Time Capsule Television

TV from a golden age .. - Pic courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I’m enjoying a week of vacation -- just a “me” week. My usual travel companions are otherwise occupied so I decided to catch up around the house. “Me” week calls to mind my latest guilty pleasure -- MeTV on channel 24. MeTV gives me these great oldies all in a row: Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and The Odd Couple. In 2.5 hours we progress from 60’s gimmick shows to 70’s sophistication.

MeTV takes me on an excursion to my teenage years -- an era of bell bottoms, fall colors, pimped out cars and resigning Presidents. Another station that I watch a lot of is TV Land on channel 66. This gives us more recent retro with Cosby, Raymond, King of Queens and The Golden Girls. At 55, some would say I’m pretty golden myself -- my viewing habits are age appropriate. Rue McClanahan was only @ 51 at the start of Golden Girls.

What all these shows have over current TV is that they are scripted, well-crafted stories. Each one is a slice of Americana that tells us a lot about who we were at the time. The alternatives now on broadcast TV are shows like The Voice, Idol, America’s Got Talent and Bachelorette. It makes me sad that TV has devolved to this point … talent discovery shows like Star Search and The Gong Show were considered the dregs of TV back in the day. They were mindless filler for non-prime viewing hours.

APP WORLD

In a related pop culture arena, famous author Stephen King was recently asked by Entertainment Weekly what he thought about the reading habits of young adults. He said, essentially that we’re a smart phone, sound bite society -- young people don’t really read anymore. Too much competes for young people’s attention. LOL and ROFL round out the new vocabulary. I can’t help but think that the same short attention span keeps young people from watching a TV show or movie that calls for maybe a 60 minute time commitment. Complex plot lines and cultural references might seem too much like homework in a world where book reports are Wikipedia cut-and-paste jobs … a world where conversations are a hastily thumb-typed “As if!”. More words fly by, but they are vacuous monosyllabic words.

There is hope actually -- a ray of light that breaks through the clouds of this dull, intellectual laziness. Not everyone is a fan of reality TV -- some very noteworthy Hollywood denizens (eg, Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy) would like to put reality TV out to pasture. TV Land, mentioned above, is also giving us some great new scripted shows like Hot in Cleveland and Happily Divorced. These shows are hardly intellectual exercises, but they have just enough wit, relevance, continuity and structure -- they seem like War and Peace next to The Voice.

Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses. It turns out he was wrong about that … XBox, Wii and smart phones are the opiates that have turned so many Americans into distracted zombies.

Steering back to the TV Land topic, I’d like to briefly discuss my new, old favorite ...

GOLDEN AGE

Golden Girls ran from 1985 through 1992. I liked the show, but was put off by Betty White’s Rose character at first -- I wanted back the tart nastiness of Sue Ann Nivens from Mary Tyler Moore. But I got past that quivel and started to enjoy the centered qualities of Dorothy and Southern-style trampiness of Blanche. I figure that Dorothy was fairly close to Bea Arthur’s real personality. The show went off the air 21 years ago and continues to be hilarious. Even the Reagan jokes seem fresh from when I saw the shows originally. You don’t have to be senior or female to think the Girls are great.

IN CONCLUSION

There will always be a small subset of people who can rise above sexting and tweeting. Those young people who can go beyond that adolescent fixation will have the world in the palm of their hands. Maybe we’ve lowered the bar too much, to make that a standard for intellectual leadership. It could serve as a minimum requirement.

In the meantime, if you are a 50+ dinosaur like me check out MeTV and TV Land. Look at where we’ve been and where we might go again if we’re lucky.

© 2013 blogSpotter