Classic TV’s Curtain Call: 1989

It has always been this blog’s assertion that the 1980s was the last classic TV decade.

That doesn’t mean television hasn’t introduced memorable shows in the years since. It refers instead to how our relationship to the medium began to change in the 1990s, a trend that continues to the present day.

Cable and satellite television added hundreds of viewing options to our TV menu. As a result, viewership for even the most celebrated shows has been greatly diminished. VCRs, DVRs and streaming services all allowed viewers to watch programs whenever they liked. So even if 10 million people eventually catch the same episode of Westworld, they didn’t all watch at the same time. 

For better or worse, new channels and new technology have abolished the communal pop culture experience that television once provided.  

That experience, to me, is what separates the classic TV era from our current TV age.

If we go with that premise, 1989 was the final year of the classic TV era. And what’s amazing is how a closer look at the shows that debuted and ended their runs in that year make a convincing case for our hypothesis – the old order of things have passed away, as television stepped into a more tumultuous future.

Hello: The Arsenio Hall Show, The Pat Sajak Show

If you were a betting man in 1989 you might have put your money on Sajak having the more successful launch, though both series aired opposite the still dominant Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Sajak had higher name recognition from Wheel of Fortune, and he was the very model of an amiable, quick-witted, good-mannered young man from the Midwest. That’s the kind of host TV executives believed audiences wanted to watch before drifting off to dreamland. 

Sajak enjoyed the additional advantage of having his show carried by CBS, while The Arsenio Hall Show played in syndication. But The Pat Sajak Show was gone in about a year, while Arsenio made the cover of Time, put the first real dent in Carson’s ratings, and owned the under-30 audience by booking pop stars and athletes and wrestlers that would never be invited onto Carson’s couch. By the time presidential candidate Bill Clinton showed up to play Heartbreak Hotel on the sax, it was obvious that the formulas that worked on TV for 30 years were no longer reliable.

Goodbye: American Bandstand

The revolution in music brought about by Napster and iTunes was still a few years away, but the cancelation of American Bandstand, a television staple since 1952, illustrated how music no longer needed Dick Clark to gain exposure. MTV, which debuted in 1981, made Clark’s weekly dance party look like the relic from the past that it was. 

Hello: Seinfeld, The Simpsons

While 1989 also featured the debuts of such traditional situation comedies as Coach, Anything But Love, Major Dad and Family Matters, the year’s two most successful new sitcoms, in both ratings and cultural impact, were groundbreaking in format and clearly belong more to our current TV age than the one it followed.  Seinfeld was too subversive to be considered an heir to sitcoms from generations past. Its objective was not to function within the format, but to undermine it with a cynical self-awareness. That it did so brilliantly cannot be denied. And The Simpsons? It’s still on, after more than 600 episodes.

Goodbye: Sale of the Century, Super Password, Card Sharks

All three of these long-running shows left us in 1989, opening up valuable morning broadcast real estate to the likes of Jerry Springer and Maury Povich. Game shows are still with us – high-tech new ones and MA-rated revivals of the classics. But only The Price is Right soldiers on in a format that would be recognizable to someone who stopped watching TV in the 1980s. 

Hello: COPS, Rescue 911, America’s Funniest Home Videos

Who needs actors? Who needs scripts? The reality TV genre rolled into 1989 with hit shows featuring police officers chasing perps through dark alleys, paramedics pulling drivers out of car accidents, and camcorder footage of Uncle Charlie doubling over after little Timmy bats a whiffle ball into his crotch. What a golden age it was. 

Goodbye: Ryan’s Hope, Dynasty

Two popular soaps, one daytime, one nighttime, would not survive to see the 1990s. Dynasty had run its course by 1989 so that cancelation was not painful. 

But Ryan’s Hope had been revitalized by writer Claire Labine and deserved more time to be rediscovered by the audience that left after too many dead-end storylines and recasts of pivotal characters. I still miss Maeve Ryan singing “Danny Boy” at the family bar. 

Other notable 1989 debuts: Nightingales, branded as Aaron Spelling’s attempt to revive Charlie’s Angels with nurses, and canceled after 13 episodes. 

Quantum Leap with Scott Bakula; Saved By the Bell, the Gen-X Brady Bunch, Baywatch, the slow motion jiggle series Aaron Spelling wishes he created instead of Nightingales, and Chicken Soup, a very funny sitcom that was pulled off the air by ABC, despite high ratings, because of inflammatory statements made by its star, stand-up comedian Jackie Mason.  

Well, at least some things haven’t changed.