Late '80s

I don’t have much to say about last night’s shows (Scrubs finale which may or may not have been a finale, good episode; American Idol, the last woman gets voted off and Paula gets to lip-synch), but I do have something to say about shows from 20 years ago. Which kind of sums up my whole worldview, but anyway: After the news broke that Thirtysomething was to be released on DVD, I remembered something that Marshall Herskovitz wrote a couple of years ago. He wrote that when he and Edward Zwick did that show, ABC hardly ever gave them notes. Now, his main point — that he was going to produce awesome shows for the web, thereby bypassing network interference — turned out to be very wrong. But his other point was that network shows in the late ’80s often received fewer notes than they do now, and that seems to be true. You don’t often hear the late ’80s discussed as a golden age of television, and I’m not sure that I would call it that. But the period from approximately 1986 to 1990 does seem to have been a time of surprising freedom in U.S. television, particularly for showrunners.