Arguments for a New Golden Age

When you’ve been doing a job for more than a few years, a couple of things happen to you (in addition to must and mold).

One, you begin to believe that you know everything about everything. That’s usually true.

The second (given the human memory’s selectivity), you begin believing that the old days were better. You know, no general could command troops like Black Jack Pershing (World War I). No one could croon like Russ Columbo (the ‘30s). And so on and so on, all the way through the ‘40s to the television era and:

They don’t make TV like they used to.

When you hear yourself saying that, it’s time for them to bag you and haul you off to the attic. Goodbye and good riddance, you’re officially an antique.

Now, some of TV’s pioneers did some splendid work in the mislabeled “golden age”--theater of the airwaves that stands up today, a feat all the more remarkable given the rudimentary technology of earlier times. For example, you’ll never find a better, more emotionally searing performance anywhere than the one Piper Laurie gave opposite Cliff Robertson in “Days of Wine and Roses,” the John Frankenheimer-directed production of JP Miller’s play that premiered live on “Playhouse 90” in 1958, four years before the movie version with Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon.

“Days of Wine and Roses” is about the booze-driven deterioration of a young couple, the bottle gradually becoming more important to each of them than they are to each other. When Joe ultimately finds his tortuous way back from drinking, Kirstie rejects his pleas to join him in sobriety and resume parenting their young daughter.

I’ve watched it perhaps a dozen times, never being unmoved by this memorable, uncompromising work, by Robertson’s torment and ultimate strength as Joe and by Charles Bickford as Kirstie’s father. But especially by Laurie’s devastating sadness in the last scene as a woman desperately wanting to return to her family, yet unable to give up the only thing that will make Joe take her back.

“See,” she explains haltingly in a wobbly voice, “the world looks so dirty to me when I’m not drinking, like the water in the Hudson when you look too close.”

It’s a lump in the throat you don’t get over.

Yet “The Days of Wine and Roses” was not typical of prime time then, and in many ways the golden age of U.S. television is now. When someone from the older-is-better crowd starts huffing about the past, holding up the best of today’s TV as rebuttal can make the codger cower like a vampire before a cross.

Several series from early this week will make the case: “The X-Files” on Fox, “NYPD Blue” on ABC, “Law & Order” on NBC and “Murphy Brown” on CBS.

Especially amazing is “Murphy Brown,” considering how it had faltered for several years prior to this season and how its current absorption with its protagonist’s recovery from cancer is a minefield that very, very few comedies could tiptoe through without getting blown to smithereens. Instead, Candice Bergen’s character and her “FYI” newsmagazine colleagues are breaking ground every episode (it wasn’t too long ago that mentioning breasts, let alone breast cancer, was a TV no-no) by somehow finding humor in her mortality and fight against a life-threatening disease.

Tonight finds Murphy reeling from the effects of chemotherapy and trying to find relief from her misery late in the episode by sampling marijuana that the usually stodgy Jim (Charles Kimbrough) has bought on the street for her medicinal use. Thus does “Murphy Brown” confront the sizzling issue of marijuana as pain relief for cancer patients--though in no way promoting it for recreational use--while also exploring a tenderness between Murphy and Jim without becoming maudlin or manipulative.

What remarkable work by a comedy. That laughs as well as emotion flow from the script by Tom Seeley and Norm Gunzenhauser and the direction by Steve Zuckerman is an example of the artistry that now separates the newer, better-than-ever “Murphy Brown” from the herd.

*

“Law & Order” and the herd have never been on the same planet.

In its eighth season, it remains wondrous for the quality of its acting and its scripts, and for saying so much so entertainingly and thoughtfully in so short a time: Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) investigate, their boss (S. Epatha Merkerson) grumbles, Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell) prosecute, their boss (Steven Hill) harrumphs, the verdict comes, credits roll. And you’re agape, wondering how, given the constraints of TV, Dick Wolf’s series can be this good week after week after week within a format so rigid.

In its on-air promotions, NBC has stamped a “Ripped From the Headlines” tattoo on “Law & Order” that hardly does it justice, making it sound like one of those cheap TV docudramas that regurgitate yesterday’s most titillating crime stories. It is anything but shrill and predatory, though, instead using those headlines as a resource to dramatize and explore hot-button themes related to law and the attitudes of society.

Ruby Ridge and Waco echo tonight. Directed by Constantine Makris, the episode leaps from a bloody shootout during an armed robbery to an examination of 1st Amendment issues and extremist militia groups that are inclined to impose violence on others in the name of justice. On trial for conspiracy to commit murder and robbery are members of the New Sons of Liberty, one of whom (played persuasively by Dennis O’Hare) faces McCoy in court as their defense attorney.

He and his fellow defendants are misguided but articulate, even eloquent, their expressions of discontent (“Global corporations are sucking the blood and life out of this country”) perhaps reflecting the frustrations of many Americans. David Black’s script tests not only the consistency of these Constitution-quoting militiamen but also the beliefs of the oft-unlovable McCoy. However, his summation to the jury (in which that fine actor Waterston is at his very best) resonates powerfully. As does the case’s outcome.

When it comes to passionate storytelling, though, nothing is likely to beat Tuesday’s episode of “NYPD Blue,” which ended with those scarred hard bodies Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) and Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) reaching out to each other after being emotionally clobbered by the separate cases they had just concluded.

Elevating seething to the highest of arts, Franz once more was magnificent playing a detective who always seems to be the sum of his inner demons, this time exploding at a sex criminal who had raped and beaten a young girl. The falsely accused initial suspect was a young man with Down’s syndrome (played by Gary Ruvolo, who has Down’s syndrome), in an hour, written by Catherine Stribling and directed by Farrel Jane Levy, that rippled with bigotry and racism.

In addition, Simone (with Smits doing perhaps his best work on the series) buckled under the huge weight of a murder case, weeping after a pregnant, drug-addicted mother (a tingly performance by April Grace) turned in her two sons to earn reward money to finance her habit.

It was fine television. And in a testament to the series, “NYPD Blue” has been even better.

*

Ever terrific, foreboding and mysterious, meanwhile, “The X-Files” opened its new season Sunday with the first of two episodes (written by series creator Chris Carter) following up on last season’s ending cliffhanger in which Scully (Gillian Anderson) announced that her FBI-agent partner, Mulder (David Duchovny), had died, apparently by his own hand. Oh, sure. And cancel the Part 1’s resurrection of Mulder was interesting; Part 2 next Sunday is even better, with Scully growing paler and weaker by the minute, it seems, as the search for her apparently terminal cancer’s origin and cure intensifies, religion enters the plot intriguingly and the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) is increasingly prominent. The mood and tone of the series are rewarding on any level. But if you’ve not seen “The X-Files” previously, trying to read the plot now is like trying to read Latin.

Of course, the most wonderful thing about “The X-Files” is its supreme murkiness. It remains a rare cubbyhole of prime time where truth remains inky and elusive and where the unexpected can be expected. In other words, it’s what golden ages are made of.

*

* “Murphy Brown” airs at 8:30 tonight on CBS (Channel 2). “Law & Order” airs at 10 tonight on NBC (Channel 4). “NYPD Blue” airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on ABC (Channel 7). “The X-Files” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Fox (Channel 11).