My History of TV

 I enjoy telling younger people what it was like before TV. We played outside, tried board games and listened to  radio shows such as Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly.

 

But in 1950, the neighborhood kids all flocked to someone’s house to see Hopalong Cassidy on TV. I was gone so much my parents finally bought a 14-inch TV with a ring of light around the edges to protect your eyes.  Guess that didn’t really work.

 

Vertical hold was the biggest problem: The screen kept rolling up and down. The first shows on the only three channels came on at about 5 p.m., including Howdy Doody, and later on, Milton Berle. After Berle was signed to a 30-year contract, NBC executives discovered that popularity was fleeting, and they were stuck.

 

I watched entirely too much TV, but nobody saw any harm in that at the time. Today I would have been a video game addict. I even used money from my paper route to buy an old TV to watch Charlie Chan and other movies in my room.

 

Soon, there were great dramas on TV, high-quality shows like Playhouse 90, Hallmark Hall of Fame and Studio One, performed live as if they were on stage. We saw Peter Pan and the premiere of Cinderella the musical, right in our living rooms. This was amazing. It was called the Golden Age of TV, and it was.

 

Then the networks discovered ratings. They could find out what people really watched. The average viewers didn’t want quality drama. They wanted Westerns! When they got tired of that, TV disintegrated into the trashy stuff we saw afterward.

 

I was so fascinated with TV that I made up my imaginary TV listings, quite odd for a 10 to 12-year-old. A waste of time, right?

 

Well, not quite. Thirty-five  years later, I was hired to be editor of a couple of magazines for satellite TV viewers. There were hundreds of channels! These had all of the shows being sent by networks to cable TV operators around the country. People with satellite dishes got a sneak peek at them. I was definitely prepared!

 

Those listings don’t work anymore. Even TV Guide became a shadow of its former self as TV listings moved online. Besides hundreds of cable channels, there are thousands of streaming offerings.

 

So to find out what to watch TV, many people go through those 1,000 channels, read reviews somewhere or open up Netflix and other streaming services to scan their offerings. Others, like Pickett, hear about some shows from a friend. Each streaming  service seems to have that one show that just can’t be missed. You need to pay for a “trial” subscription but it is so difficult to cancel once they have your credit card!

 

So sometimes, after doing extensive research on the night’s fare, I say to myself, “I think I’ll just read a book.”