The TV Week of Yore

As a child, the Fall season brought an electricity of anticipation.  I was too young to be keenly aware of specific dates and events, so I could not tell you whether my excitement peaked during the week of Labor Day, or the week before, or the week after.  I just remember that as the long hot days of Miami summer drew to a close we became very busy completing our back-to-school shopping, discussing new teachers and classrooms, and perching in the “Florida room” after dinner for brand new television shows.  For weeks, we endured network teasers of fresh shows featuring unfamiliar faces and exciting new entertainment vehicles.  Then, all at once, there would be a brand new broadcast schedule—one show after another of never before seen scripts.  It was an embarrassment of riches.   There were new episodes of all my returning favorites interspersed with completely new instant classics.  Together, these shows promised weeks and weeks of sensory delights for good girls who finished their homework and piano practicing.

So predictable and complete was this annual phenomenon that I could watch my favorite "Plan A" shows religiously from fall through the winter school break and then switch to  the less compelling "Plan B" shows (those that ran against my favorites on other networks) during the first post-holiday re-run season.  Having ignored the Plan B shows through the fall, they were entirely new to me.

We had only one family television for the house.  For years it was an old black and white encased in a maple cabinet with four mid-century legs and a pair of “Martian antennae” on top.  My father would not spend hard-earned funds to replace a working appliance, so we endured the black and white technology years after colored TVs were in vogue.  Eventually, my mother saved hundreds of books of S&H Green Stamps—given with each purchase at the local market—and traded them for a colored television.  She always had a work-around when my father dug in his heels.  As long as she abided by the letter of the law, she was free to take liberties with the spirit.  It was a funny ‘Rob-and-Laura’ game they played.

With only one television, it was mandatory that we reached agreement with the viewing schedule.  As the youngest in the household through most of my childhood I had little clout when it came to picking shows.  My brother and my uncle favored shows like Outer Limits and Night Gallery, which gave me nightmares, or Dragnet and Adam 12, which scared me with guns.  I tolerated Star Trek because there was a woman on the bridge, and because—let’s face it—Mr. Spock rocks.   I preferred the shows with girlie girls and kids like me, such as That Girl and The Brady Bunch.  One of my all-time favorites was Get Smart—the farcical cold-war comedy from Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.  I loved to parrot the predictable cartoon-like dialogue (“Sorry about that, Chief!”) and emulate the James Bond-like gadgetry (“Pardon me while I get my shoe phone”), but at my age I completely missed the larger joke of the opposing powers, Kaos vs. Kontrol.  When the one-way chemistry between Agents 86 and 99 finally turned to love, I became obsessed with this show.  Although the romantic story line was a typical jumping-of-the-shark, it made the whole pretense of the show relatable to the little girl that I was.  I waited with butterflies in my stomach to see if the inevitable kiss at the end of one season would spark a lasting romance in the next. 

(Obscure TV trivia:  There was only one episode that revealed a name for Agent 99.  In that episode, she was dating a man named Victor who turned out to be a Kaos spy.  He called her by the name Susan Hilton.  But at the end of the episode, she whispers to Max that it is not her real name.)

There were other shows that were so good I never minded watching them in reruns.  In fact, the opportunity to see them again and again (usually at least three times in a year before the fall returned) was rewarding.  Some of the more controversial shoes—like All in the Family—were so surprising in the moment that you had to see them multiple times to appreciate the journey on which the writers had taken you.  The moment when Sammy Davis, Jr. kissed Archie Bunker, for example, is a classic moment that paid off only because of the years spent exploring the depths of Archie’s unflinching bigotry.  And the tender moments—Gloria’s miscarriage and Edith’s breast cancer scare—were made all the more poignant because we were rarely treated to a glimpse of Archie’s heart.

These days, the jostling of television shows across hundreds of networks has destroyed the tradition that was Fall Premier Week.  There is no longer a new show season.  The original big-3 networks make a feeble attempt to unveil new shows around Labor Day, or after the Emmy Award broadcasts, but it just does not raise goosebumps like it used to.  We have drama series that start in the spring, run for a few weeks, and then disappear until summer when we are treated to a few more episodes.  We have other networks that run just 8 or 10 shows during the summer.   Even football no longer waits for Fall to make an appearance.  And to make matters worse, in an election year like this one, we have events like conventions and debates that so disrupt the flow of episodes that some networks wait to roll out the heavy hitters until after the inauguration.

My economics professor explained that television broadcasting was an example of an industry that would run more efficiently by monopoly.  Rather than networks competing head-to-head with like programming, thus splitting the target markets, a smarter approach is to plan a range of different programs in the same time slot, allowing the schedule to fulfill 100 percent of the market’s tastes.  In the seeming randomness of today’s network/cable scheme, we are approaching this now.  Rather than throwing all the new sitcoms and high budget dramas at us at once, they are revealed one by one.  Whereas we once had a limited new show season and a lot of fanfare to call us to attention, we now have to study the offerings constantly to find our favorite shows.  And because of the market optimization efforts (Dexter in the fall, True Blood in the summer) there is no planned down time for viewers.

At least we have DVR.