What TV trend defined the decade?

By: By Joanne Ostrow | THE DENVER POST
Published: December 31, 2009

What image deserves to stick in our minds as the signifier of what TV became in the first decade of the millennium?

A certain New Jersey mobster is a contender, having monopolized the water cooler for thinking viewers for seven years. When James Gandolfini accepted the Emmy Award for his work as Tony Soprano, the moment represented the artistic heights that the medium achieved in this decade, particularly on HBO.

A succession of brainy series on cable -- The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos plus AMC's Mad Men -- demonstrated a new kind of television, worth discussing and analyzing as literature.

Perhaps the box set? Encompassing a rich list of TV dramas and comedies, DVD sets earned special status as keepers, worthy of home-video libraries. The idea of marathoning through a series, avoiding commercials and watching one installment after the next, came into its own.

Might the image of the decade be the reflection of You, the consumer, as envisioned by Time's Person of the Year 2006 cover? In television, the shift to users controlling information was apparent in iReporting, anchors blogging and podcasting, YouTube aggregating, and the DVR, all techno-endeavors that altered -- some say democratized -- the ways in which information and entertainment are spread.

True as far as they go, but none of those sufficiently conveys the gestalt of the decade as experienced by the bulk of the audience.

No, the single defining television image of the decade is the talent show. Coming full circle to Ted Mack's 1948 Original Amateur Hour, a gaggle of shows broke from the crass, situational "reality" TV pack to revive interest in singing, dancing, designing, remodeling and even losing weight.

Megahit American Idol brought scores of viewers to the tube starting in 2002, remade the TV and music-industry economies and spawned other shows, which likewise had enormous pop-cultural impact beyond music.

At home, these semi-scripted shows made talent scouts and critical observers of us all. And sometimes, they even got the winners right.