Reminiscing About Television

With TVLAND and some other cable stations running a lot of the old programs, it got me to thinking about how things were way back when. Some of you may remember when the staple of television programing was the "Western." No matter how hard they try in today's television/movie world, they just don't have the same "feel" as the Westerns from the 1950s & 1960s (actually two of the venerable shows, "Bonanza" and "Gunsmoke" lasted into the 1970s.)

And then there were the prime time variety type shows, like Perry Como, Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Milton Beryl, Flip Wilson, Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan and I'm sure others I'm just not recalling at this moment. They tended to rely heavily on comedy, but they actually did have a variety of acts, and they helped many new acts get a lift up to the big time. Late at night, Jack Paar, and later Johnny Carson held down the post prime time slot.

And news, at 6 p.m. came the local news. It only lasted fifteen minutes!!! Then came the national news, and it lasted fifteen minutes!!! In both cases, the allotted time included commercials! News was news back then, not some of this silly stuff that gets on nowadays, when they're trying to fill up time. And the networks didn't break in every half hour with today's "breaking news." When the networks broke in, it was something really important on a national/world level, not this stuff where "There's a warehouse fire in Dallas and firemen have responded with ten trucks." I'm sure that's important in Dallas, but it isn't really national news. And, while there certainly were limited choices in television stations back then, the shear fact that the three major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, wanted to air their regular show line ups made them far less inclined to get onto a story and just beat the living hell out of it. Today, the cable news stations just get onto something and run it into the ground, in my opinion. I have no idea who Anna Nicole Smith is, and I DON'T want to know!!! I listen to a radio program in the early morning in Cleveland, and I remember someone called in and asked why she is famous, and one of the guys on the show answered, "I don't really know, except that she is famous for BEING famous." To be quite honest, that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge about this woman, and I'm sorry that she died, but otherwise, who the hell cares?

Well I know that we can't turn back the clock, and I don't think I really want to, but it never hurts to give some perspective to some of these things, and we do learn from the past.