Over the past week, I’ve started paring down my TV options and subscriptions. They really catch up with you after a bit. First you get Amazon Prime, then maybe Apple TV, then perhaps a Netflix and Max. And before you know it, you’ve got $150 a month going to streaming services you watch maybe once a month.
Sweeping changes were made this past weekend, and it has been amazing. I’ve discovered “free” streaming services (ad-supported) like Pluto and Tubi TV. They’ve been incredible. Instead of a channel showing different types of programming, Pluto basically has a channel per show. So there’s a Star Trek channel, a Doctor Who channel, a Baywatch channel and all day every day, they just show repeats of those shows. Tubi also has some live channels mostly based around content you might’ve seen on Channel 38 or 62 back in the day, but occasionally shows live news, etc.
Sitting back with these old shows like Gunsmoke, and The Brady Bunch, and a whole channel dedicated to campy old 1950’s sci-fi movies – the nostalgia was deep. So, too, was the recognition of how much television has changed since then.
I don’t really know when it started. Maybe it was gradual. Maybe I just missed the day it all changed. But 80% of television seems to be two talking heads in a double-box setup when talking about anything newsworthy. I remember around 9/11, that was the first time you saw constant crawls of news on the bottom of a screen. Then, later, every news item seemed to become BREAKING NEWS. Fewer and fewer sitcoms were made. And even fewer went to a second or third season.
With as fractured as the television and streaming landscape has become, your target seems to be a million viewers. In the “old” days, episodes of I Love Lucy or MAS*H would regularly get tens of millions of viewers a night. Now, it seems the only way you can get viewers is laugh-tracked sitcoms or talking-heads screaming at each other.
As I dove deeper into the “free” streaming, I have to admit that most of those old shows still hold up. I went on a bender of about 6 Cheers episodes and was laughing out loud several times. “NORM!” “What’s up Norm?” “Well, Woody, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and I’m wearing Milk Bone underwear.”
It was like finding an old pair of pajamas that still fit and were still just as warm and snuggly as you remember. And it was also so much more quiet than TV is now.
As we start to evaluate the state of the world, we have got to include the state of media at the same time. Bobbleheads arguing YES or NO in a never-ending cycle of BS is so worthless to your brain that it makes an episode of Knight Rider seem like a graduate level class on astronomy.
So now all of my streaming services are gone. Hello Pluto and hello Tubi! Now where did I put those old pajamas?
(Follow Chris Kamler on the X machine, where you’ll find him at @chriskamler)
