Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The rush of TV upfronts week means it’s almost impossible to keep up with what TV shows are coming, what shows are going, and these days, what shows are coming back. One show that quietly got the axe last week was ABC’s American Crime, their anthology-style drama series that recently completed its third season. There wasn’t a whole lot of hoopla around its cancellation. No save-our-show campaign. Tim Allen isn’t out there calling the cancellation politically motivated. American Crime had barely made it to a third season in the first place, getting a last-minute reprieve before last year’s upfronts. The show was never a ratings powerhouse to begin with, and the numbers only went down from there. Three seasons is about the best you can expect from a show that’s getting such low viewership, so in that respect, what we got was a blessing. Because what ABC didn’t get in viewers it got in prestige and the idea that a broadcast network could still put out a show that could hang with the best and most prestigious cable/streaming dramas.
Looking at the current slate of ABC dramas, it all feels very broadcast. Grey’s Anatomy is the stalwart, and the rest of the Shonda-verse shows like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder do a great job branding ABC as the go-to network for getting together with your girls and some wine and hoping Olivia Pope manages to destroy someone else this week. Quantico follows that style template perfectly. And One Upon a Time and Agents of SHIELD are both niche shows in their own way. Then there’s Designated Survivor, the new kid on the block that nonetheless is decidedly within the network-TV mold, establishing an outlandish scenario and then propelling viewers from episode to episode with cliffhangers and mystery boxes.
American Crime was the standout, a sober drama that told stories that were relevant, difficult, at times even punishing. Which … that sounds a lot like The Handmaid’s Tale or Rectify or any number of shows on HBO or AMC. High production values, top-level actors, and a complete lack of boundaries when it came to content or style. The age of so-called prestige TV has drawn a line in the sand between broadcast networks and cable-streaming, but often the distinction has been a know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing. Broadcast shows tend to be different spins on other shows that have worked before. Cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows. That doesn’t mean that shows can’t be great within that framework (The Good Wife, for example; or NBC’s This Is Us, which harkens back to past shows like Parenthood). But the framework is still there. Cable/streaming shows have their own framework, a little harder and bleaker and given to harrowing scenes for their actors to perform. American Crime had that it spades. Felicity Huffman’s private-school principal in season 2 was as difficult and morally compromised character as anyone on an AMC drama. Regina King’s back-to-back Emmy wins were proof that her performance was stacking up just fine against the likes of FX’s Ryan Murphy shows or Fargo.
The defining characteristic of American Crime was always how un-fussed-with it seemed. You never saw ABC’s fingerprints on it. John Ridley (Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave) was able to put together seasons that touched on sexual assault, gay-bashing, racial stratification, worker exploitation, racism in the criminal justice system, and more, without ever seeming to have to soft-pedal anything to meet the demands of a mainstream audience. After three seasons, the picture we got from American Crime was an idea of America as a crime, a series of systems and structures that by design keep the marginalized in check and vulnerable at every turn. That is some heady stuff for broadcast TV at any hour. It’s no surprise, then, that the ratings were never great.
Maybe that’s the lesson. Broadcast TV can compete in the creative sphere with cable and streaming, so long as they don’t care what the ratings look like.
