How old is "old"?

I've long since become accustomed to the idea that nothing of much value comes from the BBC, including the letters "B" and "C." I'm not here, though, to rag on the BBC. Instead, I'm going to rag on an article I bookmarked from the BBC website about four years ago.

The article, by David Renshaw, asks the question: Is Watching Old TV Good For the Soul? For those of us who hang out here, the answer is obviously yes. It is, in the words of my friend David Hofstede, Comfort TV. It's something of an existential question, getting to the heart not only of what old television purports to be, but how it intersects with the increasingly fluid values displayed in today's pop culture. I suppose you could describe it as the basis for everything this website is about, and in fact I did describe it that way in the first chapter of The Electronic Mirror, which is pretty much all about the question of what classic television is. The only question that concerns me right now, however, is how you define the word old. 

I've used the words old and classic more or less interchangeably in that paragraph, because that's how I've always thought of it myself. Maybe I've been wrong about that, though. Someone once suggested using the word "vintage" instead of "classic," since classic implies a certain quality that doesn't necessarily depend on age; hence the otherwise oxymoronic term "instant classic." (I suppose one could say that "instant classic" is as oxymoronic as "instant coffee," but since I don't drink coffee, I don't have a horse in that race.) Anyway, it was a good suggestion, but I was already too far down the road I've taken to change, and so the term remains "classic television."*

*Or, as I call it in Darkness in Primetime, "Classic-Era Television." 

But this Renshaw article redefines old in a way that isn't familiar to me. Some of the "old" television programs mentioned in the article include:

• The Sopranos
• The Office
• Seinfeld
• The West Wing

Depending on what you think of them, these shows (and others from their era) could, I suppose, be considered classic, but would you consider them old? I don't; to me, "old" means the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the 1970s. I suppose, though, today's viewers would consider them not old, but ancient. Maybe that's what bothers me about this article; after all, if shows from less than 30 years ago can be considered old, what does that make me, in the early years of my seventh decade? Am I ancient too? Hell, I'm not even eligible for Medicare yet. 

It gets worse. Renshaw quotes Daniel D'Addario, Variety's head TV critic: "'The sea-change I'm really expecting is that there will come a point where we're so far past Friends and The Office that future generations cannot relate to them,' he says, pointing to I Love Lucy as an example of a classic TV show that no longer chimes with modern audiences."

It's true that I've never been much of a fan of Lucy, but I'm going to take a stand on her behalf here. Yes, the world populated by Lucy and Ricky Ricardo is one that might appear foreign to modern audiences, unless they grew up watching Mad Men (another "old" program). And yet, I have to ask why Lucy wouldn't chime with them? The show's humor, much of it rooted in the human condition, is timeless, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Love, friendship, misunderstandings, couples getting mad and making up—these are things that have tickled the funny bones of people for generations. And as for slapstick, someone once said that nothing was funnier than a man slipping on a banana peel, because the anticipation was half of the fun. Isn't that how we feel when Lucy and Ethel are trying to keep up with the chocolates on the assembly line in the candy factory? And I'm not just talking about comedy; is there any who can really say, with a straight face, that a show like The Twilight Zone doesn't have something to say to us today?

No, you know what kinds of shows I think future generations won't be able to relate to? Shows that traffic in political proselytizing in the guise of entertainment. These shows don't even attempt to be timeless; they're geared to appeal to others of similar beliefs, a kind of secret handshake that welcomes like-minded viewers into an exclusive club, from which they can laugh at and ridicule those outside their clubhouse walls. I suppose these shows, like so many other things in our modern economy, are designed to be disposable; considering the number of programs viewers can choose from (532 original scripted television series were created last year), maybe they don't need to have any shelf life at all. We watch them, and when we're done with them, we just throw them away. Maybe it's just me, but I doubt that in twenty years, very many people are going to be laughing at jokes about presidents with orange hair.

The best part of this article, by far, is D'Addario's explanation of why people turn to old shows, and it's as David Hofstede says: for comfort. "[T]here is the comfort of familiarity. The things people are binging are not deeply experimental, you know the rhythms of these shows very well. It's about knowing what you're getting and letting it wash over you." And for people who feel alienated from today's world that seems to say that right is wrong, left is right, up is down—well, for them (and there are a lot of them), that familiarity is not going to be found exclusively in the shows of the last thirty years; they're going to find it in shows like Leave it to Beaver, Andy Griffith, and, yes, I Love Lucy.

It is, I think, alarming that we've come to the point that we consider something from thirty years ago as old. It really doesn't have anything to do with television at all, you know. It's a disregard for experience, for history, for tradition; it's a scorn for values that were accepted and lived out for centuries, if not millennia. It's the mark of a society that thinks only the now is important and that values are transitory, that crucifies people for the sin of having been products of their time, that views the past and those from it as being as disposable as, well, those TV shows I was talking about. 

So that brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning: how old is old? It's a question we all struggle to answer; we keep coming up with trite phrases like "60 is the new 40"* and then plaster them on wooden plaques we hang on our walls to make ourselves feel better as the birthdays ramp up; we keep talking and dressing and living as if we're still twenty years younger than we are. We don't want to grow up, let alone grow old.

*Being half a decade past 60, I can assure you that I do not feel 40. In many ways, my life is much better; nevertheless, my body says otherwise.

There are those who say that seeking comfort in nostalgia is an attempt to escape the world of today, but maybe it's also a way of acknowledging that we're all growing older, at the rate of 60 minutes per hour, and that we've come to terms with it. Watching television from the 1950s and 1960s isn't a way of trying to recapture our youth—it's admitting that, like these shows, we are old, and we accept it. As Harry Reasoner (a really old TV guy, and therefore of no importance) once said, no matter how a man tries to avoid risk or grasp for youth, "he may get one day extra or none; he never gets eternity." Not in this world, anyway. TV

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