When it comes to drama development in the last few years, the output of the broadcast networks could fairly be compared to a medium-sized dumpster fire. In a world where consumers have an exploding number of options and there are multiple entertainment temptations for every taste, the broadcast networks have too frequently created bland, safe and derivative one-hour fare.
It’s not that there haven’t been the occasional successes and decent performers, but in the last few seasons, it’s been hard to avoid the sense that the broadcast networks have suffered a crisis of confidence in the one-hour realm. Seeing so many competitors carrying off big chunks of their turf hasn’t made the biggest networks brazen and bold (at least, not often enough) — quite the opposite. The increasing amount of quality competition has led these once-powerful entities down some pretty pathetic pathways; recent seasons have featured a numbing parade of expensive, interchangeable widgets with most of their edges sanded off.
There have been a few bright spots, among them “How to Get Away with Murder,” “Empire” and, last season, “Sleepy Hollow.” And go figure — many of the dramas that caught on with viewers had unusual or exciting elements and performances or approaches that set them apart. Though I might take issue with how those elements have been deployed (all of the shows named here have encountered their share of stumbling blocks), when they’re working, these programs are not usually fear-driven collections of least-common denominators.
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The biggest problem is that the characters generally hew to types: pushy mother-in-law, lax granola mom, tightly wound career woman, anti-authoritarian artist, overworked dad tempted by the babysitter, etc. Despite the talents members the cast have displayed elsewhere, I had no desire to get to know these people any more deeply — in fact, I wanted to get far away from them, given how unpleasant, self-aggrandizing and oblivious they could be. And just to make sure viewers weren’t missing anything about the underlying tensions within this group, a random narrator would pop in from time to time to kill off any halting attempts at nuance and subtext.
Zachary Quinto, Peter Sarsgaard, Uma Thurman, Thandie Newton and Melissa George all try their best, but this is not a legal drama or a cop show, where a near-miss can more or less work. You either nail this kind of challenging material or you don’t, and “The Slap” ultimately fails to live up to the potential implied in its attention-getting title.
