Happy Medium:

A Nice New York and Other Prime-Time Fables

by Ana Marie Cox

My folks were the kind of good liberals that never admitted to watching TV. We kept our television in a closet, and when company came over my mom shut its doors. When we did discuss television, it was with an ironic embarrassment meant to both acknowledge and distance its presence in our lives. We talked about our racist relatives the same way.

I've been living on my own for a while now, and while I still don't talk to Uncle Chuck or Aunt Wilma much, I've welcomed television into my life. Income levels change, parents get divorced and friends move away, but television is always there. I don't mean the individual shows themselves so much as the mere fact of television.

My mom always told me that if I watched too much TV my brain would turn to mush. Though the image was not without a certain gory resonance, the prediction did little to dissuade me. Perhaps I subconsciously realized what mom never took the time to notice herself: it wasn't my mind that turned to mush, it's television. The anonymity of its locales (Can anyone even pretend to know where Roseanne is set?) means that TVs gone soft on detail, and the clichéd star-hopping which has the ER doctors patching up Friends has shows melting into each like ice cream.

Not that this is anything new. No one knew where the Beaver went to school either, and cross-promotion is as old as bandwidth. Still, recent stories in the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly suggest that TV's commitment to even a modicum of realism has taken a deep plunge. And maybe they're right: Melrose neighbors that don't ever seem to lock their doors? A hospital (two, actually) where the first question isn't "Are you insured?"

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But few articles have addressed these particular flights of videotaped fantasy. Nope, all they wanted to talk about was New York. I doubt if anyone will care or even notice if Tony Danza fails to stroll by Maxwell's in the Hoboken-based Hudson Street. Few will raise an outcry if the Chicago-set Pursuit of Happiness gives the wrong address for Wrigley Field. But shows set in New York -- and this season brings the count well into the double-digits -- are put to a higher test.

Those screaming nellies who bemoan the other-worldly apartments of Friends or snicker incredulously at the luxuriously barren desks of the editors on Central Park West seem to think that it should mean something that a show is set in New York. It takes a neophyte New Yorker like myself to see that the sins committed against New York by both NYPD Blue (not even filmed on location) and The Single Guy only mean that New York City has become, at least in the popular imagination, what suburbia became long ago: a backdrop, a generic reference point that serves not so much to locate a scene but to explain its location away.

That urban shows even bother to identify their location seems dated somehow, a vestige of a time when places were actually different from each other. Descriptions of new fall shows already read like shockingly uncreative mad libs, where Single [occupations] in [major city] try to make it on their own. Certainly the day when citified citycoms finally follow the Simpson's lead and give up even the suggestion of a fixed location draws near indeed. In the future, will there even be a need to say what hip urban center you're in if they're all equidistant from a Barnes and Noble Superstore anyway? Call it the Starbucking of prime time.

The New York which hides behind the pre-fab sets of Caroline in the City, The Preston Episodes, or any one of the scores of city-coms this season brings, is an emasculated Manhattan, as predictable as a McDonalds and just as clean.

Part II - True Stories