Tag Archives: tv

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.

Missing Mad Men

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The new season of True Blood begins on Sunday, so we’ve signed up for HBO again. We don’t really watch HBO during the rest of the year, so we don’t see the point in paying $16 a month for it, but it’s worth it during the summer.

I associate True Blood with summer Sunday nights: sitting on the couch in shorts and a t-shirt, turning off the air conditioner so that we can hear the TV.

Unfortunately, my sense memory keeps tricking me into thinking that Mad Men is also coming back soon. Because that’s the other thing that makes me think of summer Sunday nights. For the last couple of summers it’s been a great TV combination: Bloody vampire southern Gothic on HBO at 9:00, followed by New York midcentury modern on AMC at 10:00.

I am SO ABSOLUTELY BUMMED that there will be no Mad Men this summer. And I’d thought it was coming back in January, but no – it’s actually not coming back until March. MARCH! Are you kidding me?

I wonder if there’s anything else worth watching on summer Sunday nights. Any ideas?

Oprah and Sisterhood

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So, the other thing I was going to say about Oprah was:

Sometimes I romanticize things, but thinking about Oprah last week made me envy the idea of a “sisterhood.” It’s a total stereotype, but I’m thinking of small groups of female friends who live in the South or somewhere suburban where there’s mostly shopping centers and chain stores, and when each of them is alone they watch Oprah and wish they could make their own lives better, and when they get together as a group of friends, they all discuss Oprah.

I’m not sure why this idea appeals to me. Maybe it’s because I’m sentimental and don’t have many friends. And men aren’t traditionally supposed to be sentimental and have heart-to-heart talks with each other. Despite having come out of the closet more than a decade ago, I’m still sometimes ashamed of the parts of my personality and emotional makeup that are not traditionally seen as masculine.

I feel like Oprah’s show is meant for women and that men aren’t supposed to get anything out of it. But the ideas she talked about in her final episode apply equally to men and women: find your calling, take responsibility for getting there, and remember that you’re as worthy and as allowed to be happy as everyone else.