For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication—and to profitability—has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers quite low enough to be canceled. In 100 Episodes, we examine shows that made it to that number, considering both how they advanced or reflected the medium and what contributed to their popularity.
Take a look through the Golden Globe winners for Best Drama Series in the ’90s, and you’ll come across an oddity. The usuals are there: Twin Peaks. Northern Exposure. The X-Files. All three saw considerable success at other awards shows and continue to be at least somewhat popular with critics and viewers to this day. (Northern Exposure needs to get on a streaming service so the world can be reminded anew of its brilliance, but that’s another article.) And yet smack dab in the middle of The X-Files’ three wins is one of the most surprising TV awards upsets ever: In 1996, Party Of Five, a Fox drama struggling through a low-rated second season with cancellation rumors bedeviling it at every turn, won the Golden Globe for Best Drama.
Yet how often do people talk about Party Of Five nowadays? Though its entire run is available to stream on Amazon, the show almost never comes up when the great dramas of the era are discussed. Yes, its final two seasons are hugely problematic, overcome with the kind of melodrama the show kept tastefully tamped down in its first four years. And to be sure, this kind of hyper-earnest drama has largely passed from the airwaves since the rise of The Sopranos and its ilk. (Oddly enough, Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, two of the most important producers on that HBO show, worked on Party Of Five in its fourth season.) But for the most part, Party Of Five has been forgotten because it’s become a synonym for a kind of TV that’s not cool anymore, dominated more by emotional reactions than high-stakes drama, filled with basically good people trying to do what’s basically the right thing. Party Of Five will turn 20 next fall, and it seems unlikely that birthday will carry with it the kind of celebrations The X-Files is seeing this year as that anniversary approaches.
In many ways, Party Of Five deserves to be better remembered for precisely the reason it has mostly been forgotten: It’s the culmination of a type of television that flared up briefly in the ’80s and ’90s, then mostly subsided in the face of antihero shows. This type of family drama, first brought to wide popularity via Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick’s thirtysomething, tended to be about affluent white people, who mostly fretted about their emotions and connections to the other people in their lives. Herskovitz and Zwick used this formula on four seasons of thirtysomething, then applied lessons learned there to shows about characters in their teens (My So-Called Life), 20s (Relativity), and 40s (Once And Again). None of these lasted as long as thirtysomething, which still didn’t crack 100 episodes or see a lengthy run in syndication or cable reruns.
The formula found more success when it was grafted onto other formats. Many of the workplace dramas of the ’90s, like NYPD Blue and ER, delved ever more deeply into their characters’ personal lives, while Northern Exposure took these quests for meaning and understanding and piled them atop a quirky small-town comedy (inventing a whole new genre in the process). Party Of Five, however, mostly played the home-set drama, in all its earnestness and occasionally cringe-worthy pathos, straight. There wasn’t a strong workplace element: Its central characters were responsible for a restaurant, rarely a good source of TV storylines. Although the comedy was there, the show’s struggles to attract an audience famously stemmed from how depressing it could be. And yet Party Of Five lasted six years, by far the most successful of the Herskovitz/Zwick direct descendants, and extended its run in cable syndication.
The reasons Party Of Five succeeded where many other thirtysomething clones failed are threefold. First, the show’s premise was more immediately gripping than thirtysomething’s, which was essentially “a bunch of yuppies live in Philadelphia and figure out what they want.” Centered on the Salingers, a family of five children, the show chronicled how they tried to take care of each other after the death of their parents in a car accident. Party Of Five straddled the lines of young-adult drama, offering up love triangles and tragedies for the Salingers in their late teens and 20s, and teen drama, with sweeter, smaller stories for the younger characters. Second, the show figured out fairly early on that it could successfully graft its premise onto a social-issues melodrama. With each season, the Salingers confronted the sort of small-scale problem—abortion, alcoholism, cancer, domestic violence—they might believably run into in real life. These issues gave the show a sense of external stakes other family dramas of its type sometimes lacked. And finally, Party Of Five was on the Fox of the ’90s, a network that had tasted success but was still uniquely willing to take chances on smaller, riskier shows for a season or two.
It was a slow build. The show’s first season lingered near the bottom of the Nielsens week after week, drawing raves from critics (including TV Guide’s “Best Show You’re Not Watching” at a time when that title still held weight) but largely ignored by mass audiences. For the most part, this was understandable. The first season is strong, particularly for a debut drama, but as conceived of by creators Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman, the show was very much about the siblings dealing with the grief following their parents’ death. Other storylines float in and out, but the bulk of the story involves the siblings learning to operate as a family unit without the two people who brought them into the world. The height of this approach is the deeply earnest “Thanksgiving,” which releases the drunk driver who killed the Salinger parents from prison, then has the four oldest siblings talk to him one by one, generally behaving like walking, talking Clinton-era time capsules, scored by acoustic guitar.
Watching that now may seem slightly ridiculous, especially removed from the context of the era in which it was made. But that clip reveals many of the show’s secret strengths. For one thing, the cast was stellar. To play the four oldest siblings, Keyser and Lippman found Matthew Fox, Scott Wolf, Neve Campbell, and Lacey Chabert, all of whom would go on to have significant careers elsewhere and all of whom almost immediately started acting like a semi-functioning family unit. They were able to take the show’s stabs at quirkiness (like Chabert’s character, Claudia, living in a pup tent in the living room) and make them feel organic, and they looked eerily like they might be related, adding a verisimilitude that’s hard to quantify. (Keyser and Lippman’s eye for strong casting ran down to the smallest of guest roles, and they even found Jennifer Love Hewitt right before she became the late ’90s crush of every teenage boy.) But the show’s dialogue also gave the cast plenty of strong material. Notice how the opening lines of the episode overlap in fun ways, how the conversations dovetail over each other and sound more like the real cacophony of a house with four kids and a baby living in it. It’s not Robert Altman or anything, but it was sophisticated for the TV of the time.