or The Wild, Wild West or Lost in Space in primetime, during those – cough-cough – sick days, we spent the daytime hours with The Life of Riley, My Little Margie, The Gale Storm Show, December Bride and its spinoff (yes, they had them in those olden times) Pete and Gladys, The Ann Sothern Show, Leave It to Beaver, The Real McCoys, Bat Masterson, My Friend Flicka and a host of others. So, at the same time we were watching Combat! or The Man from U.N.C.L.E. If one of us was, you know, home sick from school (“No, really, Mom – cough-cough – I don’t feel well, no, it’s for real this time, don’t you hear me coughing? Cough-cough!”), or on the weekends, we were treated to shows that had come and gone before we were old enough to have had our own contemporary primetime faves. Beginning in the late 1950s, syndication – where licenses for old shows were sold to individual TV stations – helped stations fill those hours.įor Boomers like myself, this made for an oddly bifurcated kind of past-and-present TV pop culture environment. Except for the earliest years of the medium – say the late 1940s into the late 1950s – TV schedulers have always had more time to fill than they have had content. It’s as old as… Well, it’s as old as whenever content producers had produced enough cancelled TV shows to give them something to sell. You study tidal movements and you’re looking at the moon’s gravitational pull, winds, rotation of the planet, and how they all interplay.
Studying trends in TV is like studying the tides changes never come down to one thing. So… why? At a time in TV history when so much adventurous, brave, edgy, and truly creative programming flickers to life on TV screens each day, what is providing this fertile ground for so many channels to find their market in yesteryear? Herewith the paradox of today’s multiple platform programming environments with streaming services and a bazillion cable channels: that at the same time audiences are treated to more new programming on any given day than ever before in the history of the medium (and a fair bit of it rated among the best to ever hit the no-longer-so-small screen), they are also being offered more old TV programming than ever before in the, etc., and with Me TV’s recent addition of a second channel – Me TV+ - channels whose entire 24-hour line-up – or at least most of it - is nothing but TV oldies, some of them more than a half-century old, seem to be flourishing. At which point he/she shakes his/her head over what’s on the screen – an episode of Columbo, or My Favorite Martian, or Wanted: Dead or Alive – and turns to you and says, “I thought this was what we left behind!” You plop him/her down in front of your big screen TV (which does suitably impress him/her), hand your visitor the remote, and, as luck would have it, your guest lands on, oh, say Cozi TV. In a bit of saintly largesse, you take one of the locals with you to show him/her just how far TV has progressed over the intervening half-century. You’re grateful as hell to step back through the portal and looking forward to streaming Disney’s new Obi-Wan Kenobi series. If the time portal landed you in a major TV market, there might be an independent station, maybe a couple, unaffiliated with a network, and they fill their days with even more old movies and old TV shows, more local talk, and sports.Ĭompared to what you left behind in 2022, it’s a comparative content desert. The local affiliates fill the time between the network programming blocks with syndicated game shows, local gabfests, old movies, and old TV reruns. There are just three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), and they’re not even on the air 24 hours a day! You can only watch a specific show once each week on a specific day at a specific time.
So, you step through the portal and come out somewhere in the 1960s. You have a time portal and you’re curious about how different television was decades ago.
0 kommentar(er)
