When I'm bored and fed up--on a daily basis, increasingly--with streaming the latest inconsequential, instantly forgettable crap from our new Hollywood masters Neflix and Apple and Amazon and Skydance (don't even mention to me the soulless, dead-eyed, shrieking automaton YouTube and Tik Tok "influencers and content creators"), I like to dial up that other scourge of the modern age, Google, and troll through their Newspaper Archives, looking at old movie ads and TV schedules from my youth.
I'm keenly ware of what a curious thing that is to do, by the way. Nostalgia is a retrograde emotion, no question. My old man, who worked for a newspaper (that now almost-dead rag, The Toledo Blade, may it and all who sailed on her rot in hell), would have snorted with contempt at the notion of combing through old newspapers for such trivial, worthless information.
He went to the movies when he wanted to see something, and that was it. He paid his buck and a half, watched it, and left. It wasn't an act of aesthetic accumulation, a building of a cultural background to his own person that he valued outside of the viewing experience itself. It was just a movie (as Hitchcock said): light and shadow on a screen that entertained him for a couple of hours and then was done (thank christ he kicked off when he did, before seeing what I do for a living--he would have dropped dead from hysterics).
Same with television, if not more so. He considered teevee totally disposable, something to be left on in the background as he ate his dinner, and read his newspaper, and then to be stared at, more or less with semi-focus, until it was time to go to bed. To suggest to him that the shows he routinely watched in the 1950s through the 1970s would somehow later be considered "culturally significant" and a viable commodity not only for academic analysis, current pop culture re-excavation and veneration--or more accurately, denigration-- but also for further commercial exploitation through home media sales, reruns, syndication, and streaming, would have resulted in his uncomprehending derision at such a notion.
He certainly wasn't alone. Right from the start of television the snooty East Coast liberal "television critics" wrote in their newspaper columns about which few shows were culturally more "valuable" than all the others (while still believing the medium, overall, was junk compared to the legitimate theater and literature).
However, that kind of thinking was being expressed for a slim margin of readers who, when pressed, would have probably stated that they didn't really watch TV, anyway (lying, of course), and that nothing on the tube would be considered "art" by such discriminating viewers like themselves That certainly wasn't my old man, but the end result was the same.
However, in the early 70s when I was kid, the notion that TV, "could be art...or at least transformative," was becoming more mainstream, and more frequently parroted back to regular viewers, thanks almost entirely to the inflated reputation of Norman Lear and his rebranded U.K. series like All in the Family and Sanford and Son.
Naturally all the new TV critics (with the same old liberal viewpoint) had skin in the game elevating Lear to auteur status. After all, the so-called "vast wasteland" of TV, as dim bulb Newton Minnow put it, had been, they said, "saved" by liberal Lear from the tyranny of conformist, conservative 1950s pap, and fluffy, inconsequential--and thus, evil--comedy and fantasy series of the 1960s (and don't even mention the Western to 'ol Newt).
The unfortunate result of this newly concentrated indoctrination of the previously innocent, happy American TV viewer was an evolving gestalt that balefully harangued, "entertainment for entertainment's sake is bad," while a lecture, dressed up as entertainment, that argued, "You, the viewer, stink," for any number of societal, religious, or racial reason, is good.
Thus, all those previously satisfied viewers who found meaningful moments in lovely programs like Leave it to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best, and genuine, uncomplicated laughs in shows like Gilligan's Island and The Munsters, were left feeling somewhat ashamed of themselves, for the TV they enjoyed.
And we've all seen the decades-long result of such a mainstreaming democratization of this elitist viewpoint of television. In the 80s, critics, still largely impotent to their effect due to the carrying over of that old intellectual, rather than emotional, argument, cried over low ratings for self-conscious, obvious, pretentious--and politically aligned--snooze-fests like Hill Street Blues, while snickering at the huge Nielsen numbers for honest, earthy, blood-and-guts melodrama like Dallas and Knots Landing.
By the 90s, the openly crusading liberal critic finally appeared, who had Soviet-style political correctness by their side to right the wrongs of fickle, stupid American TV viewers who didn't understand that television entertainment had to mean something, that it had to point out their faults, that it had to punish them in some way, for it to be truly worthwhile.
And it's only gotten worse in the decades that have followed. Television as a whole isn't allowed to be purely entertaining anymore. That doesn't mean I only want Gilligan's Island reruns, obviously, or that I don't want to watch something challenging. I'm talking about something broader, something enveloping that's been strangling off for years the basic pleasures for which the medium was originally implemented.
There's always a beef attached to a show now, or a message as payment for our laughs that is first framed in the one-side negative, invariably, or if we're lucky, an out-and-out assault on us for who and what we are--actually who we physically are--woven into the fabric of a mystery, a procedural, a dramedy, a sitcom, or even a game show, for god's sake.
Well...you can have it. And according to the declining viewing numbers, I don't suppose I'm the only one who feels this way (there's a reason the streamers don't release true viewing numbers and audience demos: they're dire, I suspect, particularly when tallied up against the outrageous money-laundering sums being thrown around for production).
And that's why I scroll through old Toledo Blade "Peach Section" listings of TV shows from my youth, seeing the long-ago line-ups, and remembering the specific pleasures that were associated with those groups of shows. The feeling of physical and emotional release--complete and total freedom of mind and body--as I ran flat-out of Wayne Trail Elementary to my home to catch the start of WKBD TV 50's line-up out of Detroit. Various combos of shows like The Three Stooges, The Munsters, Lost in Space, The Little Rascals, The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Addams Family, and on and on and on.
The feeling that I was being catered to, that my pleasures were being attended to by some anonymous, mysterious force called "Channel 50" that thoughtfully put these shows out there every day, to make my miserable little life maybe just that much more bearable, can't be recreated in today's streaming a la carte world.
Long gone is that heady anticipation of the coming weekend, where I could dodge whatever horrors were going on in my home to sit in my room and watch Lawson Deming's Sir Graves Ghastly--in drag--introduce a Universal Monsters classic while lip-synching to Spike Jones' My Old Flame, before the killer early evening line-up of The Avengers, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible.
Then, a few "Big Three" primetime network offerings to kill time before going back to WKBD for some late-night Ghoul action, watching in wonderment as Ron Sweed implored me to never visit some place called "Parma" overdey, before blowing up poor Froggy with an M-80.
And if the weekend proved to be like so many others, where even TV couldn't patch over the physical pain and despair, well...I could always fake a sick day on Monday, and stay home to watch Bill Kennedy At the Movies, and see the former B actor reminisce about Cagney and Bogey and Cooper and Davis, and talk about magical Hollywood and its studios and contract players and beautiful starlets and its parties, an unmistakable wistfulness playing on his craggy features as he mentally went outside of dreary Detroit and the chilly, gray Great Lakes region, and back to the warm, sun-soaked West of his memories, of his youth, and to a past time he clearly loved and missed. He was always at least as entertaining as the movies he hosted.
Unlike my old man, I like to think the gruff, crabby, marvelously theatrical Bill Kennedy would have understood my Google scrollings, back to a better past. It's a nice thought, at least, and it's certainly saying something when old memories beat actually watching most of the crap on network and streaming today.
%20%E2%80%94%20Scaled%20(90%25).png){kind=tracking}
