The naughty and the vice

It was a hard, long year. A year I found myself at odds with a majority of the electorate.

I speak, of course, of the high ratings for “Desperate Housewives,” to which an estimated 22 million people turn weekly, but which I found sort of dumb. And its success is outpaced only by another show I don’t like much, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” finding its pornographic obsession with the mechanics of violent death far worse than anything to emerge from the chest of Janet Jackson or the mouth of Bono.

“Desperate Housewives” also made newsier news after ABC appended a cross-promotional teaser to a “Monday Night Football” broadcast that paired “DH” star Nicollette Sheridan and Philadelphia Eagle Terrell Owens in a naughty locker room encounter. FCC head Michael Powell, given an opportunity to look like a man of the people, wondered “if Walt Disney would be proud,” referring to the late founder of ABC’s corporate parent. Given the thrust of the show, which is pelvic, ABC cannot have counted any of this as bad publicity.

Taking a moment from helping to relax media ownership rules, Powell also persuaded his agency to overturn its sensible earlier decision that what might be called Bono’s “expletive delighted” at the 2003 Golden Globes was not in context obscene. Context was also at the heart of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl flap (or what the flap was torn aside to reveal, to be precise), an affront to football-loving propriety that inspired the FCC to fine 20 Viacom-owned CBS affiliates a combined $550,000 for “indecency.”

The size of this fine, and the conspicuousness of its application, along with the commission’s $1.2-million dunning of Fox for some sexual folderol on the markedly less well-rated “Married by America” -- a fine based on 90 complaints, from only 23 complainants, all but two of whom cribbed from a Parents Television Council form letter -- marked it as more a political than a custodial act. In this climate, 65 ABC affiliates opted out of joining a Veterans Day broadcast of “Saving Private Ryan,” fearing government retribution over the film’s soldierly speech.

Yet the airwaves are public space, and certain commonly held notions of proper behavior do apply there -- it’s the virtual town square, not a posted nude beach. The fact that Americans are stupidly hung up on certain words and on the human body and its factory-installed functions is beside the point. I don’t know whether people have a “right” not to be surprised by most of Janet Jackson’s naked breast -- and not even what’s usually considered the nasty part -- when all they had come for was the dainty art of football, but they certainly have the right to be offended.

More important, they have a right to complain, being shareholders in a space that the networks are only licensed to use -- CBS et al. may act as if the bandwidth belongs to them by right and in perpetuity, but the airwaves are yours, people. For all their reflexive 1st Amendment talk, the networks rarely act as if they’re custodians of a public trust; profit is overwhelmingly their motive, and the shareholders that most concern them are their own.

Indeed, the people ought to complain more, and not just those people who take their marching orders from the PTC -- an organization responsible, according to the FCC’s own figuring, for nearly all the year’s indecency complaints. No! Complain instead about tired plots and trite ideas, about product placement and the half-truths of advertisers, and the laziness of the news, and all the many other insults to intelligence that in television are business as usual.

On a more positive note:

If the major networks largely failed to bring anything fresh to the table, there were interesting things being served in the farther reaches of the dial: Trio aired the excellent Hollywood mockumentary “Pilot Season,” while Sundance Channel had Robert Altman’s election-year TV-verite “Tanner on Tanner,” with Cynthia Nixon, Michael Murphy and an impressive slate of real-life politicians and pundits.

The most reliable venues to my taste were BBC America and Cartoon Network; the former has the luxury of cherry-picking the best programs from a system more open than our own to unlikely material; the latter has the advantage of ... being cartoons. This year on BBC America brought “The Office Special,” the satisfying conclusion to a saga of less-than-quiet desperation; “The Young Visiters,” an adaptation of a Victorian novel by a 9-year-old-girl; the science-film parody “Look Around You”; the sketch sociology of “Little Britain”; and the political melodrama “State of Play.” Cartoon Network summoned up “Foster’s House of Imaginary Friends” for children of all ages, and the Hardy Boys/Johnny Quest-mutilating “The Venture Bros.,” for children of a certain age.

Being on premium cable, David Milch’s mud-and-guts western “Deadwood” could be as foulmouthed as it liked, but it was smart too -- the first fully rounded series HBO has mounted in a while. (Old reliables “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” continue brilliantly apace, the last of these featuring Mel Brooks in a kind of extended shaggy dog story whose brilliant punch line was to turn the series into “The Producers.”)

There will come a day when reality programming will loosen its grip on the culture, and the word “reveal” will go back to being a verb instead of a noun. That day will not come soon, or soon enough. But that said, I have nothing but affection and praise for Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” whose message is, “You’re already nearly perfect -- now try on this jacket.” (I like “What Not to Wear” for the same reason.) I have also been seduced by the VH1’s “My Coolest Years,” a more personal variation of its “I Love the ‘70s,” etc., franchise, in which various well-known and almost-known figures bust their high school selves as dweebs, jocks, hippies, metalheads and various other familiar flavors of loser.

“Something the Lord Made” (HBO), “Ike” (A&E;), “The Dead Will Tell” (CBS) and “The Wool Cap” (TNT) were all better than average TV movies, with much better than average performances (by Alan Rickman and Mos Def; Tom Selleck; Anne Heche; and William H. Macy and Keke Palmer, respectively). UPN’s disaffected-Nancy-Drew series, “Veronica Mars,” doesn’t quite live up to its promise, but the scenes between star Kristen Bell and father Enrico Colantoni are always real. I would also like to say an admiring word for Kelly Osbourne on ABC’s otherwise overcooked teen dramedy “life as we know it,” more natural here than she was playing herself on “The Osbournes.”

And Fox gaveth and then (after four episodes) tooketh away my absolute favorite show of 2004, “Wonderfalls,” the story of a Niagara Falls slacker assailed by advice from inanimate objects -- but the series’ 13 finished episodes will appear on DVD in February, so I can say in advance that next year will not be a total loss.