Why JAG Was an Older Person's Show: Reflections

Donald Bellisario's JAG had a ten season run and provided the platform for the launch of one of the twenty-first century's biggest ratings' successes, the NCIS franchise (the fourth show in which, NCIS: Hawaii, has just hit the air). All this may seem surprising given that it was hardly one of the past generation's more talked-about shows, with what little comment I remember about it jokes about the advanced age of its audience. (Notably I recall a fantasy sequence in one episode of Scrubs where J.D. is in the implausible situation of sharing an apartment with a large number of old men and yells for "whoever's been filling up my Tivo with JAG reruns to cut it out!") And if this seems like just a matter of cheap laughs Bellisario personally confirmed that the jokes, at least, were not baseless. When the show was canceled he acknowledged publicly that the age of the audience was a factor for advertising-minded executives, and even joked that the decent ratings with the 18-49 crowd it had in the earlier days were a matter of it being just 49 year olds who were 59 year olds a decade later.

Recently I have found myself giving some thought to the reasons for that. Certainly part of it would seem to be that JAG simply happened to run on a channel that, even before TV generally became an old-person thing, had a reputation for drawing an older crowd. (After all, in those years CBS was identified with Murder, She Wrote, and Diagnosis: Murder, and so forth in the very years when FOX and WB and UPN and others were going very hard after younger audiences, and getting them.)

Still, JAG was hardly the show to change that image. It was, after all, hardly Beverly Hills 90210 or Dawson's Creek or even Friends. Rather the show was a legal drama about the armed forces, with grown-up characters dealing with grown-up problems and any distinct youth interest lacking. Moreover, if the show's mash-up of A Few Good Men with Top Gun promised some action-adventure that was only part of the package--and those who came for the action did not necessarily stick around when it cut back to legal procedural. This seems all the more the case given what Bellisario and his team made the stuff of the episodes. The writers attempted to be contemporary with "ripped from the headlines" plots, like that other NBC hit Law & Order, and by making the gender politics of the armed forces (an ultra-fashionable topic at the time) a major theme.1 Yet the show's backward glance, a little more recognizable when one remembers that Bellisario was the creator of Airwolf (1984-1987) and Magnum P.I. (1980-1988) before he created JAG, and before that had worked on Black Sheep Squadron (1976-1978), was unmistakable.

Simply put, the pop cultural craze for things military in the '80s that helped make Airwolf a hit was well on the way from crest to trough circa 1995 when JAG came along. This went especially for a major factor in that craze, the "ghosts of Vietnam" with which Airwolf and Magnum P.I. were saturated (the protagonists of both shows were veterans of the conflict whose service in that conflict was background to many a store, while the issue of American MIAs from the conflict was central to Airwolf and prominent again in Magnum), and with which JAG was also saturated (not least through its protagonist Harmon Rabb's hunt for his MIA father, a running story through the first three seasons, which tied up with much else).2 And where in the '70s the old-fashioned feel of Black Sheep Squadron (at the time Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales called it a "war-is-swell series" for people who recalled "World War II as a rousing, blowzy, fraternity turkey-shoot") found an audience amid a period of nostalgia for World War II-themed entertainment, JAG's reverence and earnestness and what an earlier generation would have called its "squareness" were out of step with the irony-saturated '90s, a throwback to the '40s when the show did not recall the post-Vietnam '80s. All this limited the audience, with this going above all for the young, for whom G.I. Joe was just one more thing they enjoyed as children from which they had moved on to other crazes (to the Turtles, to the X-Men), for whom Vietnam was remote, for whom much in the ever-growing range of choice they had was more appealing--while it was a segment of the older population with which the theme and the baggage and the tone were likely to strike a chord, and apparently did.

Still, the game has changed a great deal since, and it says something that as reruns of old shows seem to be resurgent across the basic (and even premium) cable line-up, helped by the arrival of a growing number of channels devoted to classic TV. Indeed, after the show being off the air for a long time, this year I have spotted reruns on no fewer than three channels (H & I, WGN/NewsNation, even Sundance!) in what seems just one reflection of the way that older groups once shunned by advertisers have become a highly coveted demographic.

1. Apart from the pilot, where the theme of women in combat and the relations between men and women aboard ship were central to the murder investigation and the larger situation of which it was a part, and the consistent pairing of Harmon Rabb with a female partner (with all the opportunities to raise such issues such a pairing meant), the show devoted numerous episodes to such matters as gender discrimination, sexual harassment and the frictions and other complexities of male-female relations within the armed forces ("Chains of Command," "The Court-Martial of Sandra Gilbert," "Offensive Action," etc.). Indeed, Representative "Bobbi" Latham, presented as a standard-bearer for the cause of women's participation in the military on equal terms with men, appeared in no fewer than 18 episodes during the series' run (from "The Court-Martial of Sandra Gilbert" on).
2. The protagonist Harmon Rabb's father (played by David James Elliott, just like the son), we are told at the outset, was a Vietnam War "MIA," believed by his son to be still alive in Communist captivity, a fact that drove Harm to sneak into Southeast Asia as a teenager in search of him, and has since remained an obsession. Indeed, the fact is significantly referenced at the very start of the series, with Harm's assignment in the two hour pilot which launched the series taking him to the very carrier from which his father flew in the war ("A New Life"), and where the ship's current Carrier Air Wing commander ("CAG") is one of the war buddies with whom he did it--Rear Admiral Thomas Boone--a connection that proves significant over the show, with, after his saving Boone's life in the pilot, Harm time and again coming to Boone's legal defense during the ten later episodes in which Boone appears. Meanwhile no fewer than six of the show's first sixty-two episodes ("The Prisoner," "Ghost Ship," "King of the Fleas," "People vs. Rabb," "To Russia with Love" and "Gypsy Eyes") had Harm's search for his father at the center of their plot, with the narrative arc concluding only with Harm's discovery of his father's fate--his transfer to the Soviet Union, his escape, his taking up with a woman with whom he had a child and whom he died defending from Soviet soldiers, though that is of course not the end of the theme. It resurfaced a number of times, not least in a Christmas-themed episode set during his father's service during the Vietnam War about a USO visit to his ship ("Ghosts of Christmas Past"), while afterward the half-brother he discovers his father sired in Russia, who happens to be a helicopter pilot (like some Russian counterpart to Airwolf's Stringfellow Hawke!) appeared in another dozen episodes (over seasons 6-8). And still other episodes evoked the conflict, sometimes in quite similar fashion, with Harm's boss Admiral Chegwidden, who has plenty of "ghosts of Vietnam" of his own, in one episode going overseas on a private mission to rescue a man who saved his life during that conflict ("Soul Searching").