Do you remember canvassing TV Guide searching for something to watch and selection was simple? You had the three television networks and their affiliates along with local Metromedia (FOX) stations and Public Broadcasting? There was also what we called “Channel U” (UHF) with a very limited number of regional stations.
I remember arriving at my permanent USAF duty station in a very rural part of Oklahoma in 1977 to discover Cable TV. We were too far away from any metropolitan area to depend on rabbit ears or a rooftop antenna. We were billed $7 every other month and thought it absurd we had to PAY for television.
We didn’t quite understand Cable TV was the wave of the future – and it would cost a whole lot more. Worse yet, the networks would take advantage of a paying captive audience and load up the programming schedule with more and more commercial airtime. There is no sense of fair play in anything anymore. Wall Street and Madison Avenue have us by the short hairs.
It is appalling just how bad it has become.
The good news is the cable networks’ attention to baby boomers and the classic sitcoms we grew up with. METV, FETV, Antenna TV, and TVLand have all stepped up with popular sitcoms – both classic and present day. Personal favorites are “Mike & Molly”, “Roseanne”, “Mad About You” and a host of others from recent times. Dusty old sitcoms from the mid-20th century are too numerous to name – “I Love Lucy”, “I Dream of Jeannie”, “My Favorite Martian”, “Dick Van Dyke”, and “Andy Griffith” to name five. I can sit there for hours watch these favorites from back-to-back.
When we were growing up, it was common to have 60-second adventising spots at the top of the hour, at the 15-minute point, and at the bottom of the hour. Today, there can be as many as 20 commercials at the 10-minute mark followed by five minutes of program time followed by another 10-20 commercials – most of them pharmaceutical in nature to convince the viewing public they have some sort of ailment they don’t have – “See your doctor…”
The news networks like MSNBC, CNN, FOX and the rest are big on stringing you along with teasers until the last 15 minutes of programming – then, one story and “after the break…” or “after a short break…” which is a bold-faced lie. Also – the ever popular…”stay with us…” and “be right back…” I wear my remote out surfing because I refuse to sit through five minutes of lifestyle drug company commercials. You know, two women playing bad mitten trying to look like they actually know how to play or some aging baby boomer fishing with the grandkids.
Boomer Journey... 
The drug company commercials… “It’ll really help if it doesn’t kill you.” I’m sure we had fewer channels, but I’m not sure about the content being of better quality. It’s easy to pull out some gems that were unusual, groundbreaking and contributed to the TV tope lexicon, but soft focus tends to allow us to closet some of the real losers and the not so cleverly disguised PSAs as shows, soapboxers, heavy handed patriarchy, stupidity… It’s nice that quite a few services have attempted to “curate” a Golden Era of TV’s Greatest Hits streaming/OTA catalog but even some considered classics are embarrassing, like music and literature, when taken out of cultural context. TV, by and large, became what Morrow prophesied – Lights and wires in a box. Or Ellison’s Glass Tit.
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