Sucking in the viewers

Had you told me in January that the three best new TV shows of 2004 would be on ABC, I would have said, “Yeah, sure. And I’ll be writing my year-end review for NUVO.”

The cast of ‘life as we know it’

Well, here we are. Lost, Desperate Housewives and life as we know it were, indeed, the best new network shows of 2004. That they’re all on ABC, a network that has done little right since the 1980s, isn’t something straight out of Lourdes, but it’s not far off.

These shows have little in common other than their network, the fact that they’re scripted (as opposed to reality) and that they concentrate on the fine art of storytelling. In Lost, we get a weekly mix of terror, mystery and a dose of black humor as we watch 45 air-crash survivors try to coexist on an island that may or may not be inhabited by a monster that can suck down trees like Coca- Cola. Desperate Housewives takes suburban living to extremes, while life as we know it does the same with high school.

Lost sucked in viewers, literally, in the first minutes when it dropped us into the chaotic aftermath of the plane crash, then showed a passenger being sucked into the jet’s engine. And the show merits appointment viewing because each character is more intriguing than the next — the ingenue on the run from the law, the Korean woman who hides the fact that she speaks English, the musician whose career hit the skids, the military man who isn’t military at all, the outlaw who appears to want to sabotage the group.

Each week, we learn a little more about these people, but so much is left unspoken. What do they really think of each other? How afraid are they? Do they hold out any hope? I have no idea how this is going to turn out. And man, I really want to know.

Desperate Housewives, even with all the hype, keeps audiences coming back for its seductive stories about a suburban neighborhood with too many secrets. Like Lost, Desperate Housewives has been unfolding slowly, revealing layer by layer the motivations of the ladies on Wisteria Lane. (Outside of Mike, the secretive bachelor, the men are mere playthings.) The series is a little of everything — drama, comedy, soap opera, murder-mystery — and not enough of anything to be predictable.

If you don’t like Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) boinking the teen-age gardener, you can laugh about Teri Hatcher’s Susan attempting to snag a man. If Lynette’s (Felicity Huffman) addiction to her children’s ADD medicine is uncomfortable and perhaps a little too real, there’s the wonderfully constipated performance by Marcia Cross as Bree, the woman who tries to be the perfect homemaker even as her world crumbles.

Television has always tried to peer into the lives and bedrooms of suburbia, from the legendary Peyton Place to the awful NBC sitcom of a couple of years ago, Hidden Hills. The hope may be to expose some dark secrets, but actually it’s allowing the audience to be thankful that their lives aren’t nearly as messy as the lives of the characters they’re watching.

Yet if you watch life as we know it — life in a suburban high school — you might feel as if the lives you’re watching are/were your own. Of these three shows, life as we know it gets the least notice and respect. ABC even yanked it during the November ratings sweeps. But the series has developed into a clear window on the world of high school students and their sex lives. We see their world through three couples in various stages of dating (one couple is a male student and a hot, young teacher) and dealing with the consequences, the teasing, the need to keep secrets and the burning desire to blab and brag.

Best of the show’s characters is Kelly Osbourne’s Deborah, a pudgy girl who, through force of personality, persuades Jonathan, the boy who likes her, to accept her, pounds and all — even if it means being mocked by his friends. Their relationship, both together and within the high school, may be the most realistic teen-age romance on television since Angela Chase moped about Jordan Catalano on My So-Called Life. ABC axed that Life after less than a full season. Let’s hope the network demonstrates more patience this time.

We’ve come to expect the best television from HBO, and it delivered a couple of solid series this year in Entourage and Deadwood (not to mention brilliant seasons from The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm). Cable also gave us, among other things, exceptional seasons of The Shield (FX) and Joe Schmo 2 (Spike). And if you missed The Office special on BBC America, well, you missed the funniest 90 minutes on television in 2004. But for the first time in a long time, network television, which has been hemorrhaging viewers for years, provided a reason to come back.