In May 1961, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gave an address to the owners of America's television stations. 'When television is good, nothing - not the theatre, not the magazines or newspapers - nothing is better,' Newt told his Washington audience. 'But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine or newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you, and keep your eyes glued to that set, until the station signs off. You will observe a vast wasteland.'
The phrase 'vast wasteland' stuck. US television's self-image never recovered, nor did its reputation among intellectually aspirant Americans. In Britain, by contrast, we have our complaints but we acknowledge TV's place in the culture. In the contest between Lord Thomson's infamous off-the-cuff about an ITV franchise being a licence to print money and the much repeated platitude that Britain has the best television in the world, smugness won.
Until recently, at least. These days, I find myself explaining to bemused Americans that the programmes we most enjoy are theirs. There are, it is true, bright Britons who do not 'get' American sitcoms, but few have resisted forming an attachment to at least one of the following dramas: in the 1980s, Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere, Moonlighting and LA Law; in the 1990s, thirtysomething, NYPD Blue, ER and The X Files; and, currently, The West Wing, Ally McBeal, The Sopranos, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Six Feet Under. Our enjoyment is not ironic - the so-bad-it's-good glee we afforded Dynasty and Dallas. Emotionally and intellectually, these programmes provide all we need from television drama. If US television is a wasteland - and spend an evening in an American hotel room with only basic cable available and you will discover much of it still is - how do so many towering achievements spring from it?
The paradox is the greater since the American commissioning process could have been designed to crush innovation. A network buys 100 scripts for new shows each year, makes 20 pilots and then sends them for testing before sample audiences who sit in rooms twisting dials to register enjoyment or boredom. Five may make it to air. 'It's a hoary rule of research that shows test the best when they remind people of other shows,' Austin Bunn wrote recently in the New York Times.
An analysis of the sameness of US television drama was once provided by the critic Charles Williams. He argued that all popular narratives elaborate, in infinite variations, one plot: the family is threatened; the family is reunited. This theory applies not only to the Ewings of Dallas or the Waltons of Virginia but to the cops of NYPD Blue , the baby-boomers of The West Wing and the doctors of ER. It even holds good for thrillers. For is not Jack Bauer, the hero of 24, actually head of two families, his own at home and the family of spooks at his intelligence agency? The mighty ensemble dramas of recent years, from Hill Street Blues to The West Wing , play particularly well to this sublimated theme of the American family moving perpetually between discord and reconciliation.
They demonstrate, too, that even within homogeneity, creativity can be born. The sheer density of talent located in Hollywood makes it likely that quality will occasionally emerge, but what has been produced in the past 20 years point to better odds than that. Perhaps, while so many of the prevailing conditions in America are inimical to excellence, others are sympathetic to it.
What is it, exactly, that we admire in American drama? Part of it is the big budgets that crowd hospital wards with extras, the slickness of the filming and editing, the soundtracks that manipulate our reactions, the standards of acting. Yet production values are not everything. Although drama on Channel 4 and BBC2 is frequently starved of investment, BBC1 and ITV1 spray so much money on to their favoured projects that they can end up almost matching American standards of gloss. Spooks, which enjoyed surprising success recently on BBC1, had production values coming out of its ears (which may explain why so little was going on between them). Nor can we say that a profession that produces a John Thaw, a David Jason or a Julie Walters is incapable of delivering brilliant character actors.
No, the area where we crucially fail to match the Americans is writing. Before he departed for America, Michael Jackson gave an interview looking back upon his term as Channel 4's chief executive, in which he seemed to agree. 'In drama, we've tried to achieve a more contemporary, less authoritative approach,' he said. ' Psychos, Queer as Folk, Teachers were an attempt to bring some of the best features of American television drama to Britain. The disappointment is we found few writers other than Tony Marchant [Kid in the Corner, Never Never] able to write the big picture.'
Narrative, the art of telling, is one aspect of good writing. If nothing else, the hour-by-hour plotting of 24 would exemplify it. Yet, despite that show's stopwatch pace, its writers also find time to adumbrate character. There is hardly a player with a speaking part who does not come with a back story - even down to the short-order waitress with a speeding conviction and a broken marriage. In the case of Maddie and David in Moonlighting, and Scully and Mulder in The X Files, the relationship between the principals can even overwhelm the genre to which the show belongs, just as Chaucer's pilgrims shine more brightly than the stories they told.
In an industry whose oldest joke is about the bimbo actress so stupid that she slept with the writer, the true punchline is the way American television dramatists have triumphed. In the late 1940s, for example, Reginald Rose began contributing scripts to CBS's series of one-off plays, Studio One. Rose's most famous show became a film, 12 Angry Men, but long before it he would hear people on the subway saying: 'Hey, I heard there's a Reginald Rose play on tonight.' Writers were paid well - $10,000 a script. Their names were announced over the titles.
The latter practice has disappeared, but the association between a writer and his show persists. Even though teams of writers traditionally work on shows over a season and even to complete one episode, a moderately alert American viewer might be expected to know that David Chase invented The Sopranos, Alan Ball Six Feet Under, David Kelley Ally McBeal, Chris Carter The X Files and Aaron Sorkin The West Wing. If you have any doubt of the superiority of American television dialogue to that of American movies, rent Sorkin's 1995 movie The American President and, straight afterwards, watch the latest West Wing.
It is very rare for British television these days to hand its actors in a year lines as good as Bartlet, Toby and Josh get weekly in The West Wing. It was not always so. Classically trained actors such as Peter Barkworth, Denholm Elliott and Patricia Hayes once delivered verbal arias on primetime television. But they did so in an age when British television was using theatre rather than film as its reference point. As filmed drama become the norm, directors assumed control and the great age of writers such as Dennis Potter, Alan Sillitoe, Alan Pater, Mike Leigh and Don Taylor slipped away. In 1984, after 14 years, the BBC, to its shame, cancelled Play for Today. Ten years later, the playwright Colin Welland complained to me in The Observer about the consequences. Writers were getting used to directors paring back their longer scenes and speeches. 'That's what happens in movies,' Welland said. 'Everything is,"Where are we going in this scene?" "Get it moving!" "How is it progressing the story?" So it's all narrative and no development of character, nothing contemplative.'
Historically, the second reason for American TV's comparative health is the career of Steven Bochco, a writer himself. After studying playwriting in Pittsburgh, Bochco won an internship at Universal Studios and by 1970 was story editor on Columbo. The awards piled up and in 1978, determined to extend his control over his material, he became a producer and was asked to develop a police series for NBC. The show that resulted in 1981, Hill Street Blues, broke all the rules - a too large cast, too many plots per episode, a tone that varied from farce to tragedy, and a grubby cinéma verité. In a wonderful instance of form reflecting content, the murky ambience of Hill Street merged with an authorial ambivalence towards its flawed cops.
'We were putting more information on, frame by frame, than any other show in prime time,' Bochco said later. 'We redefined for the audience the terms of the agreement under which they turned on the set.' In his rocky relationship with the networks, Bochco was forced to adjust those terms, but the impact on a coming generation of writers could not be undone.
Bochco also came to realise how television had to compete with the wilder force of video. The Bible Belt and the sponsor's wife were easily shocked. Their sons and daughters were not, and rather than watch tame family telly they were hiring videos. In NYPD Blue, Bochco introduced near-nudity and cursing that at least sounded filthy, which signalled that the values of television were back on speaking terms with those that prevailed in the cinema.
On one network, in recent years, the language of film and television has become indistinguishable. The only difference between The Sopranos and Goodfellas or between Six Feet Under and American Beauty is that The Sopranos and Six Feet Under are the more sophisticated offerings. This network - a third explanation for the health of American television drama - is HBO (Home Box Office). Its secret is that it earns its income by subscription. It does not have to appeal to advertisers, fearful of associating their products with the wrong things (such as the Mafia or undertakers). Nor does it have to appeal to audiences, at least not directly. Although cumulatively over its various airings, audiences for The Sopranos do add up to more than 10 million, it would not matter terribly if they were less. Subscribing to HBO is a mark of economic and intellectual distinction, whether you get round to watching what you pay for or not.
As HBO spawns imitators, and networks take note of what is happening to their audience share, the beneficial consequences for the coming generation of screenwriters could be immense. The old audiences are being supplanted, too. If there is one form of literacy on the increase in America, it is television literacy. Viewing figures for network television have been in decline for years, but exceptionally intelligent shows such as ER attract 10 million more viewers than their nearest rivals. The only explanation is that on Thursday nights people who 'don't watch television' (even if they subscribe to HBO) put down their books and switch on the set. The next great American novel may be a television series.
Classic serials aside, there has been no corresponding renaissance in British drama and so no leap in audience expectations. The most sophisticated shows, such as Tony Garnett's The Cops, meet with critical adoration but audience apathy, but I would not swap the eight seasons of NYPD Blue for the dozen or so Cops that were made. When we try, our verité is better than their verité. Besides, when dramatists find a way of telling us what is happening in our inner cities we are bound to find ourselves involved. From this distance, watching New York's street scum being roughed up by Andy Sipowicz is mere voyeurism.
But if out of the wasteland something as accomplished as NYPD Blue can flourish, there must surely be lessons for British broadcasters. The unlikely story of American television is that when the masses are offered something of real quality, every now and again they have the good sense to embrace it. They agree with Newt. When television is good, nothing is better.
· A longer version of this essay appears in the latest edition of Prospect
