Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ The Origin of Alien Species

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - May 18, 1998

The Culture Industry

Why we want our television shows to die before they get old

BY KURT ANDERSEN

WE ARE ABOUT TO BEGIN a pop-cultural Lent, what historians may one day call the Time of the Great Television Endings- "Seinfeld," done; "Ellen," done; "Murphy Brown," done; "Larry Sanders," done. Why now? Because spectacular television finales have been, for the last thirty years, the unmistakable maturity milestones for the postwar generation. Because that same generation has, in adulthood, become chronically wistful. Because baby boomers are now as close to death as they are to youth.

When baby boomers were children, television series just ended, without fanfare. One season you watched "Leave it to Beaver" or "Rawhide," the next season you didn't. No one engaged in speculative water-cooler conversations-that is, drinking-fountain conversations-about the final episodes of "Combat!" or "The Dick Van Dyke Show." The series just went off the air. There were no great national chatterings, no barrages of media coverage, except, of course, the one time a real-life event led to the demise of a TV show-when Lucille Ball divorced Desi Arnaz, thus beginning the sixties.

The first time America became hysterical about the finale of a TV series was in 1967, with "The Fugitive." The show didn't simply stop arid slink away, like other series; instead, the one-armed man a is found and killed, the wrongly accused hero is retried but acquitted, justice triumphs tidily. The End. Unlike novels or movies or plays, American series television tends by its nature to defy time, p change, resolution. Like a young person who doesn't quite believe he will ever die, 3 a TV series has an implicit ontology of immortality. And so "The Fugitive" concluded startlingly and definitively in 1967, the year the first baby boomers turned twenty-one. In 1967, baby boomers were leaving home, grandparents started to die off, parents began divorcing. The Edenic American childhood was ending.

For a decade, no other show concluded in such a spectacular, galvanizing fashion. The next gala series death was that of the first Smart Modern Sitcom, the "Seinfeld" of the seventies, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." In its final episode, a new owner buys the station and fires everyone, except the moronic, unworthy Ted Baxter: Injustice triumphs. The End. How 1977: a majority of baby boomers had now passed into adulthood, their parents had begun to retire and die, and ironic disillusionment was the ascendant American paradigm.

Then came the end of "M*A*S*H." In a technical sense, “M*A*S*H" was about the Korean War, not Vietnam, but its sensibility and its success were entirely post-Vietnam artifacts: smart-alecky, ambivalent McGovernite Peter Pans putting off respectable careers in favor of an extended adolescence of casual sex and substance abuse. Its final episode the war ends, everyone goes home aired iii 1983, eight years after the Vietnam War ended. By then, the major epiphenomena of the youthquake (casual sex, stylish substance abuse, sideburns) were disappearing, and even the youngest baby boomer was old enough to vote and marry and rake our a mortgage.

Now, in 1998, every baby boomer is middle-aged. For a forty-two-year-old, let alone a fifty-two-year-old, retirement and death-one's own Final Episodes--are no longer unthinkable abstractions. And so there is suddenly just one great, overriding political issue: optimizing Social Security payouts for the twenty-first century. The deaths of Princess Diana and Linda McCartney-Linda McCartney!-would not have received nearly so much attention twenty years ago, before death was a major item on the baby boomers' agenda. Baby boomers are now interested in the warp and woof of endings, in how to wind down gracefully, comfortably; meaningfully. Moreover, because this generation is now old enough not only to have created its own beloved TV series but to see the shows die after good long runs, America is being forced to spend the rest of May obsessively picking over final episodes of four echt-boomer sitcoms- "Seinfeld," this week, along with "Ellen," "Murphy Brown" next week, then "The Larry Sanders Show."

For baby boomers, who tend to be nostalgia addicts as well as narcissists, these shows have provided crypto-nostalgia in contemporary drag-life the way it was for a forty-something hack in nineteen-seventy-something main characters on "Seinfeld," "Ellen," and "Larry Sanders" are all over thirty-five but are single and childless: free to be charmingly self-involved and fun-loving. (Murphy Brown is still single; after she acquired a child, the show's ratings went into serious decline.) Indulging this realtime nostalgia for the late sixties and seventies, the modern ideal of perpetual youth and permanent hominess, is now the goal of the American pharmaceutical industry as well: fifty-year-old men are paying whatever it costs to score the new Austin Powers miracle drugs, Viagra and Propecia, the way they used to pay whatever it cost to score Quaaludes and acid.

So which is it: a generation finally ready to grow up, finally facing the fact that life doesn't go on forever? Or seventy-nine million vain, goofy' people who want to believe they're wild and crazy right up to the instant of brain death? Both, of course. Having it all is the baby-boomer
dream. ©