MTV's Jersey Shore flexed its muscles.
We’ve covered the best and the worst of TV in 2010: now for the biggest. After the jump, a selected list of some of the stories that shaped TV (and by which TV shaped the culture) in 2010, and your invitation to suggest more:
* The Rise of Great Cable. This is a story long in the works, but particularly with the continuing rise of AMC (not to mention FX, and the post-Sopranos resurgence of HBO), it felt like 2010 delivered something like a critical mass of high-quality shows on cable. With the exception of comedy (in which the broadcast networks still compete), if it was worth talking about on TV last year, it was a fair bet it was on cable. And there’s no sign of that changing.
* The Rise of Mediocre Cable. But though people like me pay most of our attention to the Mad Men and Walking Deads of the world, as much or more important were cable’s burgeoning army of middle-of-the-road shows, like the record-setting Rizzoli and Isles, which now compete on the same ground (and sometimes to similar ratings) as the less-ambitious big-network shows. For that matter…
* The Rise of Crappy Cable. …arguably the signal TV-biz watershed of the year was Jersey Shore, which, whatever you may think of it as a possible sign of the apocalypse, also went head-to-head this fall with original network competition on Thursday, the most-watched night of the week, and destroyed the competition among the advertising demographic.
* Broadcast’s Surrender. OK, an exaggeration. But with rare exceptions, the fall schedule this year suggested that, in the wake of Lost, the networks were pretty much done taking creative chances on anything. (An odd attitude, frankly, given that one of the few broadcast smash hits of 2009 was Glee, which is nothing if not risky.)
* The Jaypocalypse. I don’t need to elaborate on this for you, but on top of the endless entertainment that NBC’s Tonight Show meltdown brought—on TV and on Conan’s live tour—it also left us with a new status quo in the late-night ratings. On any given night now, in the 18-to-49 demo that determines the ratings, the late-night leader could be Jay on NBC or Dave on CBS or Conan on TBS—or, increasingly, Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. All white guys, true, but a bigger group of them with no one dominant anymore.
* Betty White. Look, I’m sure that on some level even Betty White is sick of hearing about the miracle of Betty White. But the octogenarian actress’s year-long comeback was testimony both to the power of new social media and to the ageless staying power of talent.
* Cord-Cutting. I’ve always been suspicious, in the absence of hard numbers, whether the much-talked-about phenomenon of people giving up cable and satellite entirely to save money was as big as it was hyped up to be. But this year we saw real, if still creeping, evidence that cord-cutting is real. And there’s more serious talk of TV businesses changing to adapt to the phenomenon, as when HBO entertained the idea of making subscriptions available online.
* CNN Hits Bottom. Well, maybe not exactly bottom, but the news channel suffered through one report after another of embarrassingly dipping ratings. And for all the talk of the news channel retooling its primetime—where its fortunes have been worst—its first replacement show this year, Parker/Spitzer, not only got trashed by critics like me but drubbed in the ratings worse than the Campbell Brown show it replaced.
* TV as Political Launch Pad. We already know you can’t throw a remote today without hitting a Palin, but potential GOP candidates Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich also now have TV deals with Fox News and its rich trove of potential GOP primary voters. Whether their efforts can translate into votes and not just ratings for Fox (and ABC, and TLC) is, I suspect, one of the topics I’ll be running down on this blog in a year or two.