Running out of TV? Nonsense!

I ran across this old article in my digital files from that awful Covid Theater year of 2020, Alison Herman's story "We're Going to Run Out of TV" (complete with the panic headline; exclamation point optional). "[A] drought is upon us," she says. And even though it's dated (she was referring to is the lack of new television due to the virus), the message still pertains today. 

Nonsense! In reality, there's no lack of television out there; between DVD, YouTube, and other sources, there's more TV available than any sane person could watch in a lifetime. Of course, throughout these ten years we've established that sane people do not run this website; even so, there's still a substantial number of TV shows just waiting for viewers to discover them.

And that's the problem: when it comes to television, too many people people limit the scope of their investigation to what's new, what's now, what's dope. Maybe, just maybe, they could be persuaded to look back as far as ten years. And you might as well forget about anything in black-and-white; I'm sure there are plenty of college-age types who refuse to believe there was ever such a thing.

It's their loss. It's reasonable to assume that we all have a bias toward the television of our own time, which is why today's viewers call shows like Breaking Bad "the best drama television has ever had to offer"—which it might well be, but it's pretty hard to make that claim stick by ignoring the first sixty or so years of television's history. "Don’t we lose more than we gain by constantly promoting the new and hip at the expense of the old and unfamiliar?"

In addition to losing our knowledge of television's past, though, we run the risk of losing touch of our own cultural past.  I often point out how the shows of yesterday offer us a window to the world of yesterday—one which is only approximated in period shows such as Mad Men.  I suppose this isn't a real surprise, given that these kids nowadays think history started about ten minutes ago.  But looking at the shows from the 50s and 60s introduces us to a world of wonder, in which walking on the moon was a fantastic dream; a world of apprehension, in which the threat of nuclear annihilation was a real and present danger; a world of comfort, in which the two-parent family was the norm, and neighbors looked out for each other.  We look at the stereotypes of women and minorities and see how things have changed, we see cars and fashions and marvel how technology has evolved.  We see the small towns and byways of America in the 60s, and wonder at how completely different the country has become.  We see travelogues of distant lands, and dream of travel beyond our own homes.

Over in England, someone touched on this with regard to the ongoing controversy over Doctor Who, now on hiatus and perhaps never to return. Considering the poor quality of recent seasons, the commentator offered what seemed to me to be a sensible question: why do we need new Doctor Who at all? After all, there are twenty-five or so years of the classic version out there on DVD. We're watching them again now (and enjoying them again immensely), and depending on your viewing habits, this could keep you busy for years. When you have that kind of inventory, why do you even need new Who? It is, I think, a question for which I'd struggle to come up with a sensible answer.

Brandon Norwalk, in a perceptive 2014 article at the AV Club (which, alas, I can no longer find), referred to this lack of familiarity with the shows of the past as "television's cultural amnesia."

When television fans lose their familiarity with classic television, every little formal discrepancy—from black-and-white to a multi-camera format to more obviously stylized performance—leads to perceptions that older TV is dated. And that, in turn, leads to blanket dismissals.

And that's the point about classic television, and what this blog has attempted to say about it over these many years. For classic television is not only old B&W programming, frequently primitive and sometimes very difficult to watch. It's more than that, though: it is our world—the world that has been shaped by generations past.  When we lose touch of it, we lose touch of ourselves.  It's part of the magic of classic television—the magic of memory.  It's like looking through a family scrapbook, where we can watch ourselves grow, and grow old.  When we suffer from amnesia, when we lose touch with our roots, we are the poorer for it, for as Nowalk writes in conclusion, "To the untraveled viewer, the horizon is endless. I highly recommend exploring." TV

If you enjoy the content here and want to support my broader creative work, please consider leaving a tip at my Ko-fi page. Any amount you contribute helps me continue writing, researching, and sharing these articles and projects. Thank you!