On TV, Nice Guys Finish First

Twice a week the show presented a spectacle that would not have been out of place on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” circa 1954. Even the losers left the ballroom grateful to have given their careers a lift.

Before the Iraq war veteran J. R. Martinez beat out Rob Kardashian in the finale, David Arquette made use of the show to change his image from tabloid bad boy to giggly leading man, and Nancy Grace revealed the vulnerable kitten hidden beneath her accusatory cable persona.

The success of the relentlessly feel-good “Dancing” is very much in keeping with a new-again TV spirit, a balm perhaps for the blow suffered to the blinged-out optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Hard times have been made all the more vivid by the Occupy movement, which rendered 2011 a cousin to the revolutionary years 1848 and 1968. So when those of us not actively positioning ourselves on either side of the barricades find ourselves navigating TV offerings, we may be a little more inclined to settle on shows that provide civility and escape, no matter how Jell-O-like they render our brains.

Consider “American Idol.” After roughly a decade of stellar ratings, “Idol” had a falloff in its 2009 season, which, perhaps not so coincidentally, was the last with the asp-tongued Simon Cowell as its dominant p

Viewers who relished his casually sadistic turns of phrase figured the show would lose not only its zing but also its very reason for being when it returned, in 2010, with the friendly Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler filling the time once gleefully devoured by the man in the snug black T-shirt. But improved ratings suggested such worries were unfounded. On TV, these days, nice guys finish first.

It’s a shift that hasn’t been lost on the shrewd Mr. Cowell himself, who has made a fortune gauging the masses’ ever-changing moods. On a recent edition of his new Fox show, “The X Factor,” the onetime meanie offered not only high praise for a contestant named Stacy Fisher, but also something more concrete: “I think you want to give me a kiss, don’t you?” he said, before stepping away from his product-placement Pepsi and planting a smooch. Unaccustomed to this reformed Mr. Cowell, Ms. Fisher was as stunned as Bob Cratchit on the morning after Christmas when Scrooge gave him a raise.

The game-show genre, once a space where it was acceptable to leap and whoop in spasms of childish want, is also moving toward goodness and light. The contestants on “You Deserve It” on ABC play not for themselves but for someone else in need. All that jumping for joy is altruistic rather than self-interest.

The niceness has also melted the once-icy environs of NBC’s Thursday night sitcom block. This is where “Seinfeld” held sway in better times, with an amusing nihilism that stuck a pin in the chubby, happy Clinton days. The dictum laid down for “Seinfeld” by its main writer, Larry David, was “no hugging, no learning,” a rule flouted this season by its increasingly sentimental descendants, “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office.”

As its doodle-dee-doo theme song suggests, “Parks and Recreation” ranks high on the niceness scale, even as it pokes fun at the notion of Midwestern politesse.