelligence of their audience. Mad Men is in a league all its own where it is, but just look where its creator, Matthew Weiner, came from: HBO, late-series Sopranos work. When Mad Men goes to commercial, it doesn’t get frantic and hysterical; it kicks up its feet and lights another cigarette. It’s as if its transitions are only pauses before the start of another scene, even often fading out to them instead of quick-cutting behind noisy, screeching strings (coughLostcough). It goes to commercial break trusting that when it comes back, you’ll be waiting. And then it carries on. What a concept.
What makes Party Down special isn’t so much a sense of anti-sensationalism or freedom; it’s that it’s plain funny, and pretty deceptively smart. It reminds me a bit of a show like Arrested Development, a show that everyone will agree got screwed by its network. Constantly moved from its timeslot, advertised badly and mismarketed, Arrested never settled and found a home on Fox. It had to perform immediately for them and it couldn’t; it wasn’t that kind of show. A show like Arrested Development would have survived on an off-cable brand. Or, if nothing else, at least it would have died gracefully.
I know that in turning this meant-to-be highlight into a pretty-full-fledged essay I’m completely betraying my idea two weeks ago of “one topic, one post” entries, but when it’s flowing you have to follow it. Let me just say to wrap that I absolutely love movies. I love them. But there are very definite things about excellent TV that even excellent film just can’t match. And I think that, in large part, is thanks to these “exclusive” channels and their original content–a phenomenon that probably started as a means to keep up, a marketing gimmick, but somehow flourished in the sink to become a kind of dying medium’s penicillin.
As for Party Down, what’s to say? The videos are there and I wouldn’t want to spoil anything, anyway. It was created by Paul Rudd (Role Models), Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars), John Enbom and Dan Etheridge, it’s hands-down one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in awhile, and up to about three weeks ago I didn’t even know it existed. It’s one of those great, blue moon Netflix finds.
The start of Season 2 of Party Down airs April 23rd @ 10:00PM on Starz. And Season 1 is available now–for free–on Netflix.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 9:22 pm and is filed under essay/social crit, television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
