h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

is that the viewers of the fifties, sixties and seventies are the writers and producers of today.
The self-referential and self-reverential nature of television has idiots with the same experiences (namely watching television for half their lives) pitching very similar concepts to execs and producers with very similar experiences (watching the same programs as the writers), with everything being a variation on a theme.
Not that there was a golden age of television or anything, but there was a time when the boyos shared the same experiences of listening to radio (which had it's own cycle of self-reference), watching stage shows and movies, and living through the War with it's traveling shows and unit writers.

A simple scan through old TV Guide schedules of the past decades will reveal a pile of shows that you've never heard of or vaguely remember.
The airwaves have always been full of crap. The few that have survived are disimilar enough that you would have thought that a committed student of the genre would have gotten the message. Instead, elements of the old are combined in hopes of making a new, while disregarding the reason for the success of the old in the first place.

It is no secret that Your Show of Shows, Dobie Gillis, Get Smart, M*A*S*H, Taxi, Cheers, and Frasier shared writers and producers.
(I'd have to do a bit of checking, but I think that's right.)
Success can breed success.
Everything else is just filling time.

I know there's always been crap but there used to be a time when the quality stuff was ripe and their was little (in comparison) crap but now it's crap.. crap... more crap...

Hey there's a good sho-- oh wait.. axed.

I remember a time when one could watch new episodes of Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files in a week of "family programming".

At one point M*A*S*H and Trapper Jones, MD could be watched in new episodes, in prime time.

The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction and Gilligan's Island were all prime time shows, as was the Flintstones and the Jetsons.

Of course, there were only three networks then and a lot of long-running shows. The failures often were in the opposite slots of the big favorites...regardless of quality.

Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Bob Newhart and Johnny Carson by themselves slammed the lid on hundreds of shows that tried to go against them.

Nowadays you have hundreds of channels (am I exaggerating?) and hundreds of production groups (many of them international, Spain/Bulgaria, Poland/Canada, Britich/Czech, Japanese/French) cranking out stuff by the thousands of feet.

You could fill up the schedule of a new cable channel with nothing but failed pilots... (actually, that's what HBO and TNT used to do in the wee hours back in the early days!) and never have to produce a new show.

And crap is relative. I actually used to look forward to episodes of the Pretender and Profiler. Recently I was amazed by what happened to John Doe and Firefly. But, looking back, and reviewing some of the episodes that I have on tape, it weren't nothing really that special.

My thirteen year old daughter and I plan to buy our first brand new DVD set of shows soon: 18 episodes of "You Bet Your Life".
I don't care what anybody else thinks about that show, I liked it on audio and video tape and my daughter has been watching and listening her entire life.

So, maybe if we ignore the crap on TV and watch the stuff from our own collections, maybe when we get tired of that and switch over to the commercial channels we'll see something interesting for once. If not, there's always the books we never got around to....

*looks at the 12 unread books on shelf*

Erm.. Yeah...

We obviously watch what we want but when there's a only choice between crap and crap you'll only get bad smells.