"TV is getting better."

My friend, Karen Hall put a post up yesterday that has good news about the upcoming TV season. It's under the heading "Attention TV Nerds" - because I don't know how to link to a specific post on somebody's blog.... Sigh....

Here's a snip...

TV is getting better. A lot better. Cable, which was largely responsible for its unraveling, as we all struggled to understand the New World, has ended up being the thing that raised the bar and forced network TV to strive for something better -- for mercenary reasons, but what the heck. The revolution had to start somewhere.

I'm a little shell-shocked to watch what I do for a living come back from the dead. My goal, back in 1979 (woof) when my career began, was to write for the 10%. The shows like M*A*S*H and Hill Street Blues and others that I defined as floating atop the sea of garbage. As the years went by, that 10% shrank to 5%, and then 3%... Not that I was raising my standards, mind you. What I wanted to do for a living, and what I'd always done for a living, was going away. Not just the shows that aimed higher, but the shows that were built around characters. Eventually, between reality programming and "procedurals" like the CSIs, there was no room for character drama. Year after year, my agents (and optimistic friends, not that I have many) would predict its return. Year after year, they'd be wrong.

....And then I sold "Vows." That caused me to take a look at what was going on in television, which caused me to realize that everything has taken a turn away from procedurials and back to characters. What I do was coming back.