By MIKE HALE
In April 1987 the Fox Broadcasting Company opened for business in prime time with two half-hour comedies, “Married ... With Children” and “The Tracey Ullman Show.”
But Fox had already been on the air for six months, broadcasting “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” a poorly rated talk show that would soon become just “The Late Show” when its host was fired.
Despite her pioneering role, Ms. Rivers is not listed among the guests for Fox’s 25th-anniversary special on Sunday night, which follows repeats of the first episodes of “Married ... With Children” and “The Simpsons.” She would make a more than fitting mascot for the network, though: brassy, full of chutzpah, not afraid to take a risk.
Fox has been characterized by boldness from the start. Having decided to break up the cozy triopoly held by ABC, CBS and NBC by creating the first nationwide broadcast network in nearly 40 years, Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch stole one of NBC’s brightest young executives, Garth Ancier, then 28, to be their entertainment president. When the young Fox network was struggling to expand in the early 1990s, it established itself by taking the National Football Conference, and John Madden, away from CBS.
That gloves-off approach in business has been matched by a pragmatic, laissez-faire approach in programming that has yielded better results than generally acknowledged. Fox may not have had a very high percentage of the best shows of the last 25 years — probably only “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files” qualify — but it has had more than its share of adventurous and interesting ones, the kind that people talked about and that were quickly imitated, from those early sitcoms to “The Ben Stiller Show,” “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Party of Five,” “Ally McBeal,” “24,” “Glee” and, yes, “American Idol.”
What has set Fox apart from its stodgier competitors over the years is the lack of a house style — its programmers have followed their desire for water cooler chatter wherever it led them — at the same time that it exhibited a welcome tolerance for outrageousness and provocation. That kind of freedom can have ugly consequences, like the network’s dive into the tawdriest end of the reality-TV pool in the early 2000s with things like “Temptation Island” and the torture-porn game show “The Chamber.” (Though even there, the improbably successful dating show “Joe Millionaire” was ahead of its time.)
The positive side is that there’s rarely any filler on the Fox schedule, the kind of show that gets on the air simply because it matches a network’s décor: a crime procedural on CBS, a quirky soap opera on ABC, a meta-comedy or two-hour reality competition on NBC. (Of course it helps when you program seven fewer hours of prime time than your competitors, and have virtually no daytime or late-night programming.)
Back in 1987, though, few voices were speaking in defense of Fox. In the early years the conversation was dominated by two themes. One was the network’s ineptitude and insignificance, as it slowly expanded from an hour to a night to two nights — it didn’t reach seven nights until 1993 — and shows came and went like houseflies. Do you remember “The New Adventures of Beans Baxter”? (Maybe someone did, when a title was needed for “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”) How about the satirical late night show “The Wilton North Report,” whose contributors during its four-week existence included Paul Krassner and Conan O’Brien?
Even louder was the discussion of the new network’s crudity, of how it was leading a national charge toward the lowest common denominator. The attacks centered on “Married ... With Children,” because of its barrage of sexual double-entendres but perhaps more crucially because of its celebration of a family of dimwitted loafers and schemers, and the way in which it harked back to a louder, broader, less “sophisticated” TV comedy tradition at a time when “The Cosby Show” was the dominant sitcom.
The New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor wrote that “the impulse toward being crude or outrageous” had reached “a kind of nadir” in “Married ... With Children” and another Fox sitcom, “Women in Prison.” Considerations of social class were also implicit in the initial reaction to Fox; Mr. O’Connor wrote that the network was “evidently determined to win the hearts of blue-collar workers and very young audiences as it slowly struggles to build to a full prime-time schedule.”
Of course many of us at the time thought “Married ... With Children” was pretty funny, and in retrospect it looks revolutionary, an ancestor, for better or worse, of a legion of dysfunctional-family sitcoms, from “Roseanne” to “Everybody Loves Raymond” to “Modern Family,” in which Ed O’Neill plays a cleaned-up, prosperous, suburban version of the clueless father he played in “Married ... With Children.”
As Fox matured, its reputation for outrageousness subsided, but not the sense that it appealed to suspiciously populist tastes, in shows like “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place” and, later, “The O.C.” But all along the network was finding room in prime time for unusual and refreshing shows, especially comedies, that now look far ahead of their time: the sketch shows “The Tracey Ullman Show,” “In Living Color” and “The Ben Stiller Show”; the loopy sitcom “Get a Life”; and “The Simpsons,” the most consistently funny (and serious) comedy of its time.
It also took a chance, in 1993, on a show whose premise — a pair of F.B.I. agents investigating paranormal phenomena, including a vast alien conspiracy — was widely mocked. That series, “The X-Files,” would go on to become terrifically influential, spawning countless imitators — many of them currently on network schedules — and ranking with “Friday Night Lights” as one of the best broadcast network dramas of the last 20 years.
The current Fox schedule, dominated by “American Idol,” is not as interesting, though “Idol” certainly continues the trend of shows that set the agenda for prime time. But looking around that schedule, “Bones,” “House,” “Glee” and — still! — “The Simpsons” are distinctive shows, playing with TV conventions like forensic and medical and music dramas in ways that would make them unlikely to fit in the other networks’ lineups. Good or bad, they’re not boring, and perhaps that’s been the Fox house style all along.
NYT
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