Going for closure

J.J. Abrams had to concede.

He’d overseen four seasons of “Felicity” and five of “Alias,” he’d kicked off “Lost” at ABC (then stepped away after Season 1). But when he landed at Fox last year with “Fringe,” things changed.

“One of the problems I’ve faced in the shows I’ve worked on is that people say, ‘I tried to follow it, then I had no idea what was going on, so I stopped,’ ” Abrams says. “Even by the end of the second season of ‘Alias,’ ABC made it clear they didn’t want a serialized show -- and we’d better make everything stand-alone, stand-alone, stand-alone.”

So with “Fringe” (though he insists Fox “never mandated anything”), Abrams decided, “Let’s do something that’s a little more inviting and, hopefully, understood.”

That’s how one of broadcast television’s most creative lights created, in essence, a procedural.

There’s a silent war going on in television drama between arc-driven “serial” shows that feature intricate, ongoing stories and the stand-alones, largely crime or legal series that begin and end a story within each hourlong episode. Just look at the stats: Since 2000, five dramas have earned best show Emmys: “The West Wing,” “The Sopranos,” “24,” “Lost” and “Mad Men.” Not a procedural among them.

But look at the longest-running shows on television today (see sidebar), and a dichotomy emerges -- when it comes to dramas, either you’re produced by Jerry Bruckheimer or Dick Wolf or you’re “24” -- covering the spread by being both long-running and a recent Emmy winner.

In fact, successful nonprocedurals are the exception rather than the rule on broadcast TV these days.

“The problem for the broadcast network is they still have to do mainstream programming,” explains Naren Shankar, executive producer of CBS’ “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” “Cable can do niche programming -- the best drama at last year’s Emmys was ‘Mad Men,’ which people love, but the audience for that show is very small. For a mainstream audience, procedurals are highly conducive for the audiences they want to attract.”

Theories abound as to why audiences love the procedural, though for Wolf, the man behind the three “Law & Order” series on NBC and USA, it’s simple: “Closed-ended stories tend to do well because viewers can come and go as they please. You don’t have to keep track of who is sleeping with who, who is having a personal crisis.”

“People in this landscape want to have the self-confidence that if they’re going to spend an hour of time to watch television that they won’t be left behind,” says Anthony Zuiker, creator of the “CSI” franchise. “If you have to do a lot of legwork to catch up, your level of engagement may not come back.”

Procedurals have always been a part of the prime-time schedule, but in recent years they’ve been considered a safe choice for a network trying to protect its investment in a show it has produced.

“In the last couple of years, CBS made some huge tries at things that were really brave and unique -- and didn’t work,” says Ed Bernero, executive producer of the CBS show “Criminal Minds.” “And now networks realize that while they get all of the benefits when shows are successes, they have to eat all of that in failure.”

Additionally, procedurals repeat well -- though syndication is less of a moneymaker than it once was, suggests Andrew Marlowe, creator-executive producer of ABC’s “Castle.”

“Every network is looking for something that syndicates well, but first-run and international is becoming more important,” he says.

Adds “Bones” creator-executive producer Hart Hanson, “A studio would like to know they’re going to be able to sell their product overseas aside from the network that’s paying the original license fee. I’m delighted with how well we sell overseas, given that we’re a fairly funny show and senses of humor are different from culture to culture. I guess joking over a dead body is a great leveler.”

There is the belief that a true procedural obsesses over the crime rather than the characters solving it -- a theory “CSI” executive producer Carol Mendelsohn soundly rejects. “Procedurals get a bum rap,” she says. “You think it’s a closed-ended thing and there’s no character development. You can’t have a good procedural without great characters.” But that denial hasn’t stopped a wave of “crimedys” (as Hanson calls Fox’s “Bones”) from emerging recently. They’re stand-alone crime dramas but with a twist.

“It is shifting a little bit,” says Cheryl Heuton, executive producer-co-creator of CBS’ “Numb3rs.” “People want to see a little more character and a little more comedy. There was a time when people thought comedy couldn’t belong [in a procedural] -- other than Lennie Briscoe’s little quips in the teaser of ‘Law & Order.’ ”

Hence the introduction of Marlowe’s “Castle” and Noah Hawley’s “Unusuals” in this season’s new offerings. Hawley is a “Bones” graduate and imported some of that sensibility with him to his own show.

“After 20 years of ‘Law & Order’ and 10 years of ‘CSI,’ the question is, why do another cop show?” says Hawley, whose ABC cop show mixed “MASH”-like humor with dramatic crime solving. “I had no interest in doing one unless I could reinvent it in some way.” But not all reinvention works: “The Unusuals” was not picked up for a second season.

Meanwhile, Joss Whedon emphasizes that his Fox show, “Dollhouse,” is not a procedural -- though he admits it may have seemed that way early on. When asked if he was encouraged by the network to make his show a procedural, he offers a different situation than Abrams’: “We were encouraged . . . if you can call shutting us down encouragement. The mission statement is ‘do stand-alone, do stand-alone, do stand-alone’ and ‘as much as possible, make it easy on the audience; don’t get involved.’ But doing a straight procedural -- that’s not something that occurs to my brain.”

Yet there is an element of truth about audience desires in those network notes: While procedurals are hardly unchallenging, they’re full of mythologies and tropes that are, at their core, reassuring.

“Procedurals offer the basics of storytelling that people want to hear,” says “Criminal Minds’ ” Bernero. “It’s very Arthurian and basic to human experience. People like to think that, while they can be scared and pull the blanket up around them, there are heroes out there who will save the day. It’s very comforting, and that’s why there will always be a huge market for cop shows: People need to know there are heroes.”

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