A look back at TV's best in '08
Two thousand eight was a momentous year for the nation and the world, so it's little surprise that Nielsen recorded a slight uptick in the amount of television viewing in the average American home. Truthfully, though, democracy's most-relied-upon information source did not exactly knock itself out trying to work off all those advertising dollars that it gorged itself on. Mostly it just opened a window to the most remarkable election of my generation. But that was enough to produce a year's worth of highlights.
The Democratic primaries were like a heavyweight prize fight -- back when we used to watch those -- only the 15 rounds were stretched out over five months. Contender Barack Obama surprised his opponent Hillary Clinton early on, and though she fought back gamely, Obama's team had clearly prepared him to go the distance. As he kept piling on the points, the outcome became more apparent, yet you couldn't take your eye off the champ because you knew she just might land that unexpected right cross.
The fall campaign, if anything, only raised the electoral excitement to even giddier heights. It started with the uncertainty of how the Democratic convention would play out and John McCain's electrifying choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Between there and the finish line we had the economic crater, Joe the Plumber, four extraordinary debates that drew record audiences, seemingly innocuous phrases like "that one" and "mark my words" assuming the sinister resonance of "socialist" and "he's an Arab," Al Franken (for Senate?), Prop 8 (for real?), the chase for a filibuster-proof majority and a campaign that put an infomercial in prime time because all the commercial time had been bought.
At the end, there was an Election night scene from Chicago's Grant Park as celebrities and everyday people rubbed and cried on each other's shoulders when the new First Family -- unlike any we'd seen on TV before, real or fictional -- took center stage and brought an end to TV's most thrilling reality show.
Late-night TV rose again as comedians proved, once again, they can speak truth to power at times better than journalists. Tina Fey surrendered to the demands that she play Sarah Palin and made it the role of a career (though we still love her "30 Rock" character, Liz Lemon). Her close encounter with Palin on one "SNL" episode was much commented-upon, but it was the QVC sketch -- with the fey-Sarah hawking "Palin in 2012" T-shirts while Real McCain, standing just off-camera, asked, "What are you doing over there?" -- that historians 100 years from now will write dissertations about.
David Letterman also wound up playing an unexpectedly pivotal role as the man who exposed McCain's claim to be "suspending" his campaign to be the empty vow it was. When McCain begged off an appearance on his show, claiming he was needed back in D.C. to deal with the economic meltdown, Letterman flipped a switch and showed millions of viewers the candidate, instead, getting powdered up a few blocks away from the Ed Sullivan Theater in preparation for an interview with CBS's Katie Couric. Letterman's tag-team partner Craig Ferguson also had a memorable moment this year, shortly after gaining U.S. citizenship, with an impassioned monologue on his "Late Late Show" about the privilege of voting.
The rise of MSNBC to rival Fox News and CNN can also be attributed, in part, to the rise of Obama. After wandering for years in an existential forest of right-wing has-beens, came when it embraced being the zag to Fox's zig. The channel enjoyed double-digit growth and minted another star in Rachel Maddow, a frequent guest on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" program, whose intellectual heft more than matched Obama's even if her lefty politics did not. Maddow's show quickly became the second-most-watched on MSNBC and left CNN's Larry King looking older and more out-of-it than ever.
The Don Imus debacle in 2007 led to the creation of MSNBC's other surprise hit this year, "Morning Joe," as Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzenzski became the Beltway insiders' preferred wake-up call. And then there was the channel's election coverage. Scarborough, Olbermann, David Shuster and Chris Matthews seemed incapable of playing nice while on the air together, which made for unfortunate, if hugely entertaining, video that got replayed ad infinitum on the Internet, which in a weird way only burnished MSNBC's brand. Still, the decision to station Olbermann and Matthews at the helm of supposedly fair-minded news coverage struck many observers as a breach of protocol, and David Gregory was eventually brought in to captain the ship.
Tim Russert's death stunned the capital and left NBC with a huge void to fill right in the middle of election season. While Tom Brokaw graciously agreed to keep Russert's seat warm, the network auditioned potential successors to his role as moderator of "Meet the Press," and came to the same conclusion the rest of us did: There really was no replacing the man who reinvented Sunday-morning TV. Still, Gregory at least promised to keep the tradition of tough-minded questioning going, so he was designated the heir.
Jay Leno made history as the first late-night talk show host to get his own nightly prime time program. The ingenious solution led to widespread criticism of NBC and many editorials lamenting the death of a great network, but really, what choice did it have? David Cook won "American Idol" and forced Fox to confront the obvious: People tune in to "Idol" because it's a talent show. Michael Wolff's book on Rupert Murdoch claimed that the chairman of News Corp. had come to fear and loathe his most notorious, and one of his most profitable, ventures: the Fox News Channel. Alan Colmes left Fox News, having declared that his work there was done, something the rest of us had figured out years ago.
