The Fall 2014 TV season

So I'm astonished to realize that the new TV season is going to be a veritable geek wonderland. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise, considering that the movies have, for the last several years, been dominated in a big way by superhero and geek genre films. When films featuring Iron Man and Captain America, of all characters, end up raking in hundreds of millions of dollars and setting records at the box office, the age of pop culture miracles has arrived. And now, for the first time in my life, there is probably more geek pop culture out there than I can keep up with.

What’s amazing is the scale and variety of programming that will be available as of this fall. The superhero genre already has Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Arrow, which will be spawning spin-offs like Agent Carter and The Flash. Also on the horizon are other comic book-inspired concepts like Constantine and iZombie, which also plug into the supernatural category of the long-term hits Supernatural and True Blood. We also have returning fantasy favorites Grimm, Once Upon A Time, and HBO’s surprisingly popular sword-and-sorcery epic Game of Thrones.

Given the extreme profitability of superhero and fantasy franchise films (we’re talking billion-dollar box office), it was inevitable that TV would hop on the bandwagon — and for the past several years, that bandwagon has gotten larger and more lucrative. For a long while it was just Smallville (which chronicled Clark Kent’s adventures pre-tights) and several sexy vampire shows. But when those shows proved their profitability, and when certain genre offerings on cable started pulling down big numbers, broadcast TV couldn’t help but respond.

Why now?

However, there were three factors that had to be in place before superhero, science fiction, and fantasy shows could gain any serious traction on network TV: The writing had to improve — which it did; the production values had to improve — which they really did; and the visual effects had to both drastically improve and become affordable on a television budget — which they have, magnificently, during the last 15 years. (You have the Star Trek franchise and Battlestar Galactica to thank for that last point. It got to the point where the space battle scenes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were as exciting and detailed as in any Star Wars movie, and BSG’s space scenes had a breathtaking cinema verite aspect.)

There’s also another factor that creators of geek programming have finally learned to deal with: female viewers. To appeal to women (and, let’s be honest, gays), genre programming has drastically upped the sex-appeal ante, as well as the romance quotient. Long-term successes like The Vampire Diaries make romance and youthful male pulchritude central, while the producers of the relatively new superhero hit Arrow blatantly play on star Stephen Amell’s sex appeal by including copious scenes of the exceedingly attractive and buff actor stripped to the waist. In fact, male sex appeal seems to be easier to promote in fantasy- or horror-oriented programs like The Walking Dead, where redneck character Daryl (played by Norman Reedus) has been a breakout sex symbol, than it is in realistic dramas set in real-world settings, where scenes of Dr. McSteamy in a towel in Grey’s Anatomy are the exception, not the rule.

How long?

The question is, how long will this trend continue to dominate scripted programming on TV? Easy: for as long as the shows retain their sense of novelty and relatively high level of quality. We’ve already seen that the audience’s appetite for the fantastic is not infinite: producers tried to spin off a second show from the hit fairy tale drama Once Upon A Time, set specifically in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, but it tanked in the ratings. No matter how visually impressive the eye candy may be, there is a risk that people will lose interest in predictable, juvenile storytelling. Luckily, though, genre programming is limited only by the imagination of the creators, who have centuries' worth of literary ideas to steal and adapt from. Sleepy Hollow is one such literary adaptation that has proven to be a hit.

Within a few years, geek genre programming will get scaled back on broadcast TV after the audiences get their fill of superheroes, fairy princesses, vampires, and zombies parading across prime time, much the way that networks have scaled back reality programs. Geek programming will end up being just a normal part of the network mix. Some good shows will not catch on and will be canceled before their time; some bad shows will hit it big and last for a depressingly long time. But overall variety will be enhanced by the addition of geek genre programming to the standard television mix.

For myself, as a lifelong geek, I consider this to be the Golden Age of television. Of all the choices on TV (and let’s face it, there are a lot of choices), geek programs as a rule have a higher level of writing and production values than your average cop show or prime time soap opera. In fact, many shows like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Doctor Who maintain a level of episodic quality comparable to any big-budget genre movie. And there are so many good to excellent geek programs out there now I could conceivably have several nerd-gasms a day, every day. It’s a shame I’m going to have to limit my visual media input just to have time for other things in life like work and sleep.

In the decades prior to the advent of the visual medium, sci-fi and other fantastic fiction in its prose incarnation attracted and inspired some of the most creative and imaginative minds of modern American culture. I was certainly inspired while growing up to think outside the box, to allow my imagination to run rampant thanks to Star Trek and 2001, Asimov’s robots and Tolkien’s Hobbits, Superman and the X-Men. While the visual media may not exercise the brain the way print does, nevertheless the presence of geek programming in movies and TV will spur countless young imaginations in the way reality-based or reality-inspired storytelling cannot, giving new generations of boys and girls permission to hold onto their dreams throughout their lives. And lord knows, this world could use as many people as possible who remember how to dream.