Television: No Longer Something to Talk About

I’ve been a subscriber to Entertainment Weekly magazine for more than 20 years, though lately my love/hate relationship with the publication has been mostly hate. That’s what happens when every staff writer can’t resist the urge to shoehorn his or her political views into stories where they are not relevant. But that’s another topic.

Earlier this month the magazine revamped its television section, dividing the listings into three categories:

“Watch it Live! Everyone will be talking about it tomorrow.”

“Save it! It’s okay to let these build up on your DVR.”

“Binge it! Devour it all at once.”

It’s a testament to how much our TV viewing experience has changed that both “Save it” and “Binge it” would not have been possible for much of the Comfort TV era. “Watch it live” was our only option.

I admit I felt a nostalgic twinge reading what followed: “Everyone will be talking about it tomorrow”, because I remember a time when that would have been true.

I have memories of going to school and knowing with absolute certainty that there would be classmates quoting lines from the previous night’s Happy Days or Welcome Back, Kotter episode. If you’re a bit older or younger than I am, you have those same memories about different shows. 

But such programs do not exist anymore.

In case you’re curious, three of the shows Entertainment Weekly predicted “everyone would be talking about” were Legion on FX, Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce on Bravo, and Ghost Adventures on Travel Channel. Try walking into your office and proclaiming, “Hey, how about last night’s Ghost Adventures!” You would receive the kind of blank stare I used to give my algebra teacher. 

Television really used to be something that brought us together as a nation, whether it was to find out how Richard Kimble was going to get out of another tight scrape, or to share a collective ‘what were they thinking’ at Rob Lowe opening the Academy Awards by singing and dancing with Snow White. 

Of course, even in the days of just three networks there was no series watched by everyone. But with many of the most popular shows from that era, there was a statistical likelihood of entering a crowded room and running into several people who watched what you watched last night.

So when was the last time you could say with confidence that “everyone will be talking” about a show? Of the 20 most watched U.S. television broadcasts of all time, 17 of them are Super Bowls. For the most watched scripted series episode, you have to go back 35 years, to the series finale of M*A*S*H. 

Next on the list –the final episode of Roots, which aired in 1977.

Such milestones were exceptions, and there have been similar moments in the post-Comfort TV years, including the final episodes of Cheers, Friends, The Cosby Show and Everybody Loves Raymond. 

But when you go back to the television era that began in the 1950s and continued through the early 1980s, there were shows on every night that were widely discussed around the water cooler the following day.

And even if you didn’t have those discussions, you still had that sense that when you were watching a popular prime time network series, you were sharing that experience with tens of millions of Americans doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. If you were watching Carol Burnett on Saturday night, you just felt that everyone else who was home at the time was doing the same.  

Dallas was a national obsession from its first season through that moment when Bobby stepped out of the shower. And if you looked out your window after your late local news, you could be fairly confident that any lights emanating from darkened living rooms and bedrooms were produced by TVs tuned to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. 

Here’s the part of all this that will probably seem odd to those who grew up after this time had passed: It felt good. There was something reassuring about being part of something bigger, and feeling some tangible connection to people from one end of the country to another, even though you were doing something as inconsequential as watching a TV show. Those experiences have, many years later, become memories we all share, and still talk about.

Such connections, such common threads, are beneficial for a culture. Television was just one of many that have disappeared over the past two or three decades, with nothing substantial emerging to replace them. Perhaps that’s one reason why we’re in the state we’re in now.