Back issues

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s a teenager, there were two magazines that I subscribed to, without fail, every year: TV Guide and Sports Illustrated.* They’re both still around, technically, but I’m not even sure you can call them mere shells of their former selves. Each, in its time, was the preeminent “serious” publication in their respective genres; in today’s clickbait culture, they’re now some of the clickbatiest.

*I know I don't usually italicize TV Guide, but here it's being used in conjunction with other magazines whose titles I do italicize; it would look funny otherwise.

I had cause in the last week to think about each of them in terms of what has been lost, through various ownership changes, evolutions in taste, and a general dumbing-down of society. (Current readers excluded, of course; if you happen to be reading these words, I have nothing but the highest admiration for your intellect, though I do wonder if you might not have something better to do.) You may have read about the latest to befall SI; the new owners took over last week and promptly cut half of the workforce, introducing a business plan that sounds suspiciously like some kind of a pyramid scheme involving LLCs, freelancers, and unpaid college students. (And no kidding about the pyramid part; the diagram accompanying their business plan is an actual, freaking pyramid. Of all the qualities that the new ruling class possess, irony is apparently not one of them.) One of the first stories to come from the “new” SI, a report on Saturday night’s Notre Dame-Bowling Green game, sounded as if it had been written as a first draft by a stringer for a high school newspaper. It causes even a semi-professional writer such as yours truly to look around, imagine inhabiting this world, and think of Charlton Heston’s words in Planet of the Apes: “If this is the best they’ve got around here, in six months we’ll be running this publication.” Or something like that.

It’s been decades since I’ve subscribed to SI; I dropped it sometime in the ‘80s, I think. After that, I only read it when I was stuck in a doctor’s office with nothing else to do but thumb around a months’-old magazine and find out who won last year’s Super Bowl. SI’s specialty had never been bring you the scores; you could get those in your newspaper. No, what its talented staff did was to give you the story behind the story, the in-depth profile that went beyond the fan-friendly propaganda you read elsewhere. And, of course, there was the stunning photography, from a time when not every sporting event was on TV, and the ones that were were often in black-and-white. It allowed you to actually see what was going on, not just read about it. Its writers included some of the greatest: Dan Jenkins, Frank Deford, Herbert Warren Wind, Paul Zimmerman, George Plimpton, Tex Maule, Robert Creamer, and others. It was kind of like the New Yorker of sports, and though I also read Dick Schaap’s Sport magazine, SI was the one to which I subscribed.

I gave up on the magazine when it started to become too political, when there were too many sports, like white-water rafting, that I just didn’t care about, and when the swimsuit issue turned into barely-concealed soft-core porn. (Pun intended.) I might have had withdrawal for a couple of weeks, but by then there were other serious magazines to pursue, such as Inside Sports and Deford’s failed daily sports newspaper The National. Eventually, I pretty much lost interest in most sports, which is where we are today.

The reason I bring this up—a topic that seems to have little to do with television—is the second occasion, which I alluded to up there at the beginning of the second paragraph. It was the day before yesterday, and I’d stopped at the post office to mail some TV Guides back to the generous benefactor who had loaned them to me (you’ll be reading one of them this Saturday). The woman at the window asked me what kind of magazines I was mailing back, and I told her they were TV Guides from the 1960s and 1970s. I write about them, I said modestly.

“TV Guide!’ she said, as if I’d brought up a long-lost old friend. “I remember that! We used to wait for that every week, and then look through it”—and here she made a motion with her hands, as if she were paging through the magazine—“to see what all was on! That was good reading!”

She turned to her co-worker at the next window. “You remember TV Guide?”

“Sure,” she said. “We used to read that every week! Is that even still around?”

“Yeah,” the first woman said, “but now it’s jes' like some gossip sheet. That’s all they do. It used to be good reading!”

I left with a smile, not just because it had been a pleasant conversation, but because it proved that I wasn’t the only person who felt that way about the old magazine. Like SI, TV Guide had once been a respected, weekly publication that dealt with serious issues. Like SI, it had a stable of great writers—Edith Efron, Richard K. Doan, Cleveland Amory, Neil Hickey, John Gregory Dunne and more—and like SI, it was now published every-other-week, with a tabloid-like mentality, and a website that reads as if it was written by publicists to the stars and has little to say about anything. When you jettison your heritage like this, you lose your institutional memory; in TV Guide's case, the memory is not of the latest stars, or the current gossip—it is the history of television, of the industries, of the shows that came to fame and helped make the medium what it is. Losing that memory is like losing your family album; you're left wondering who you are and where you came from.

Looking back on these memories is guaranteed to make you feel old beyond your years, which is one of the reasons why I do this blog—to make something productive from a memory that might otherwise break your heart, or at least drive you to drink. But what can you do? Times change, people change, tastes change. That this change is not always for the best is beyond the point; it simply is. It does no good to encase yourself in a sentimental nostalgia that acts as a cocoon protecting you from the present time. The past is to be enjoyed, savored, learned from—and to act as an escape only occasionally. As I’m fond of saying, I don’t live in the past, I just vacation there a lot. I’ve met so many terrific people since I started writing seriously about classic television—not just the ladies at the post office, but my friends at MANC, my correspondents, the people who’ve bought my books, and you readers out there, who make yourselves felt even though I might never meet you, or even hear from you.

No, there are good things about the present—not the least of which is all the all the great people you meet when you’re talking about the past. TV  

Another world, not my own*

*With apologies to Dominick Dunne.

Odysseus sat on the beach, Anthony Esolen tells us in the opening to his new book, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, casting his eye upon the sea, as he has done every night for as long as he can remember. It is a beautiful world, Esolen says, a world in which all is well; "only the man is lost; only the man is not well." He has all he needs here, and the beautiful woman who loves him like a pet has promised that he will not age as long as he stays here. And yet, "He suffers the pang of something bitter and sweet, and more bitter than sweet." It is, says Esolen, the pain from the desire to return from whence he came. It is, in the Greek word that we use to describe it, nostalgia, "the ache to turn back home."

How I wish I had read this before I wrote The Electronic Mirror. Not because of the elegance of Esolen's language, though elegant it is, in a way to which I can only aspire. No, it is because of the essential truth contained in those words, a truth I've tried many times to express, here and elsewhere. It helps give us a better understanding of just what that "turn back home" really means, and it has to do with what I feel is the problem today: alienation.

I'm going to refer back to that JFK assassination radio coverage I wrote about last month. Now, I don't mean to put too fine a point on this—it's certainly not my intent to turn this into the JFK channel. At the same time, these long-form recordings provide a brief immersion in the past; not just the big moments, but the little moments that precede them—and, as we'll see, the little moments within the big moments, the ones that I think provide the clearest insight and the most pain.

For example: whenever CBS would break to allow affiliates to make local announcements, the announcers at my hometown station, WCCO-AM in Minneapolis, would read listings of special church services being held in memory of Kennedy; there were so many that it sounded like they were reading lists of school closings in the Midwest during a blizzard. A lot of businesses were closing early that Friday; not so much because of the shock (although that too), but to allow their employees to attend services that might be happening at, say, 5:00 p.m. Would we hear that today?

Outside the WCCO studio, as the station broadcast the news on loudspeakers, passersby were asked for their impressions. First one man, then another, and still another, would say it. I wasn't a Kennedy man, they would say, I didn't vote for him, but I think this is the most terrible thing that's ever happened to this country. Now, remember: these were businessmen being interviewed, old enough for nearly all of them to have remembered Pearl Harbor (it was only 22 years ago, after all), and probably for most of them to have fought either in World War II or Korea. And yet, this is a terrible, terrible thing, the worst thing that could happen. Said about a man they hadn't voted for. Would we hear that today?

In Washington, the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, and the minority leader, Everett Dirksen, spoke to the media. Dirksen, a Republican, talked about the last time he and the president had spoken, just a few days ago when Kennedy was presiding over the annual pardon of the Thanksgiving turkey, and what a pleasant conversation they had had, talking of pending legislation, of 1964, and other things. Democrat Mansfield, after praising the president's memory, talked of “the cooperation and the support which the distinguished senator from Illinois, Mr. Dirksen, the minority leader of the Senate, gave to the President of the United States, a Democrat, time and time again, when the interests of the nation were at stake; and I know how grateful he was to you for the many contributions you made, and I am just as grateful, and the nation is, too.” Mansfield called it a fond memory; do people have fond memories of those they disagree with today? Dirksen later said of Kennedy, “If at any moment he may have seemed overeager, it was but the reflection of a zealous crusader and missioner who knew where he was going,” Would we hear that today?

Throughout the weekend, on WLW-AM in Cincinnati, at every station break the announcer recited a variation of the same script, WLW and the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation asking listeners to "join with us in prayer for John Kennedy, his family, and President Lyndon Johnson." At ABC radio, Don Gardiner, a newsman given to a very formal style, announced the death of the president and, one suspects for his own benefit as well as that of the audience, says, "Let us pray," followed by a moment of silence. Would we hear that on a network today? Now, it's true that the public tends to turn to religion in times of crisis; 9/11, for example. And not to suggest that such revivals are insincere, but usually church attendance returns to normal after a few weeks. Conversely, during the JFK weekend, one reporter remarks how the churches are full, yes, with people saying prayers and lighting candles; but not as full as they are on Sundays. Would we hear that observation today?

I could go on with this, ad nauseam. You listen to the music being played on the radio prior to the news bulletins, and there's no need for parental advisories. You hear the prices being quoted for groceries, and a family could probably be supported on the father's salary. You hear about families, for that matter, and that seems to be a quaint concept today. It is impossible to look at the past without feeling alienated by the present.

Yep, things have changed during my lifetime. But then, my wife's grandmother was alive when the Wright brothers flew, and again when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. There is anger in the world, and discontent, and searching. Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit,you say; thus has it always been, thus it shall ever be, and I get that. As Esolen points out, there has been no Eden since Eden. But the life that was lived in that world, and the things about which we disagreed, were still based on a common sense of principles, a shared definition of things. We hear it said often that "we don't speak the same language anymore," and I believe this; in his book The Great Delusion, political scientist John Mearsheimer reminds us that “For a society to hold together, there must be substantial overlap in how its members think about the good life, and they must respect each other when, inevitably, serious disagreements arise.” Perhaps God, in His infinite wisdom, is demonstrating something of His divine sense of humor—using the lesson from the Tower of Babel to impart a rebuke to us all.

We all feel this, the unsettledness of the world. Opioids, depression, suicide; you don't have to look far to see it. Anxiety is at an all-time high; social media makes it impossible to escape, makes it too fast to assimilate, makes it too contentious to discuss. We all live in our own little universe, where reality is whatever we choose to make of it. Nostalgia doesn't exacerbate this feeling; it helps explain it. Classic television and radio don't cause us to live in the past; they help us see how things were at any given point in that period without, as someone once said, "the corruption of hindsight." As you turn the pages, you visit a world as it was at the time when it was.

"I do not believe," John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, "that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation." Indeed; we must accept this, since it's impossible to travel backward in time anyway. But nostalgia does not suggest that we live in the past; instead, what we must do is find out what the past can teach us about the future. As I've said many times, you discover who we are by understanding who we were. When we hear, as we often do, that you can't turn the clock back, that you can't return to how things used to be back then, that's the very time when we do need to return to "back then," as Esolen reminds us in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and find out (or remember) what it means to go home.

This doesn't mean that I'm condemning the present uniformly, nor am I idealizing the past unequivocally. That would be as foolish as trying to pit 2018 against 1968 in terms of which year was worse. There is much about the present that is good, in the same way that there is much about the past that was not. The point is that the world has changed since 1963, and in doing so I believe we've seen a steady erosion of what kept society—the world—together. It had already started before 1963, and it will probably continue beyond today. But it's only that nostalgia that understanding of who we used to be, that can help us truly understand how far we've traveled from home, who we've become today. Alienation? No wonder. It is, as I said, another world, a different world from that into which I was born. And increasingly, it's a world that doesn't feel like my own. TV  

Around the dial

Before we get to the links this week, a couple of things I want to remind you of.

First, as I think I mentioned earlier, I'll be presenting one of the seminars at this September's Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland. Martin Grams has put together a terrific lineup of celebrities this year, including Barbara Eden, Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner, Loni Anderson and Howard Hesseman, Ed Begley Jr., Peter Marshall, Morgan Fairchild, and more. The seminars are always fascinating as well; in fact, I feel quite inferior being a part of it. The schedule is still a work in progress, but I strongly urge you to go to the website and buy tickets now if you can make it there. I can promise you'll have a great time, and of course I'd love to have you in the audience for my presentation!

Something else to look forward to later this year is my upcoming book, The Electronic Mirror: How Classic Television Shows Us Who We Were and Who We Are (and everything in-between!). It will be out in plenty of time for the Convention, and I can guarantee you'll hear more about it before then.

And now on to the week's best.

Really good piece by David at Comfort TV this week. Were classic TV's sitcom families really that unrealistic? He says they were more real than revisionist historians want to say, and I say he's right. This is the kind of thing that's a major part of my upcoming book.

At Classic Film and TV Café, Rick asks if you "Remember When" these Classic TV features were just the way things were. For example, do you remember when "The broadcast networks rolled out their new shows all at the same time as part of 'Premiere Week,'" or when "The World Series was broadcast only during the day." Sadly, I remember all of them.

Inner Toob has a fun piece on real-life movies that find their way into fictional television shows. I think Columbo's use of the Janet Leigh movie "Walking My Baby Back Home" in the episode where she played the killer (a former movie star) is my favorite example, but they're all good examples.

This isn't a recent story, but an interesting one, I think - Television Obscurities takes a look at a 1961 series called The Americans that's very different from the one we have today. It starred Darryl Hickman and Dick Davalos as two brothers fighting on opposite sides during the Civil War; as I think about it, perhaps it's not all that different from today's version.

A Shroud of Thoughts and David Hill's article at The Ringer both offer affectionate remembrances at Harry Anderson, who died this week at a much-too-young 65.

That should be enough to take us to tomorrow, when you'll be sure to return for a TV Guide from the late 60s. TV  

The past, brought to you by the present

It would come as no surprise, to me at least, to find out there are actually people out there who look at us classic TV aficionados and think that, well, we're maybe just a little batty. They look at our dedication to fifty- and sixty-year-old shows and think (not always without good reason) that some of us take it a little too far, that we've carried our appreciation for the past to a point where we're in danger of rejecting the present altogether, as something from which no good can come. To them we spend our days shut up in dim, dusty rooms living in our own personal twilight zone.

I imagine this is probably true for some people, at least once in a while. I have my own moments, when I’d like nothing better than to say the hell with it all and retreat to a world painted in sepia tones where all the television shows are in glorious black-and-white. (And, to top it off, I can open the window and yell at kids to get off my lawn.) On the other hand, in the world of today we don't have to worry about polio and many other diseases that terrorized people in mid-century America, we don't have to spend hours cleaning clothes and dishes by hand, we don't have to wrestle with cars lacking power steering - I'm sure you get the drift. The mere fact that you’re reading these very words right now wouldn’t have been possible back then.

But let's bring this closer to home, to the world of television. It's true that I watch very little contemporary TV other than sports, news, and the odd documentary or recent movie.* If it weren’t for my need to stay current, we’d be prime candidates for cord cutting; between our DVD collection, YouTube and Amazon Prime, we’ve got more than enough content to last us through a reasonable lifetime, or until the State comes to get us, whichever comes first.

*Though it is worth pointing out that the show at #1 on my hit parade is a current series, although I've shifted my allegiance from Top Gear to The Grand Tour.

And with that last paragraph, I’m about to prove my point – that it is, in fact, quite impossible for any classic TV buff to completely reject the present, for it is only the present that gives us access to the past.

I got to thinking about all this from a Terry Teachout column last week, in which he pointed out how it was much too easy to take the present for granted, that many of the things we enjoy without thinking would have been quite unthinkable back in the very days to which we keep returning. And as he talks about how back in the day every television show was "appointment television" that required you to make real decisions in your viewing choices because you only had that one chance to see it, no recording or going back later to catch what you missed or what was on the other channels.

I remember those days, and for all that we talk about the quality and content and charm of television back then, I have no desire to revisit the technical limitations that existed alongside those great shows. Which brings up another point: it is, after all, the evolution of technology that makes it possible for us to travel to the past in the first place.

Think about it: from the ability to record and replay, to the video tape and DVD, to streaming services that operate on machines you can hold in the palm of your hand, to subchannels that give us a windfall of classic programming - you can watch, over and over again, a history of television that goes back nearly 60 years. You can watch them free from the constraints of time and proximity to a television, free from having to choose between two desirable offerings, free to see programs that aired before you were born, or never made it to your viewing area when you were young. Is this great or what?

It's that technology that is responsible in great part for fanning the flames of nostalgia, for creating a demand for classic television that has expanded the choice far beyond the standard hits of each decade. For every Star Trek, I Love Lucy, Hogan's Heroes or The Dick Van Dyke Show that has been on pretty much as long as television has been into reruns, there are shows like The Four Just Men, Combat, The Fugitive, The Loner - series that had a short run, or never played much in syndication, or held a reputation for greatness based on their original run but hadn't been seen since. If technology hadn't succeeded in bringing us the most popular shows, it's unlikely the resulting demand for more would have caused companies to go into their vault for more obscure or seldom-seen series. It's unlikely the classic subchannels would have been seen as profitable ventures. It's unlikely an entirely new generation of fans would have grown up loving shows like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. It's unlikely that groups of fans devoted to particular series would have emerged, sharing information and creating a far more complete picture of a given show than had ever existed before. And it's unlikely that we ever would have experienced the picture and sound quality that far surpasses even that from the original airing. In other words, it is only because we are around today to benefit from this technology that any of these experiences are possible.

Not surprisingly, it's my contention that we're better off for all this, for the chance to see and learn from shows of the past, to be reacquainted with the stars and celebrities from other eras, to share the moments and memories that link us to our common history. These people, their shows, the images contained in them, the scripts from which they worked - all of these things deserve to be preserved and shared. And in each case, it's technology that makes it possible.

So if you're inclined to think of me as someone who lives in the past, think again. I don't apologize for my viewing habits, for my embrace of an era which, in many ways, seems superior to our own. Because it's only the perspective provided by the present that allows one to make such value judgments, that just maybe shows us every once in a while that things weren't all that good back then, that not every show in black-and-white is a winner.

Stuck in the past? Me? Nonsense! Better to think of me as a traveler, one who journeys daily between the past and the present, with an occasional look into the future. If these trips are at times sobering ones, they're also frequently exciting, thrilling, and immensely satisfying. Most important, they allow me to enjoy something that would have been impossible to fully experience for those who actually lived in the past.

It is the past, brought to you by the present - a present that I am only too happy to inhabit.

Why the past can be, you know, kind of important

I've said it before but perhaps not here, so I'll say it now: I think James Lileks is one of the most talented writers around, and one who really understands the intimate connection between nostalgia and the development of pop culture.  It isn't just that I agree with so much of what he writes; it's that so often he does it so much better than I would.  He can say in a paragraph what it would take me a whole page (or two) to explain.

And so I'm going to go back to something he wrote last week, and while it doesn't pertain specifically to television, I think it strikes at the heart of what I'm all about here.  The topic, among other things, is the snarkiness of today's youth culture, and the inclination to believe the only important things are things that have occurred in the last fifteen minutes.  "Teens only care about the immediate culture," writes someone in "the dreadful Grievance Scratching Post known as Jezebel." "They are not stuck in dead-time nostalgia. They have never heard of Missy Elliot.*  They do not care. That is OK. Teens plow their carts over the bones of the dead."

*Neither have I, to be honest, a statement that is meant to be neither boastful nor filled with regret.

I think it's that last part that gets me the most, plowing their carts over "the bones of the dead."  It not only disrespects those who do care about more than the immediate culture, it shows a great disregard for the dead themselves, who deserve a hell of a lot more respect than that.*  Apparently it hit Lileks the same way as well:

*If they had a favorite Bible passage, which they probably don't because that stuff is so unhip, it would probably be "Let the dead bury the dead."

And so on, and on, mostly crude and ignorant and not caring what you think, because that’s so TEEN. The word the author is trying to avoid is “dumb,” because “dumb” would suggest that there is an element of gaseous vapidity in “cool.” Can’t have that. “Cool” has been elevated to the highest of human aspirations. Of course, if the author believes that Missy Elliot is some historical standard, the ignorance of which is a measure of the mind, well, that’s rather revealing. The passage stuck out because I was a Teen in most of the clinical descriptions of the term, and was also interested in “dead-time nostalgia” as well as the “immediate culture.” Things that came before me were interesting. They helped to explain why Now turned out as it did or made you wonder why Now was different from what they expected. This wasn’t that unusual. My bound copies of Life magazine at the library, some girl’s shelf of Little House on the Prairie stories.  [Emphasis mine.]

It's that bold-faced section that explains so much about why I focus on the things I focus on, why I write what I do on this site.  It's not an approximate parallel, but it will do.  What interests me about the relationship between television and modern culture is seeing how things were portrayed, how some events and movements might have been predicted while others were totally off-base.  It's being able to see how things develop over time, what was considered important at one time as opposed to another.  It's understanding how television mirrors our culture at a given time, and how it might shape it as well.

There's a phrase I've come to use frequently, which says that "text without context is a pretext."  Simply put, it means that without understanding the context in which something appears, you can't really begin to understand what it means.  Invariably you'll put a contemporary spin on it, you'll try to view mores of the '50s and '60s through the cultural standards of the '00s and '10s.  For me, looking at the artifacts of a TV Guide, the views glimpsed out a window in a sitcom, or the issues discussed in a crime drama - those tell me more than what the plot of a show is about.  They tell me about people, about how we've evolved not only as individuals but as a society.

Lileks continues with his comments.  The original subject was the 1964 World's Fair in New Your City, and how that Fair is viewed by many today as kitschy and simplistic.  Substitute classic television for the Fair, and I think we can agree:

Anyway. Teens have to be cool because cool is great, the sole arbiter of worth, and so teen mentality is the best and most authentic - and that’s what counts, right? Not whether you are good or learned, but whether you are authentic. To what? To yourself. Of course. Because what else is there, really. The people who came after the Fair were devoted to demolishing all the pieties and certainties of their forebears, having gazed upon them with adolescent wisdom and found them lacking. After they had uprooted all the certainties and decided what an Authentic Person should believe, they were left with nothing but a Utopian ideal, a hissing miserabilism over its failure to be manifested in all aspects of society, and a set of shabby tattered folklore about a golden age between 1967 and 1973.

In a future article - maybe next week? - I want to return to the idea of virtue as expounded upon by St. Thomas Aquinas, in relation to some of the things that I think make classic television superior to television of today.  This statement, by the way, is not meant to infer that all classic television was great, that all contemporary television is crap, and that there aren't any contemporary shows that can be called superior to those of the past.  That's just ridiculous.  But it's the emphasis, the underlying conceit of particular givens that inform today's shows, that may help to explain what it is that engenders such affection for classic shows - affection that, I submit, goes beyond a simple sentimentality, a nostalgia for things past.*  And that's not old-fogeyism either.

*We shouldn't forget to draw the distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality, either.  They're two quite distinct and different things.  Not enough time to go into it now, but we will later, I promise.

I'm sure that, to those who plow their carts over the bones of the dead, I must be a tragically unhip character, if I'm even worthy of consideration.  That's all right, because a well-placed curiosity is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, and in an age that's becoming increasingly inhumane, it's a characteristic I don't mind having.

Around the dial

This week David at Comfort TV says what I've believed for a long time:  Mission: Impossible is TV for smart people.  Not only does it not refuse to pander to the audience by providing them with emotional soap opera ("the focus is always on the mission, not the operatives who carried it out."), it forces you to try and keep up with its frenetic pace and intricate plots.  The producers assumed their audience was smart enough to do so; if you couldn't, too bad for you.  Spot on, David.

And spot on to Cult TV as well, for another incisive look at the use of allegory in The Prisoner.  This week it's the episode "Free For All," which is rich in allegory and symbolism.  Pretty soon it's going to be time for me to start through the cycle again, beginning with Danger Man and proceeding through to The Prisoner - I'll be reading through these again as I watch.  And I can't wait to read your theories on The Butler as Number 1!

There can be no doubt that Made for TV Mayhem is dealing in mayhem of the highest order today: a look at small screen scream queens (say that five times fast).  Let's see, do I recognize any of these names?  Diane Baker, who always cut a lovely figure on television; Anne Francis, who didn't do much screaming in Honey West but changed her tune in the '70; Vera Miles, who always looks great.  Yeah, I recognize them.

I touch on old-time radio (OTR) from time to time, and since we've gotten Sirius I've gained an even greater appreciation for some of the shows that really forced the imagination to work; How Sweet It Was takes us through a collection of shows celebrating the 4th of July.  When you have some time, really check these out; they're a delight to listen to.  And yes, I'd buy war bonds from Cyd Charisse, or anything else she cares to sell.

Not a TV piece per se, but Terry Teachout writes this week about the limits of nostalgia, and there's no doubt that nostalgia plays a major role for many of us in gravitating toward classic television.  I really should devote a piece of its own to this article, but since you'll probably get sick of waiting for it, I'd urge you to read the whole thing now.  I particularly appreciate this quote, cribbed from Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

And finally, yours truly appeared this week at Christmas TV History's Christmas in July feature.  There's a new post up every day, with some absolutely wonderful memories and recommendations from writers all over the blogosphere, so you should make it part of your daily routine.

As a side note, one of Joanna's questions was "Name one Christmas program/movie you enjoy watching all year round."  I didn't think of it at the time (you'll have to read it to find out what I did say), but it struck me on the way home: it has to be Bing Crosby's 1977 Christmas show - you know, the one with the Bing/Bowie duet?  There's another segment to that program, though, a truly awful attempt to interject David Bowie into a second appearance without him actually being there.  While Bing and one of the kids are going through a box of memories in the attic, they get on the subject of heroes, which leads to a cut of Bowie's video for his song "Heroes".  Now, Bowie is a great performer and "Heroes" is one of his great songs - but it has nothing to do with Christmas, and it's absolutely painful to see it wedged into this show just to make it relevant.  Having said that, though, I'll listen to "Heroes" at any time of the year - like now.


By the way, another of the questions was to "Send us to three places on the Internet."  I chose my three, but in reality I'd readily recommend any of the blogs I've featured in this piece today or on the sideboard.  Your blogs are the best at keeping classic TV alive, and the pleasure you give me in reading your pieces is equal to the pleasure I get in writing about them.  You guys are the greatest! TV  

Thoughts on "The Narcissism of Boomer Nostalgia"

Terry Teachout, a writer whom I like and admire enormously, had a provocative Wall Street Journal article a month or so ago in what he refers to as "The Narcissism of Boomer Nostalgia; I would hate to think I fit his description of

Baby boomers who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age. Witness their tiresomely obsessive fascination with the popular television series of their youth. Likewise their undimmed passion for the rock music of the 1960s and '70s, which they still love so much that they'll buy expensive tickets to see wrinkled old codgers play it onstage.

You talkin' to me?  Probably not, although I can't deny there are days when I fade into the mists of classic television time as if it were a town called Willoughby.  In fact, I was going to write about this earlier - much closer to when it was actually published - but never got the piece past the "draft" stage.  Probably too busy watching The Saint and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  

But I'm glad I didn't get to it until now, and in fact what prompted me to return to the subject was the Grammy Salute to The Beatles on CBS on Sunday.  I didn't watch it; as you may recall, I've never been a particular fan of the Fab Four, and besides, it would have interrupted my viewing of season two of The F.B.I.  So let me ask all of you out there - does this show fall into Teachout's description?  Either the one above, or the one below:

As always with the boomers, this nostalgia contains more than a touch of narcissism. The same narcissism was on display in many of the countless gushy boomer-penned reminiscences occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. An indisputably major historical event, to be sure, but there was also something decidedly creepy about the self-centered tone of those suddenly-my-world-changed pieces, which was deftly skewered by this Onion headline: "Area Man Can Remember Exactly Where He Was, What He Was Doing When He Assassinated John F. Kennedy. " Like everything else in the boomers' world, Kennedy's death turned out in the end to have been all about them.

My first reaction was, and remains, that the Beatles/Grammy special probably does fall into this category. As a historical moment in time, you can't deny that it was significant.*  However, had CBS wanted to commemorate that, it probably would have been easier to simply rerun the Sullivan show that had aired exactly 50 years ago that night.  It exists, after all.  And though The Beatles are just one part of the show, that very fact illustrates how at least two eras existed in the same space that night; the world as it was, and as it was about to become.  (Had Ed had Señor Wences on that night as well, you could have added the vaudeville past as well.)

*Though I'm not prone to attaching as much significance to it as many do.  I think the idea that "The Beatles helped America recover from JFK" shtick is a bit overblown.  However, given what Teachout says about JFK above, it's not at all a surprise.

The real significance of The Beatles on the Sullivan show was that it demonstrated at once the need of programs to appeal to more than one age demographic, and the increasing likelihood that they would no longer be able to do so, leading to the fragmented programming we have today.  As suggested in the Sullivan book I reviewed a couple of years ago, one could argue that it was Sullivan's desire to remain relevant by booking rock groups such as The Beatles that led to his eventual downfall, a classic case of trying to satisfy everyone and winding up satisfying no one.

So instead of offering a one-hour look at a moment that's since been frozen in time (with perhaps a wraparound documentary), the network opted for an all-evening extravaganza consisting of a reunion of the remaining members of the group (these reunions, by the way, are starting to resemble nothing so much as the old Peter Cook-Dudley Moore movie The Wrong Box) and an appreciation concert by legendary rockers.  It was, in short, an event that came dangerously close to a marathon of self-congratulatory ceremony by the industry, for the industry, and on behalf of the industry.  Look at us, they seem to say, look at how we changed the world.

And this, I think, is the kind of thing that Teachout writes about.  Because the whole thing was important to the industry, it has to be important to everyone, inflated beyond all reasonableness.

***

Now, I know what you're thinking: wait a minute. You write about things like the JFK assassination as much as anyone.  In fact, your whole blog is devoted to classic TV.  Don't his words speak to you as well?

Probably.

I know some classic TV buffs who fit Teachout's description of those who “don’t want to see anything new, though they’ll put up with it if absolutely necessary.”  Maybe I fit in that category somewhere, although those who've followed my Top Ten list know I've heartily embraced several shows from this century - a couple of which are still going.  But it does raise a larger question: what is it about classic television that causes us to feel nostalgia?  Is it the hearkening back to an era that never really existed except in the yearning of the imagination?  Is it that television itself, which has always styled itself a guest in our homes, has the rare ability to touch our interior in a way that other media can't?

I'll be frank that in general I prefer many old television programs to new ones - I've never made a secret of it. The reasons often are the same as those given by people who prefer the current version: things like character development, longer story arcs, complex backstories, ensemble casts.  And I'd agree that there's a time and place for them, but - to coin a phrase - they should be safe, legal and rare.  For example, a program such as 87th Precinct - one of the better one-season cop shows of the early 60s - tells us virtually nothing about the private lives of its lead characters, save what's essential to that week's particular storyline.  But I'm a far bigger fan of programs that are plot-driven, shows such as Mission: Impossible in which the plot is everything and the players are generally interchangeable.  Let me ask you this: how many times have you seen Perry Mason's home?  Do you know where he went to college, what law school he graduated from, why he even went into law in the first place?  Does he have brothers and sisters?  Are his parents still alive?  Who does he chum around with when he's not working on a case?  We don't know any of that, and it matters not a whit when he sits down to do battle each week with Hamilton Burger.  The show is entertaining enough as it is.

There are other reasons I prefer older shows: often I find the absence of "frank adult content" to be a relief.  I like the immediacy and imperfection of live drama.  I think the civilizing influence of classical music is not only refreshing but necessary.  I think the rapid quick-cuts that are popular on so many shows are good for not much besides inducing seizures.  And so on and so on.

Does this mean that new television is all bad?  Of course not.  I think location filming has done a great deal to enhance the viewing experience.  The acting in many old shows was stilted, and character motivation could hover between naivety and improbable.  Advances in technology and special effects have made many action scenes more compelling, and I like avant-garde camera angles about as much as anyone.  And though I think story arcs and serializations are best left to soap operas, some character development and continuity would be welcome in the old warhorses.

***

So where does that leave us?  I think the dangers in nostalgia are twofold: first, it can be dangerously close to sentimentality, which not only isn't necessarily good but can often be bad.*  And second, it can cultivate, as Teachout suggests, a self-centeredness that combines both narcissism and isolation, to a very bad effect.

*And makes for bad television, as demonstrated by virtually anything by Hallmark or Oprah.

When we live constantly in the past, we fail to grow personally.  We refuse to mature, to take on the responsibilities of adults.  We submerge ourselves in cartoons, much the same way as some take refuge in videogames, refusing to leave the comfort of our childhood.  We stop striving, because things can't get any better than they already were.  We ignore the contributions made by present and future generations.  I didn't reject new Doctor Who, for example, just because I loved the old series.

If it seems that I'm giving classic television nostalgia a lot of power and significance, it's because the issue really isn't watching old TV shows.  It's living one's life for one's own pleasure and satisfaction, in finding a comfort zone from the past that excludes the present, in shutting everything else out.  It's defining your tastes as the correct ones, and your preferences as the only ones worth appreciating.  It is, as Teachout says, turning everything inward, it making it all about you.  And when everyone does that, when everyone points to themselves as the center of the universe - well, I guess you wind up with the world we now have, to a great extent.

And, oddly, that's not the world portrayed in the sitcoms of the 50s and early 60s, when families ate meals together and sat around the fireplace together (or the radio, or the early television) and sometimes just talked to each other.

As a cultural archaeologist, I try to use the past to understand the present and gain insight into the future.  I look at the programs of the 50s and 60s (and early 70s) in an attempt to see how and why things developed as they did, to gain a glimpse of worlds long gone, to see if there's a hint of what's yet to come.  Television both shapes and reflects its times, and as a measurement of a given time and place it's as good as anything.

Someone once said that where there's life, there's hope.  When you remove the incentive to strive, to achieve, to create something new, you've removed a crucial aspect of life.  And that, in the end, is what this is all about.  When you live in the past to the exclusion of the present, when you say that what we have is as good as it gets, then you're not really experiencing life at all.  And where's the hope in that?