Saying a bittersweet (if inevitable) good-bye to "The Good Guys"

Could The Good Guys have found an audience? We'll never know.

by Ken

Over the weekend I caught up with the two-hour season finale of Burn Notice, which lived up to expectations: a fine supsense-filled end game playing out for "the list" that burned spy Michael (Jeffrey Donovan) and his reluctant partner Jesse (Coby Bell) have been chasing all season, with lots of laughs along with a healthy dose of suspense, and a core cast of characters it's been easy to care about, in the form of the only people Michael can really trust, his friends Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar) and Sam (Bruce Campbell) and his mom, Maddy (Sharon Gless). The show's creative team also brought back as many of the memorable characters they've created along the way: the shady spymaster Vaughn (Robert Wisdom), the presumed-dead crackpot ex-operatives Brennen (Jay Karnes) and Larry (Tim Matheson), self-promoting Congressman Cowley (that virtuoso portrayer of sophisticated goons John Doman).

But then, Burn Notice has always cast extremely effectively. This seems to me in general a major advantage that the new world of cable series has all over the tired old regimes of the broadcast networks: The cable shows simply cast better actors, while the networks tend still to be hung up on prettiness and "popularity" ratings.

Burn Notice will be back in the summer, having been renewed by USA for a fifth and sixth season. Meanwhile creator Matt Nix's more recent series, The Good Guys, for Fox, seems finally to have been put of its misery. I gather it's more or less official now that the episode that aired last week was the last. Previously, on "TV by the Numbers" Robert Seidman had been listing the show as "certain to be canceled" (the category that falls between "likely to be canceled" and "already canceled"), commenting in his "Bubble Watch":

There are a few diehard fans who think The Good Guys will be coming back as a summer series. Don’t hold your breath. Its woeful ratings more than outweigh any benefit of being relatively low cost.

That last episode wasn't a bad way to go out, with a return appearance by Gary Cole as semi-legenday Dallas detective Frank Savage, retired partner of Det. Dan Stark (Bradley Whitford), of Savage & Stark "fame." Once upon a time, in 1980 to be exact, the detectives effected the safe return of the kidnapped son of the governor, exploits that were immortalized in a TV movie -- not just a movie, as Dan is known to point out, but a movie of the week!

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. In one episode we even got to meet the grown-up former kidnap victim, inescapably raising the question of whether his safe return was all that fortunate an outcome. Dan meanwhile lives on in the memory of that glory. We met him trying to inculcate his, er, "values" into his bright, ambitious, and yet vaguely maladroit young partner, Det. Jack Bailey (Colin Hanks). Most of Dan's conversation is an endless barrage of "me 'n' Frank" anecdotes and pearls of wisdom. So it was quite a thrill when we actually got to meet Frank, living a sedately normal life under the ever-wtachful eye of a wife on the lookout for any signs of a return to his previous self.

It wasn't an especially grabbing premise, but there was something about the show that kept me coming back. I don't know whether I was more intrigued or put off by seeing Bradley Whitford doing something so different from the roles the had made so indelibly his own, on The West Wing and the short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In our clip above, made of course when everyone was filled with hope for the show, he tells us that the very differentness of the character was what attracted him to it, and he certainly showed us some range.

It wasn't just the offputting appeal of the characters that worked against The Good Guys attracting an easy audience. Creator Nix had settled on a story-telling format that involved jumping around in time, so that we were always seeing scenes followed by scenes labeled "five minutes earlier" or "one day earlier" or the like. Breaking Bad does a little of this too, but only occasionally and carefully. Used the way The Good Guys did, the trick came out as slever but fatiguing if you weren't psyched for it. Indeed I found the episodes piling up on my DVR something of a trial.

Interestingly, though, I didn't delete any of them. I watched every last episode I had recorded, and gradually I found myself coming around, and starting to tune in to the rhythms and eccentricities of the show. In series television there is no "gradually," however. With numbers as terrible as this shows, numbers that kept falling (though what Fox expected in that Friday-night time slot is hard to grasp), it's amazing that the show lasted as long as it did. In addition, I'm not sure how many more episode the creative team could have wrung out of this odd-couple pair of detectives working property crimes on the fringes of the Dallas PD and somehow stumbling every week into a major case.

Nevertheless, I think it was a show worth supporting, and a good part of Nix's problem was that he was dealing with Fox. Under its various programming regimes over the years, the network has always had a penchant for offbeat properties. The problem is that it doesn't know how to sell offbeat properties. Some terrific shows -- I think of The Simpsons and Married . . . With Children and House have found audiences pretty much on their own. But some pretty terrific shows from Duet through Action to Arrested Development languished becausethe Fox people had no idea how to bring those shows to the attention of the audience that might have appreciated them.

Not that anyone in network television seems especially good at that. The marketing people all want to make their new shows sound like previous shows that audiences have liked. Often, of course, they are, and the people who tune in are confronted with yet another sorry retread. But shows that strike through to something individual, worth attending to and nurturing, largely confound viewers who were drawn by the promise of something much more conventional and tired.

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30 Rock: with The Office and Burn Notice, two hours of terrifically written and acted TV

"They're all former investment bankers who were laid off in the economic crash that Nancy Pelosi caused. [Smiling affectionately.] They've got zero real-world skills, but God, they work hard!"

-- GE-NBC exec Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) to producer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), about the snide, hypercompetitive new pages assigned to her show ("a little old," she has observed, "and overdressed"), in last week's 30 Rock episode

by Ken

And Jack would know how hard his over-age-frat-boy pages work. He asks them "to run out and pick up some flowers, a collection of bath soaps, and some Spanish-language gossip magazines," and they make a mad, elbows-flying dash for the elevators. (It turned out that Jack was trying desperately to win over the grandmother of Elisa, the Puerto Rican nurse he's fallen in love with, played by the lovely Salma Hayek. He's under the impression that the old woman doesn't like him -- perhaps because, as we saw in a flashback, she's told him that she hates him.)

I've been trying for a week to think of something remotely as smart as this dazzling bit of dialogue to say about 30 Rock. In the erratic but irresistible first season most of the fun came from ultra-corporatist Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) and his underclass counterpart, ultra-loyal (and ultra-bizarre) page Kenneth (Jack McBrayer). By the show's second season, though, all the wacky elements had hit their stride, and the momentum has carried through brilliantly to this, the third season.

To her credit, show creator Tina Fey didn't demand the spotlight, and her own character, producer Liz Lemon has grown into one of TV's most cherishable (albeit near-hopeless) characters -- her show seeming week by week less under her control, and her personal life in even worse shape. The show functions just this side, or maybe a bit over the edge, of insanity.

And NBC has paired it brilliantly with its other great sitcom, the astonishing American version of The Office. (There must be some weird schedule-balancing principle at work in plunking the hour comprising The Office and 30 Rock right after an hour filled with the flesh-crawling My Name Is Earl and Kath and Kim. Is there anybody who watches both hours?) And now with USA's Burn Notice at 10pm ET/PT as gripping and amusing as ever in its third season, we've got as solid a two-hour TV block as I can remember: smart and funny, terrifically written and acted.

(At that same hour, according to NBC promos ER continues to be shown for what is claimed to be a final season. Surely this is just a cunning cost-cutting measure, though. Didn't ER go off the air, like, 10 years ago? Surely nobody has watched it since then. My theory is that the scam goes like this: NBC simply continues to list it on the schedule and, since no one is watching, saves money by not running any actual program. Must be tough on the ad salesfolks, but it can't be much tougher than a lot of the crap they have to sell where there is an actual program.)

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