Turn-ons amid those turn-offs

When you’re a TV critic, the vans show up. Multiple times a day, off-loading content. One of the more obvious problems in a many-hundred-channel universe is this -- there’s too much on, too many niche channels, too many shows.

But that volume, by the end of the year, helps too: The best shows emerge like beacons in a sea of hype and dreck. I’m thinking of “Deadwood,” the HBO series about the Old West -- the Old West reimagined by series creator David Milch as a lawless place where alcoholics stand around eating canned peaches and talking in salty soliloquies about good versus evil, power versus powerlessness, the future versus the past.

To watch it is to be jolted. Wildly entertaining, “Deadwood” seemed a period piece, but then later in the year the presidential race heated up, and with it the cowboy rhetoric about huntin’ down the enemy and findin’ him where he sleeps, and you could feel the resonance. Iraq, another all-too-real version of “Deadwood,” was the backdrop for the race; suddenly the Old West seemed an apt metaphor for the TV year.

And yet, we must remember that TV is a mass-market business, most successful when it’s companionable without being heavy. “Deadwood” averaged around 4.5 million viewers in its first season; by contrast, 52.5 million people tuned in to see the “Friends” finale in May, after 10 seasons on the air. I don’t remember how they ended it -- do you? Or what happened, finally, on “Sex and the City,” which bowed out in February?

Still, hats off -- “Sex” got a tremendous amount of mileage out of shoes and vibrators. “Friends,” by contrast, inched to its conclusion, while that same month “Frasier” and the inexhaustible Kelsey Grammer ended an 11-year run of great ensemble acting wrapped around thin bedroom farce, having seen the show’s audience dwindle.

Into the void left by these shows entered ... well, not very much. Fox renewed its low-rated, soulless “Arrested Development,” sounding increasingly petulant that America didn’t get how smart it was -- it won the Emmy for best comedy writing! -- while CBS added another egg to Jerry Bruckheimer’s basket, ordering “CSI: NY” to go with “CSI” and “CSI: Miami.” (It’s easy to understand the popularity of procedural shows like the “CSI” and “Law & Order” franchises, but they leave me cold. The lead characters tend to be automatons, character depth coming only in small doses each week from the victim or the accusers.)

The broadcast networks’ death embrace with the sitcom format this year only made cable seem like that much more of a nightclub -- a place where you might actually see the noble purpose of comedy, which is to speak truth to power. Or, in the case of “Da Ali G Show,” to ask Sam Donaldson, “boss man of ABC News,” to discuss Nixon’s “Waterworld crisis.”

I was behind the curve on “Da Ali G Show,” finding it over the summer during its second season on HBO. I discovered that it was, simply, the freshest comedy on TV -- a sketch show starring one man, Sacha Baron Cohen, as three characters. The main one, Ali G, is a hip-hopper who conducts newsmaker interviews with surprisingly big guests, including former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Ali G adds a Boutros), and Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director. What’s great about the interviews is the way Cohen embeds the social commentary in his apparently nonsensical questions, as when he got Kerr to speculate on whether terrorists could drive a train into the White House.

Along with “Da Ali G Show,” “Chappelle’s Show,” on Comedy Central took what has become a museum exhibit -- the “SNL”-style sketch comedy show -- and demonstrated the excitement that’s still possible within the format. It has the feeling of play, of being loose and topical, commenting on the culture in a joyfully lawless way. (“The Daily Show” continued to be lawless in ‘04, but by the end of the election, with Jon Stewart canonized as a kind of liberal media saint and a “Daily Show” book on the bestseller lists, the show’s miscreant spirit was being crowded out by a kind of mass-market media embrace.)

By the time “Chappelle’s Show” wrapped its second season in the spring, NBC, which had long been able to boast of being the home of the best mix of scripted comedies and dramas in prime time, found itself boasting of a scuzzy show in which people are pretend-fired by Donald Trump on its now credulity-straining “Must-See TV Thursday.” ABC, heretofore the home of Red State-friendly family sitcoms and dramas nobody watched no matter where they lived, became the network of two good-looking new shows -- “Lost,” from “Alias” creator J.J. Abrams, and “Desperate Housewives,” a frothy prime-time soap for the Pottery Barn generation, concerning fortyish, cul-de-sac-dwelling suburban hotties in various stages of marital and parental frustration. The hype got ahead of itself, but at least watching “Desperate Housewives” makes me feel a little quaint guilt, like peeking at the Victoria’s Secret catalog when I know there’s better porn out there.

But all of this was taking place against the most relentless TV show of the year -- the presidential race. It was the year I got to know -- and like -- Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” heretofore lumped in with the other pundit pit bulls. Matthews not only has the metabolism for cable news, he has the breadth of knowledge and experience to call the spinners on their spin. He knows more than they do, you sense -- he’s been a print journalist, a speechwriter for President Carter, and an aide to Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill.

It was Matthews’ intransigence, in fact, that produced one of the more bizarre live TV moments of the year, when Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia walked out on Matthews during an interview. It was a good year to see real life spontaneously combust on your TV, from Janet Jackson’s bustier to a brawl at an NBA game that was shocking at first but began, after repeat viewing, to look like fun. But for me, the image that sticks is Osama bin Laden addressing America five days before the election. “I wonder about you,” he tells America, and: “Contrary to what Bush says and claims -- that we hate freedom -- let him tell us then, why did we not attack Sweden?” Think about it: The Al Qaeda leader, the unseen mortal enemy, appears on our TV sets at the height of election fever like a cartoon villain out of science fiction.

Bada-bing

But in a year in which the sudden reveal stole our attention much of the time, some things were happily predictable. In ‘04, “The Sopranos” remained TV’s prize package -- writing and acting that has coalesced into story so seamlessly that you rarely if ever glimpse any artifice. This year the show came back for a fifth season, from March to June, building expertly to the moment when a supporting character, Adriana (Drea de Matteo), is bumped off after her mob family learns she’s become an FBI informant. If the plotting was dramatically big, it was the little scene preceding it that shows why “The Sopranos” is exceptional TV.

In that small space of TV time, Adriana’s fiance, Christopher (Michael Imperioli), having agreed to join her in the witness protection program, goes to get a pack of cigarettes and watches a young family pile into a car. That’s it. We then learn, as Adriana is driven to the woods and plugged from behind as she flees, that offstage, her lover has changed his mind. In a year in which viewers lost a number of their favorite characters, it was this mob death, oddly, that was handled in the most dignified way.

Paul Brownfield can be reached at calendar.letters@

latimes.com.