What TV shows did you watch as a kid?
I grew up in the 60’s before they took off the good TV because it was wholesome, albeit not something that challenged our intelligence.
So it was Batman (Adam West), Gilligans Island (My Mom hated us watching that), The Beverly Hillbilies, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie (Even then I knew Barbara Eden was hot), The Wild Wild West, Green Acres and some others of this ilk.
They wiped all of those out for the next round, but we still had WKRP, Taxi, Barney Miller and some of those that were good.
Delusions of Adequacy 
Not much, actually. We got together after school at Zaharako’s Sugar Bowl, or bowled, or had parties where we jitterbugged, and everybody went to the Avon theater at least twice a week. In summer it was basically either work or sports.
In the mid 50s, we got only two channels, WGN outta Chicago and WIBC from Indianapolis. Both went off the air around 2300, had no color, and were snowy, at best. I can remember Mother watchin Lucy and Perry Mason before I graduated and went to college, where I didn’t see one my entire freshman year. Didn’t get hooked on TV ’til I had a family with little kids and a wife who liked Jerry Lewis and the old classic horror movies.
Television. Bah! A hybrid word which doesn’t know if it’s Greek or Latin. Mox Nix, tho, because it has become a great vomit puddle on Madison Avenue.
TV is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the ignorant, the wealth of the intellectually bankrupt, the live-in nanny of the totally clueless, the no-neck mouthbreathing vacant-stare gluten-free no-calorie babysitter of today’s obese ignorant gender-confused flibbertigibbets.
Originally hailed as a great source of enlightenment and education, TV has inflated itself into an intellectually defunct and untrustworthy parody of defunct journalism with all the credibility of a Baghdad Bob or Cringe Jane-Binder.
In its pre-politicized years, television actually inspired adults to consider and discuss important issues. One of its better features was a quaint practice known as “signing off” which allowed viewers to contemplate what they’d just heard without unnecessary and repetitive distractions and talk with other live humans about it.
Today that feature has been scrapped, and even when a well-intentioned expose or documentary on a serious topic is presented, it’s interrupted every 10 minutes or so by prancing bears singing jingles about toilet paper or potbellied morons arguing over whether a beer should taste great or be less filling.
I saw my first TV, in black and white of course, with tinny sound accompanying fuzzy images around 1952 or so. It was at a friend’s house, and the box had prominent adjustment knobs for “brightness” and “clarity,” neither of which I have ever seen since either on the console or the screen.
Much of what we allow into our living rooms as entertainment today is performed by people we really wouldn’t want in our homes. And the “premium” channels such as HBO and SHO are just electronic versions of peep-show parlors and bawdy houses. Much of what happens on music or sports channels is cookie-cutter droning with repeats, reruns, and lava-lamp visuals.
In the classic Greek theater, the genesis of modern western entertainment, audiences could vicariously experience human activities to help them analyze and subdue anxieties, antagonisms, and other problems of being human. Today, in case we don’t HAVE any psychological problems, social media helps us develop them. When no real news exists, managing editors and bloggers simply create some and sensationalize it with stock gifs, jpgs, and unrelated clips.
Talk shows such as The View are like being masturbated to death by carnival barkers. And of course if something genuinely newsworthy or educational in nature accidentally appears, dozens of alternate channels or blogs are available to switch to and completely avoid it.
North American society would profit greatly, IMO, if TV went off the air at bedtime and presented only local news in the morning with nothing more than weather events or traffic snarls until evening. And no one under the age of 22 NEEDS a mobile phone with social media access.
Despite our hubris, public utilities, our constant and immediate access to what’s-happenin-now, we are poorly educated, greedy, suspicious, ignorant, easily manipulated, and potentially vicious hairless apes with all the tools necessary for generating incalculable chaos and destruction.
Too many of us are wandering around aimlessly on the planet bumping into each other and stepping on each others’ toes. O asteroid, wherefore art thou !!
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well said. I’m down to Jeopardy now with occasional sports. I have better things to do.
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