13. How it came to pass that true greatness was not recognized in its own time

As of mid-2000, NewsRadio is in syndication in the United States (i.e., NBC no longer runs first run episodes, but smaller stations in local markets show frequently scheduled reruns).²¹ Interestingly, the show has become more popular today than it ever was. It seems that more and more people are only now discovering just how great this show really was. A telling sign is how frequently NewsRadio quotes now appear in people’s signatures on the Internet.

NewsRadio died a quiet death in 1999, but even in 1997 it was the worst rated sitcom on NBC. Many attribute the poor ratings to the incessant scheduling changes made to the show, never allowing it to find an audience (or more correctly, never allowing an audience to find the show). The scheduling changes were so bad that it was said that even the cast’s family members could not find it. During its five seasons the show’s timeslot was moved at least seven times (some estimates have it at nine times).

Paul Simms’ infamously honest interview with Rolling Stone in April 1997 provides insight on the behind the scenes maneuvering surrounding the show.²² Of the Tuesday night slot he said, "We built in our lead-in and were winning the time slot. They thought, "Great," and moved us to Sunday where we did the same thing. Then NBC decided it needed to have 18 nights of Must See TV, so they opened up Wednesday. And we’re dying. We said, "You’ve got to do something." They said, "Don’t worry — once we’re finished launching the new shows, then it’s you guys." Then it got to midseason, and they were promoting Chicago Sons…. The whole thing has been, "You’re a strong show; these other shows need help. So they need Thursday night," which is fine at first, but we’ve done 49 episodes, and we’re almost dead. We’re the lowest-rated NBC sitcom. They killed the show, basically."²³ This interview was given during the show’s third season (when the show was still at the peak of its artistic powers). The show was then moved to Tuesday night for its whole fourth season. In the fifth season the show started on Wednesday night again, before it was moved to Tuesday night.

Despite this, Simms never changed his mind about the strength of NewsRadio: "We had a meeting with Warren Littlefield the other day, and I said, "If this show went away and I tried to do a new one with the same cast and a different concept, there’s like a 10 percent chance it would work as well as this." They told me in very blunt terms that it’s not enough for a show to be well-written and well-acted anymore. It’s about stars." Simms recalled one meeting that seems to summarize the attitude of NBC executives towards the show: "…I just had a huge argument with this guy, Preston Beckman, at NBC — the head of scheduling — who hates the show. I heard that he’d been bad-mouthing it off the record to reporters, so I confronted him. I said, "You just don’t see this show as ever having the potential to be a hit." He said, "Well, I don’t know of a lot of hit shows where the characters are so mean." "²⁴

Simms went on to comment on how most of the new shows were just copies of something that had already been done, citing The Single Guy as a copy of Seinfeld. My opinion is that there was a definite shortsightedness on the part of NBC executives. Show business executives have a notorious and mostly well-deserved reputation for bringing artistic ambition down to the bottom line. The safest way to make money, to their thinking, is to copy what worked in the past, thus giving rise in the ’80s and ’90s to an endless stream of sequels — if Speed was such a success, why not Speed 2? Unfortunately, this sort of thinking is not conducive to cultivating a sensibility capable of recognizing worthily original (or in the case of NewsRadio, profoundly unique) art. There is no art in a formula, just as there is no mise en scène in technique.

However, not everything can be blamed on NBC’s executives. Executives are people, and what they think is sure to be mirrored by segments of the general public. At least part of why the show did not have killer ratings, and one of its greatest virtues, was precisely that it did not cater to common taste. No, NewsRadio is not like Seinfeld, Frasier, Cheers, The Cosby Show or any other sitcom. It is unique in being the only morally expressive screwball comedy with a physical-verbal comedy style in television history. It is no wonder then that it was at first beyond the comprehension or taste of large segments of the general public (at least that sub-population who could find the show on a regular basis). Amongst the critics, NewsRadio had its share of supporters. Many critics recognized that the show represented something very different from conventional TV fare, even if they tended to regard it as merely one of the best shows on TV rather than a towering masterpiece. (The most demanding test of a critic’s evaluative powers is not the capability to distinguish the good from the bad but the capability to accurately differentiate the great from the good.) On the other side of the ledger, there were critics and many people who never ‘got’ NewsRadio. Then again, I suspect people like Tom Shales (The Washington Post, Oct. 23, 1996), who called the show "Might-as-Well-See TV," tuned in expecting Cheers or Seinfeld and did not know what to make of it when they were given Twentieth Century.

There is perhaps another reason why appreciation for NewsRadio could only come with time. One of the most consistently unusual things I have noticed about the show is that it seems to take people several episodes before they fully appreciate its richness. Even in my case, I think I saw half a dozen episodes before I realized that this was more than just an excellent TV comedy but actually truly great cinematic art. In its first run, NewsRadio only aired less than once a week. Today, in syndication, it airs from one to two times a night in each local market. The rapid exposure seems to provide viewers with a cumulative onslaught of the show’s devastatingly rich comedy. Our appreciation of the relationships between the characters seems to gather strength and depth across episodes, and this is why I think it takes time to love the show.

One Internet reviewer also commented on how amazing it was that his dad liked the show as well.²⁵ In this fashion NewsRadio succeeded in meeting Paul Simms’ original intention of doing "something that my parents would understand — a show that would not only make my friends laugh."²⁶ It is a testament to the universality of its comedy and its ability to express such a breadth of human conditions and desires that the show seems to appeal equally to all age groups, from high school students to senior citizens. Equally remarkable, NewsRadio seems to find equally ardent fans amongst both men and women. I hold universality and singularity to be the ultimate mathematical truths and thus the highest signs of artistic greatness.²⁷ NewsRadio is as singular as it is unique, and it is universal in its power to communicate.²⁸

Any charge that a show lacks warmth is a serious one, even if in this case it was a seriously misguided one. At the end of season five and facing cancellation, a pensive Paul Simms said in an interview, "When it comes to sitcoms, the network people all have this sort of common language — it’s all about ‘Let’s care about the characters,’ ‘Let’s find the emotional beats.’ It’s very easy to get in that mind-set…. I’ve had four years of criticism from the network about NewsRadio, about how it’s very funny but there’s no warmth, it’s too mean-spirited, none of which I really agree with."²⁹ It may very well be that the network executives are right — that what the common man really wants when he sits down in front of the television after a day at work is what he currently finds on network television: something that does not push too hard and does not ride too hard on the edge. It may be that comfort sells, albeit comfort wrapped in a ‘quality’ package.³⁰ Whether you judge NewsRadio a success or a failure ultimately depends on what you value in art (or entertainment, for those who find the notion of art on television too pretentious a concept). If everything in the world is to be judged by its commercial value, where ratings are the measure of success and the objective is to sell and make money, then NewsRadio could be accused of making an artistic mistake by not conforming to what people expect. On the other hand, there are those of us who believe that great art seeks to communicate at the highest level rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator. It is worth noting that forty years on, the austere esoterica of Carl Theodor Dreyer is widely lauded while the unsophisticated social consciousness of Stanley Kramer (who was a critical darling amongst English-language critics in his own time) looks increasingly meaningless and is increasingly ignored. To regard NewsRadio’s so-called lack of warmth as a flaw is to declare ignorance about what NewsRadio is actually accomplishing. I have never encountered any work of film art, whether television or cinematic, that made me care more about the world than NewsRadio. It is this element of human connection that NewsRadio shares with all other narrative masterpieces of this century. Ultimately, NewsRadio may have been ‘too great’ for network television, and network television is the much better for having a show like NewsRadio.

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²² Rolling Stone, April 17, 1997. It was also in this article that Simms rudely but eloquently described NBC’s hyped Must See TV Thursday night lineup as "a big double-decker shit sandwich with three good pieces of bread, and in between…."

²³ The show would survive into 1999.

²⁴ To counter Beckman’s point, the characters are noticeably meaner than others on TV, but they are really like family to each other, which is another was of saying that the richest part of NewsRadio’s art lies in the relationships between the characters. There is lot more to the art of NewsRadio than how the characters are portrayed, and only those with myopia would evaluate NewsRadio with the same criteria used for other TV shows.

²⁵ Lamb, James. Ultimate Television (web site). December 1-7, 1996.

²⁶ Wild, David. The Showrunners. (Harper Collins: New York, 1999).

²⁷ Similarly, my basis for arguing that William Shakespeare is the greatest narrative artist of all time is the singularity and universality of his art.

²⁸ Universality should not be confused with popularity. The factors that make something universal are not the same factors that make something popular.

²⁹ Wild, David. The Showrunners (Harper Collins: New York, 1999).

³⁰ Let us return to Simms’ exasperated but honest comments in Rolling Stone in 1997. (Sensitive readers may want to overlook this footnote.) "Yeah, this is the best I can do … Pretend you’re God and you say, ‘If you do a show about a single father who’s dating a lot and has two teenage sons, and it doesn’t have to be funny, and it’ll be a huge hit.’ I’d say, ‘Fuck you, God.’"