Roush on In Treatment
Question: In your April 14 column,
Grant seems very quick to write HBO off like many others, but I'm with you. It's inevitable that a network's "untouchable" period can't last forever, as evidenced by NBC's rough periods after the late '80s and again earlier this decade. Times like that are, in the long run, healthy and necessary for networks because it keeps things from getting too stale. Instead of reaching a point where HBO might've gotten lazy, now it has to really strive to keep pushing the envelope and breaking new ground. Network dry spells encourage creative recalibration, which benefits everyone. ABC would never be where it is today with shows like
Lost and
Desperate Housewives if that awful slump hadn't forced them to go outside the box for something different. And now some years later, other innovative shows like
Pushing Daisies are benefiting from that new direction. Never assume a Hollywood superpower to be down for the count. I also question Grant's judgment about
In Treatment. I know it was a ratings bust, but it's one of the best American series ever produced, with some real powerhouse performances. I'd like to see HBO take a
real gamble and show they mean business with quality TV by bringing Paul and his patients back next year.
— Duante
Matt Roush: There's long been a belief that in all things TV, everything is cyclical, and that includes the fortunes of producers, genres and of course individual networks, even a powerhouse like HBO. Slumps in the wake of blockbuster breakthroughs (like
Sex and the City and
The Sopranos) are perhaps inevitable, but I think you can pinpoint the night that HBO followed the finale of
The Sopranos with the premiere of
John From Cincinnati (which by all rights should have been the fourth-season opener of
Deadwood) as the true beginning of the current backlash. That and programming two downbeat series involving therapy back-to-back in HBO's fall and winter cycles. It
has been reported that because of the effects of the strike, HBO's usual summer staples will be postponed until fall, and it's at that point that we should re-examine the network's creative fortunes. That and the decisions made by the network's newly installed programming chief. I wouldn't view the fate of
In Treatment as another turning point. It was an honorable experiment (one I appreciated more for the acting than for its structure, which I've said before I found monotonous), but should this series fall between the cracks of the regime change, that's not reason enough to lose faith in HBO's ability to get back in the game.
