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David Letterman's postSept. 11 return
Irony was dead, they said. Humor was unseemly. And late-night comics, those unacknowledged legislators of America, no longer had anything to say to us. Yet it took a late-night comic to voice, movingly and indelibly, how we felt. "We're told [the terrorists] were zealots fueled by religious fervor," said the subdued but resilient host. "If you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any goddam sense?" And just as important, he—and his counterparts at The Daily Show, South Park and Late Night with Conan O'Brien—gradually came back from comedy's self-imposed mourning period to show that topical, cutting satire wasn't just appropriate; it was downright American. |
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HBO's Sunday night
Some of its efforts were mixed (Band of Brothers) or complete misses (The Mind of the Married Man). But with strong additions Six Feet Under and Project Greenlight, returning stalwarts Oz, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Emmy-winning Sex and the City and an utterly transcendent third season of The Sopranos, the cable network laid claim to the true must-see—albeit must-pay-to-see—night of TV. |
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Undeclared (Fox)
The characters are freshmen, but the comedy is far from sophomoric. Producer Judd Apatow (of the much mourned high-school drama Freaks and Geeks) got a well-deserved, and more commercial, second chance with this college sitcom. Undeclared, starring Jay Baruchel, above, takes the eccentric sensibility of Freaks and applies it to smart, sharply observed coming-of-age stories of self-discovery, romance and beer. |
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Conspiracy (HBO)
In a year of high-profile Holocaust dramas (ABC's Anne Frank, NBC's Uprising), an understated movie about a meeting in which Hitler's lieutenants planned the Final Solution outdid them all. Not a shot was fired, but the cool bureaucratese with which these officials rationalized mass murder showed how language can be humankind's most insidious weapon. |
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Alias (ABC)
Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner, below left) is a waifish grad student who looks as if you could knock her over with a heavy textbook. And she's a karate-kicking, gadget-wielding double agent. Ridiculous? Yes, and wonderful. Reveling in '60s spy chic, this stylish, turbocharged and emotionally charged CIA serial grew more addictively complicated, involving and suspenseful with each episode. |
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Junkyard Wars (TLC)
Comedy Central's robot-war show BattleBots has the testosterone and buxom babes. But this U.K.-imported engineering challenge has the real geek appeal. Turning teams of amiable tinkerers loose to build hydroplanes, rockets and the like out of scrap parts, it combines good-natured competition with just enough pseudo education that you don't have to feel guilty for not watching Nova instead. |
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Pasadena (Fox)
Underpromoted and endlessly pre-empted, Fox's twisted rich-family saga is harder to find than Dick Cheney's secret secure location. But intrepid viewers are rewarded with a great cast (including Dana Delany, Martin Donovan and Philip Baker Hall) in a darkly funny story of a powerful media clan with a skeleton—perhaps literally—in its walk-in closet. Not everything in Pasadena, we learned, smells like roses. |
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The Bernie Mac Show (Fox)
On network TV, it turns out, you still cannot say motherf_____. In every other respect, however, this fresh sitcom stays true to the foul-mouthed Original King of Comedy's riotous stand-up voice. Playing a comic (surprise, surprise) who takes in his sister's troubled kids, the gruff, unsentimental but likable Mac takes the cuddly out of family comedy. |
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"Once More, with Feeling," Buffy the Vampire Slayer (UPN)
You could apply the title of this audacious musical episode to the whole season of Buffy, which survived an acrimonious move from the WB to return smarter, funnier and dramatically richer than ever. Who'd have thought creator Joss Whedon (who taught himself piano to write the episode's surprisingly tuneful score, as well as the nimble lyrics) studied his Sondheim along with his sarcophagi? |
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24 (Fox)
Even before the war made heroes out of CIA agents, this thriller was the talk of TV. Deservedly so: its pulse-pounding premise (a counterterrorist agent—Kiefer Sutherland, below—has 24 hours to stop an assassination), gimmick (each episode is one hour in real time) and look (a split screen is used to relate concurrent story lines) made its pilot the most exciting of the year. Some later episodes had a draggy, shaggy-dog quality, but at its best, 24 had us counting the seconds. |
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The Worst | The West Wing's terrorism episode
With the best postSept. 11 intentions, one of TV's finest dramas indulged in its worst tendencies: preachiness, speechifying and condescension. As its characters lectured a high school class about terrorism, the show figuratively and patronizingly reduced its audience to schoolchildren who needed a lesson. |
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Nike, Freestyle
Was it a commercial? Was it a music video? And did anybody care? These breathtaking TV spots, a 2 1ˇ2-minute extended version of which ran on MTV, barely mentioned the product, except for a flash of the swoosh logo. Instead, against a spare backdrop, they showed expert dribblers dexterously pounding basketballs and executing trick maneuvers. Call it basketballet. The squeak of their soles and the thump of rubber provided a primal, trance-inducing soundtrack (with some help from hip-hop legend Afrika Bambaataa). The message: Sport is music. Sport is dance. Sport is art. And so was this ad. |
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BMW, The Hire
In five short online films by directors including Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie, a chauffeur undertakes different missions. The common thread: spare story lines, action, high production values ... oh, and the car. BMW aimed the pricey campaign at computer-addicted upscale buyers. For everyone else, it was reason to shell out—for high-speed Internet hookups. |
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Gap, Give Your Gift
Having hot musicians (Sheryl Crow, Macy Gray, Shaggy) sing about giving of yourself—so you'll give your business to the Gap—would be dicey any year, much less after Sept. 11. Yet once again, the retailer's holiday ads were culturally pitch-perfect. On a stark set, the singers, covering Supertramp's plangent Give a Little Bit, gave a little uplift to a Christmas season that needed it. |
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The New York Miracle
After Sept. 11, New York City's most recognizable faces joined in a series of fanciful spots to bring visitors back to Gotham. The inspired sleight of hand—Woody Allen executing a professional ice-skating routine in Rockefeller Center, Henry Kissinger belly-sliding into home plate at Yankee Stadium—reminded us all that New York is a city where the impossible is possible. |
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AI Web-marketing campaign
Love the Spielberg movie or hate it, this stealth campaign for the robo-Pinocchio story was popcorn entertainment itself. A network of websites spun a complex murder mystery, never mentioning the movie's plot or its main characters, but hardwiring curious surfers into AI's fictional future world. |
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Lipton, Sizzle and Stir
"When you cook," said commercials for this prefab meal kit, "you're a family." And what a family! In one of the spots, surreally cast with a potpourri of midlist celebs, "Mom" Sally Jessy Raphael and "Dad" Chuck Woolery fuss in the kitchen, while the "kids," squabbling over setting the table, turn out to be Pat Morita and Little Richard. Does that dinner mix come in tutti frutti? |
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E*Trade, Monkey II
At Super Bowl 2000, in the glory year of the dotcom ads, the online trader proudly blew $2 million on a spot featuring a dancing monkey. At Super Bowl 2001, the monkey rode through a ghost town littered with the graves of "Tieclasp.com," "Pimentoloaf.com"—and the lifeless body of a familiar-looking sock puppet. At least the Internet boom could laugh at its own funeral. |
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Reebok, Women Defy
They're not quite strong. They're hardly invincible. They are ... men. In spots that upend the male-female sports dynamic, male dancers shake their booties at a women's basketball game, female bodybuilders laugh at a feeble guy at the gym, and Missy Elliott raps, "It's a woman's world." Hear her roar. |
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Kate Spade print campaign
Art photographer Tierney Gearon shot an upscale suburban couple frolicking with their kids in scenes that are idyllic—almost. Mom bundles her son into a car as a crow glares in the foreground. The kids dress up, half cute, half menacing, in devil costumes. It's a haunting deflation of our myths of the innocuousness of childhood. |
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The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show
As a play for viewers, it was pretty transparent. (So was the clothing.) As advertising, it was a coup: over 12 million (more than half of them women) watched what amounted to an hour-long underwear ad on ABC. |
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The Worst | Pop-under ads
Do these obnoxious, ubiquitous online ads really sell anyone a low-interest credit card or "the amazing XCam2!" wireless camera? Search us. But these rapidly proliferating ad windows, leaping onto screens unasked for, turn Web browsing into an annoying game of digital whack-a-mole. That's not selling; that's mugging. |
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