Last week was certainly a dispiriting time on the TV landscape as two very different eras came to an end: The 35 year broadcasting career of David Letterman and the 7 season run of AMC’s acclaimed series, Mad Men. Watching each of the finales were two completely different experiences for me, but in the end, they accomplished the same result: melancholy.
The success of Mad Men is one of the major highlights of this new “Golden Age” of dramatic television by way of well crafted basic and premium cable shows. Mad Men was able to last 7 seasons with an ambitious resolve to give so much depth to character, theme and story that it was able to carry the series by giving little moments huge importance. This was accomplished while never over-stepping the line into eye-rolling pretension.
As this series comes to an end, I’ve wondered if there will be another series that will be able to walk this tightrope, and more selfishly: If it does, will I get it? That’s part of the deal. Any work of art, be it music, poetry, photography, film etc, is subject to one’s personal set of discretionary criteria. “Does the art speak to you?” I missed out on The Soprano’s for that reason. While I recognized it as good work, it just did nothing for me. Hopefully, when the next show of this caliber comes around, it will speak to me and I won’t go, “huh?”.
Man, I loved David Letterman in my teens and twenties. I thought he was the coolest person on earth. A talk show with his irreverence was unlike anything I’d ever seen. During summer as a teen, I would stay up to watch his show and also tape it, so I could re-watch in the morning when I woke up. I remember watching him walk out to do his monologue and noticed that he wore wrestling shoes with his suit. This meant that I started to wear wrestling shoes with whatever I wore. I watched his show whenever I could during his run on NBC and the first few years on CBS. I had only seen a handful of shows in the last 15 years or so as the format had grown incredibly stale and being an adult with weird working hours had gotten me out of the habit of watching. However, with his final show coming up and the fond memories I had of him, I made a point to watch the three shows of his final week. These three shows filled me with sadness as the show was so stale and more strikingly, the once brash, fearless comedian that deconstructed the talk show format was now old, slow and tired. It reminded me of an old man having trouble parking his over-sized Cadillac. Here was Dave just trying the pull this bloated, out-dated show in, all the while the turn signal has been blinking for the last 10 years or so and he keeps going over the curb. Of course, adding to my downbeat wistfulness was the retrospective pieces run during the finale that included many moments that I remember watching as they aired, reminding me of the brilliance of the show that I loved. Alas, Father Time gets the best of everyone.
That now brings me to the pending third member of this depressing triumvirate of departures: Jon Stewart. This one will hurt the most, because while Letterman and Mad Men had both run their course and ended accordingly among fanfare, there is no hint of fuzzy nostalgia with Stewart’s run. The reason for this is clear: we still need Stewart politically. It’s a sad commentary on the state of US news media that the most trusted person in the news is the one doing a fake news show. That’s just the plain reality. I fear that without Stewart poking holes in the Fox News talking points, that the Right Wing will dupe enough of the casual thinking “undecided” voters to swing the 2016 election towards them. Furthermore, I think that without Stewart engaging the equally casual young, left leaning voters, they will not go to the polls in the necessary numbers to win. And I haven’t even mentioned how unelectable Hillary Clinton is.
This is compounded with the departure of Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report as he has left the conservative pundit character behind to replace Letterman on CBS. When Stewart tapes his last Daily Show on August 6th, it will be a sad, sad day. Here’s hoping that the summer never ends.