my grandfather has worked in TV as a chief engineer and technical genius for damn near 60 years. because of this, my dad spent a good 16, 17 years doing the same. that also means that i’ve had cable for basically my entire life, save a four-month stretch in undergrad and the sublet i lived in over bar summer. TV and i have a long-standing friendship, even though i haven’t liked a new show in a very long time. i favor old shows. always have.
case in point: when i was three and a half, our cable system had nickelodeon, but did not carry nick-at-nite. it would scramble the channel at 7:00PM every night. this vexed me, because i could see all the ads during the day for all the shows on nick-at-nite. so my daddy [probably because he was sick of me fussing about it] carried me down to our friendly neighborhood cable provider, where he picked me up, set me on the counter, and said, “tell the nice lady what you tell me all the time.”
“i want my nick-at-nite! please?” was my pigtailed little response. we got nick-at-nite four weeks later, and i still like to think that my winsome little-girl charm had something to do with it.
but ANYWAY, the point is that i have always had a fondness for the sitcoms of the 1960s and 1970s. the mary tyler moore show, soap, benson, taxi, the dick van dyke show, M*A*S*H, maude, good times, all in the family, and the like. and honestly, no one will ever convince me that there’s been a sitcom that can equal those produced in the last 35 years. seinfeld was funny the first time, but on repeated viewing, reduces to narcissistic people whining. (not to mention that curb your enthusiasm outed larry david as a world-class self-absorbed dickhead, which i STILL cannot understand how people think that’s funny, and really stripped the humor out of george costanza.) i didn’t like friends at the time, much less now. sex and the city was funny for a season, but quickly lost its allure once they kept writing basically the same episode with different outfits for six seasons.
in fact, a lot of culture from the late 1960s through the late 1970s can be called the pinnacle of american artistic achievement, if you ask me. not that the last 35-40 years haven’t produced some good things (i commend your attention to the glory of homicide: life on the streets, especially if you think baltimore-based crime dramas begin and end with the wire). but the good has been few and far between. for every bright spot (treme) there are ten thousand horrorshows (whitney, the new girl, most of the NBC lineup for the last 10 years, how i met your mother, two and a half men, ad infinitum, ad freaking astram).
the sitcoms of the 1970s were ABOUT something other than meditations on the self and the self’s importance to the self. and they were DAMN funny about it, too. they were able to have frank, blunt discussions about racism, sexism and other issues. you could NOT talk about race they way they did on all in the family on a show today without people misunderstanding and misinterpreting 100 different ways from sunday. hell, maude had an abortion on a NETWORK SITCOM. in a time when a movie about getting knocked up could only bring itself to snicker around the edges (“sha-shmortion” – are you freaking KIDDING me?), that is unthinkable.
so call me a snob if you will. wouldn’t be the first time. i would quote my favorite beach boys song here, about how the current era and i do not necessarily get along, but everyone loves that song now because mad men used it a couple of weeks ago. (and if you want to know about a show i HATE, ask me about mad men.) i will continue to honor the viewpoint that the 1960s and 1970s brought to culture. remember how things were in a lot of respects? people actually (GASP!) thought about the things they said and did, and wondered how their actions impacted the world around them. it’s no surprise to me that the 2010s are nostalgic for the 1980s and the 1950s respectively. three eras in time that were about materialism, self-absorption and thoughtless greed. except that in the 2010s, the illusions that fueled the 1980s and the 1950s have been exposed as illusions. those visions and dreams are what put us in the mess we’re in.
but it’s nice to dream rich, isn’t it? thank you, but i’ll take my entertainment with some thought behind it. now where’s my remote? i’ve got a date with judd hirsch as alex reiger. give me something with some substance.