It’s actually a good thing, the more you think about it. Still, another thing lost, tears in the rain and all that….
It was nearly two months ago that I’d posted about the television theme song apparating like a ghost in my head during the particular time and night it came on in the mid-1970s. Irrational as I know it to be, I can’t entirely shake my nostalgia for those days before video recording when you had to watch the show when it came on, or waited for the re-runs.
Re-run season started in May, but I never knew anyone so fanatical about a program that they combed the TV Guide listings every week to see when it came on. If someone had a show they were accustomed to watching at such a time on such a day, they either tuned in and grumped at the episode being a re-run or—and I know how crazy this sounds—they rejoiced for re-run season because it’s warm weather season and a good time to get outside and do warm weather things. These latter were a minority, but not so small as you’d think.
It’s another one of those things that is difficult to imagine if you weren’t there, but there was a nationwide excitement in anticipation of the new television season in September. It didn’t matter that the new shows premiering were more of the same variations of fantastically principled, dedicated and heroic doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement officers, with the half-hour situation comedies following the same formula of mismatched couples and families putting each other down. These shows were new, and you couldn’t wait to see them.
Among the Back to School sales, long before the fructose syrup concoction of “pumpkin spice”-flavored milk coffee was a thing, the fat, photo-packed TV Guide Fall Preview in August, was a sign summer was winding up. I remember my mother coming home with the 1972 issue and smiling as she showed it to me. She had first dibs! It was something we looked forward to, and if the new TV season turned out to be much of the same-old, same-old, complaining about it was as much a part of it as anything else.
I had wondered what year the last digest-sized TV Guide Fall Preview came out. I had guessed it had died out sometime in the middle of the first decade post Y2k. I didn’t need to know that badly so I didn’t look it up. The days when you went to someone’s house and they had a copy of the latest TV Guide under the ashtray on the little table between Mom and Dad’s recliners in the living room are just another thing long gone with the 20th century.
But in looking for a cover image I could use by way of illustration, I came upon the edition for this very television season. Well. Okay, then. Who’s reading this? Almost no one reads print magazines these days, so this has to be a tax write-off.
With these remembrances of Things Past out of the way, I now come to the contemporary reason for this essay. As of this writing in September 2023, there is no new television season because of the writers’ strike. It’s been going on for months now, with naturally very little media coverage, given who owns the media.
In those happy, golden years I described there would have been an uproar. Sure, there were the usual cranks then crowing about how TV was bad for you. If a writers’ strike held up the new TV season back in the day they would be lecturing people on how this was a good time to get into the habit of doing something, anything else—and they would be largely ignored by people angry that the new show starring that guy they like from that other TV show was not coming on.
Now, nobody cares. In this age when you can get anything you want, including the grossest pornography, streamed to you over the Internet, when new “content” is being debuted on those same streaming channels throughout the year, the idea of a new television season is a quaint artifact of a distant past. People still have their favorite shows but these are all niche audiences. The days when most of the country would watch a show and talk about it the next morning around the water cooler are another long gone, never-to-return thing.
There’s so much content already available to watch, straight-to-streaming (formerly straight-to-video) movies, and entire seasons of shows most people haven’t heard of, it will be a while before anyone complains that there isn’t anything new to watch. By then, the film and TV companies will have their A.I. scriptwriter bots up and running, and no one will notice the difference.
The crowning irony of all is the striking writers are concerned they will all be replaced by artificial intelligence (A.I) software writing scripts by algorithm. They’re likely right, and said replacement is very likely happening anyway because why not? They were writing by rote and formula even in the Good Old Days. These days it’s even more rote than ever, and the formula is simply rancid.
Once you notice you can’t stop noticing. As smarter writers than I have noted, you can’t even enjoy the TV shows and movies from the Good Old Days because you notice the tropes creeping in. They were there all along. What you see now is the direct result of a long, slippery slope.
You could have written a lot of the so-called cinematic classics with A.I. Now that the studio heads have the technology, they’re set to save a considerable sum of money, and so they shall. Next up: holographic actors. The people who watch TV will continue to watch TV. Everyone knows those stupid actors were way overpaid, anyway.
All around, it’s what would properly be called a “whitepill.” If we no longer can come together as a country to talk about the real cool movie of the week the next day, we no longer come together as a country to take in the regime’s talking points. The derision behind the sobriquet “TV watchers” in regards to the COVID cultists “following the science”—in reality, following the banter of late-night television comedians and the same news media that sold us every useless war since Korea—is well-earned.
The stupid and easily led will always outnumber the rest of us who have checked out, but it’s impressive just how many there are like us. We’re oblivious to the latest gross-out horror show or sci-fi dystopia the shills are talking up on the Internet. We’re reading, writing, working out, doing community stuff, etc. I’m proud to say that no one I know where I am, whether in church or with the community organization I volunteer for, speaks of anything on television, with the rare exceptions of a sports game. The 70-point-plus humiliation of the Denver Broncos by Miami last week stands out, but also because there was a lot of “man, that sport has gone so far to hell” to go with it.
I should note that there is an entirely different attitude towards life out here in the country. Another post for another time. Suffice it to say no one is staying up too late to watch anything when there’s stuff to do in the morning. Autumn is harvest season. New fall TV season? You live out here long enough, where people raise the steak and the fries and grow the barley for the beer they’re brewing, you realize just how absurd it all was.
Meanwhile, that Carol Burnett Show theme still plays in my head after 10 p.m. on Saturday nights. I don’t mind. It’s crazy, but there’s worse ways to be.