Author Archives: Tin Man

Watching TV

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Lately I’ve been nerding out with a terrific book: Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television, by Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik. It’s an incredibly detailed history of American television, organized season by season. The first three chapters cover the invention of TV and the beginnings of TV broadcasting, and after that, each TV season is covered in great, engagingly written detail, one chapter per season, from 1944-45 all the way up through 2009-10. (So far I’m up to 1978-79.) Most chapters are about 7-8 pages long, but the book is 8 1/2″ by 11″ and the text is in two columns per page, so on ordinary-sized book pages, each chapter would probably be about 20 pages long. (The chapters have neat titles, too. Here’s an explanation of each chapter title.)

The season-by-season structure lets you follow the story of TV over the years: the rise of the networks, the completion of the coaxial cable that allowed live TV from coast to coast, the move of TV production from New York to Hollywood. You can follow the flow of broadcasting trends over the years: TV experimentation in the 1940s, variety shows and anthologies and Westerns in the 1950s, action-adventure shows and rural escapist sitcoms in the 1960s, smartly-written CBS sitcoms in the early 1970s, and so on. You can follow the changing fortunes of the big networks: CBS was king for the first few decades of TV, but in the mid-70s ABC suddenly rocketed to number one with entertaining escapism like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Charlie’s Angels. (That’s where I am right now.)

The book also covers government regulation of TV and the rise of public TV and cable TV, and it touches on national and world events when relevant. Did you ever wonder why network prime time runs from 8-11 pm (7-10 pm Central/Mountain), except for Sundays when there’s an extra hour? Did you ever wonder why TVs used to have both VHF and UHF dials? It’s in this book.

Each chapter also has a prime-time grid of the networks’ fall schedules for that season, as well as a sidebar listing some important events from the season.

This will sound silly, but I love this book. I’d always been a TV history nerd, but I didn’t know this book existed until a year ago. (It’s actually an updated edition; it was first published in 1982). I haven’t loved a book so much since The President’s House, a two-volume history of the White House, covered chronologically by presidency, that I read a few years ago. I guess I enjoy incredibly detailed, information-packed, well-written chronological narratives about topics I’m interested in.

Yeah, I’m a nerd, and proud of it.

Romney, Kerry, McCain

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Just a quick post on politics:

Even though Rick Perry jumped into the presidential race and immediately grabbed the lead for the Republican nomination from Mitt Romney, it seems possible that Romney can regain the lead and get the nomination. The more Perry campaigns and debates, the more he seems to fall in the polls.

It seems to me that Romney in 2012 is going to be like Kerry in 2004 and McCain in 2008. Kerry and McCain each had an early lead for their parties’ nominations–not because they were particularly well-liked, but because they seemed electable. Their support started to waver as primary voters began to look for someone who genuinely excited them, rather than someone who just seemed “electable”: Howard Dean in 2004, Mike Huckabee in 2008. But the early front-runner managed to re-grab the lead and win the nomination.

Of course, in each case, the eventual nominee lost the general election.

Baby Tech

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Last weekend Matt and I were using FaceTime to video chat with my brother, my sister-in-law, and my niece. Matt and I were in front of my iMac, so we were stationary, but my brother was using his iPad, and as he walked around the room, I watched my sister-in-law and my niece playing together. It was just like being there. I marveled that we were having this video conversation. I’m still amazed that this technology exists, something that used to seem straight out of Dick Tracy.

At one point my niece was watching me and Matt. She’s not yet two years old, and I wondered: can she comprehend this? Does she realize that we’re interacting with her, or does she think she’s watching us on TV? Or does she think we’re somehow inside the device? Is she confused by any of this?

And then I realized that she had no problem understanding that she was interacting with us. She didn’t even think about it. After all, when I was little, I watched TV and I didn’t think there were little people inside the box; I just knew that I was watching something on the TV screen. I didn’t think it was weird; I didn’t even question it. I just accepted it as part of the world.

So I’m realizing that my niece is growing up in a world where iPads and video chats and swiping your finger across a glass screen to make things happen is just the norm. To me, it’s this super cool thing that tells me we’re finally living in the future. But to her, it’s just the way the world is and always has been. She’ll grow up in a world where this technology has always existed.

What this shows me is that human beings are amazingly adaptable. In one sense, our natural habitat is the savannah, or the forest; I still feel some primeval connection to the earth when I walk through a tree-filled park. And yet I can totally take something like television, or flying in a big metal tube, or living in a big city, for granted.

If you traveled back in time, say, 10,000 years, and you kidnapped a pregnant woman and brought her back to 2011, and the woman gave birth, the mother would probably remain terrified by everything around her. But her child would grow up totally accustomed to life in the 21st century. Like my niece, this time-traveling ancient child would take iPads for granted.

The human genome is pretty close to what it was several milliennia ago. We are endlessly adaptable. It’s just so bizarre to me.