Of the top 15 shows for the 2005-2006 network TV season, I only watch only one—CBS' Survivor—regularly. When coworkers gab endlessly about American Idol, or my mom calls to tell me what she saw on CSI last night, I have only a vague idea of what they're talking about.
So I decided to take another look at TV's most popular shows, to see what I'd been missing. Summertime is still largely the season of reruns, so it was easy to catch up on CSI, Desperate Housewives, Without a Trace, Grey's Anatomy and House, which ended the season as the second-, fifth-, sixth-, eighth- and 11th-most-watched shows on network TV. (I skipped reality shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, which don't repeat over the summer, Monday Night Football for obvious reasons and CSI: Miami out of a consideration for redundancy).
The key to TV success, it seems, is repetition: CSI, Without a Trace and House are deeply, purposely formulaic, following the same basic structure each episode and providing viewers a familiar, safe experience. In the first two, character development is kept at an absolute minimum, although there are flashes of it, and the handful of episodes I watched weren't enough to get the full impact that no doubt presents itself over the course of an entire season or two.
Since both are repeated daily (CSI on Spike TV, Without a Trace on TNT), I found that they were often on while I was eating dinner or doing other things, and I caught more snippets of episodes than I did full hours sitting down to watch on purpose. These mystery-of-the-week shows are easy to turn on midshow, catch up on fairly quickly and ride out until the end, the natural inclination to figure out whodunit (or, in the case of House, whatdiseasedunit) overriding other, more pressing real-life concerns. As long as the writing is clever enough to keep you guessing, the average viewer will stick around.
The same is largely true for House, which substitutes murder mysteries or missing-persons cases with medical conundrums, with the solving led by Hugh Laurie's titular cranky doctor. House has a greater emphasis on character and continuity, and consequently I found myself more frequently in the dark about what was going on. But even the extended plot arc about House pursuing his former love (played by Sela Ward), which spanned the episodes I saw, never distracted from the focus on the patient of the week.
Having watched the first season of Desperate Housewives and grown increasingly annoyed with the haphazard plotting, repetitive jokes and broad characterization, I have a feeling that the only reason the show remains popular is by coasting on its rapidly diminishing reputation. The two second-season repeats I saw were not horrible, but they were far from compelling, and the show has become so fragmented that it's like watching four different programs, one about each of the main housewives, and the writers clearly struggle to find reasons to have them all gather together. Housewives is a heavily serialized show, one that rewards loyalty and close attention. CSI, Without a Trace and House likely have large pools of casual viewers that change from week to week, while Housewives relies more on a cadre of dedicated fans, one that is slowly dwindling and will probably continue to do so.
Even with its rapid decline in quality, though, Housewives remains sort of entertaining in its snarky, cynical way, anchored by strong, distinctive performances, and I didn't hate watching it again after having given up on it.
The only show in this exercise that really annoyed me was the medical-drama sensation Grey's Anatomy, which started to build its audience on Desperate Housewives' strong ratings, only to surpass its lead-in's success to such a degree that ABC is moving it opposite CSI next season. I found the early episodes of the show drippy, whiny, predictable and solipsistic when I first reviewed it, and coming back to watch some second-season installments didn't change my assessment. This is the one popular show that remains a bit of a mystery to me, since its relationship stories are second-rate WB fodder and its medical drama pales in comparison to any given episode of House.
Although Grey's and Housewives are less formulaic than the procedural shows, that doesn't make them inherently better, and the procedurals can get a lot of mileage out of breaking with their formula once it's been established (an episode of CSI featured four overlapping mysteries, with the action moving back in time after each was solved to go on to the next). I'll probably stick to the slightly more unconventional fare that I prefer, but knowing these reliable shows are around and successful is a comfort of sorts, as it certainly must be for the people who put them at the top of the ratings pile each week.