If this season has taught us one thing, it's that more networks should be down in the ratings basement more often. ABC, trailing even Fox last season in viewers, devoid of any new hits for the past few years and with one-time ratings champions like The Bachelor and even Monday Night Football fading, had nothing to lose going into this fall. Thus, it ended up airing the most exciting new shows of the season, and in doing so, turned its ratings around. The consistently suspenseful and original Lost was an early hit and the quirky nighttime soap Desperate Housewives (Sundays, 9 p.m.) is the highest-rated new show of the season.
It almost makes you (and by you, I mean me) have hope for the future of television to see Desperate Housewives at the top of the heap. The show, with a creative team including Golden Girls creator Marc Cherry and former Melrose Place executive producer Charles Pratt Jr., is a crafty mix of soap opera and dark satire, centering on four suburban women (played by Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross, Felicity Huffman and Eva Longoria) and the turmoil just below the placid surface of their everyday lives. The show is narrated by a fifth woman, a fellow suburbanite who committed suicide at the beginning of the first episode. In this way, and in a few others, it owes more than a little to American Beauty, but it's got enough other disparate influences (the pastel blandness of the neighborhood in Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, the bizarre mysteries of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, plenty of the camp of Pratt's old Melrose stomping grounds) that the result is a new take on familiar themes.
I was pleasantly surprised that the show on after Desperate Housewives, The Practice spin-off Boston Legal (Sundays, 10 p.m.), also is both entertaining and successful in the ratings. I only watched The Practice, David E. Kelley's drama about crusading Boston lawyers, a handful of times, and wasn't ever driven to become a regular viewer. I was, however, a huge fan of another Kelley Boston-based legal show, Ally McBeal, at least until its rapid decline in quality somewhere around the middle of its second season.
Boston Legal is a sort of Ally McPractice, with the quirky characters and over-the-top cases of Ally plus the slightly more grounded and serious tone of The Practice. Like most Kelley shows, it'll probably sail off the deep end sooner rather than later, but right now there's enough fun in watching ham-tastic stars James Spader and William Shatner trade verbal barbs that I'll keep watching it.
Not everything that ABC touches has turned to gold this season, either in terms of ratings or quality, though. I was doubly disappointed by the much-hyped Life As We Know It (Thursdays, 9 p.m.). To say that this teen drama is poorly scheduled would be an understatement—it's up against both CSI and The Apprentice, two of the most successful shows on TV. And, as expected, Life got trampled in its first week, even losing to wrestling on UPN. I would say it bothered me, but the show wasn't nearly as good as some critics made it out to be.
Although developed by former Freaks & Geeks writers Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah, Life is less Geeks than Creek, as in Dawson's. Focusing on three high-school boys and the girls they pursue, the show has some clever bits, including the main male characters talking directly to the camera, but the plotlines (a fling with a teacher, trying to get a girlfriend to give up her virginity, a mother engaging in an affair) are nothing new, and aren't handled with enough cleverness to spice things up. The three male leads are virtually interchangeable, but Kelly Osbourne gives a surprisingly accomplished performance as the "fat girl" romanced by one of the boys. (A world in which Kelly Osbourne is considered "fat" is a scary one indeed, but that's a whole other subject.)
It's great to see Lost, Desperate Housewives and Boston Legal succeeding, but not everything worthwhile on TV is doing well. Both UPN's clever Veronica Mars and NBC's uneven but fun LAX are fading fast but deserve chances to find audiences. Take an hour away from election coverage or baseball playoffs and give them a shot.