When TV was TV

When I was young, Saturday morning was really special, because that was about the only time you could watch cartoons non-stop. In my eyes, that’s what you were supposed to do if you were a kid on Saturday mornings. Now my kids have access to about 10 all-cartoon channels on our satellite, so Saturday mornings are no longer a special thing.

And I have to sadly admit that it really cuts down on the time that we spend watching TV together as a family. I’ll watch Spongebob Squarepants and Animal Planet with them, but when it comes to the super-hero stuff, I’m out of the room. And there is nothing, I repeat, NOTHING on prime-time network television that we can watch as a family. In fact, the only network program that my wife and I still try to watch together is ER, and that’s mainly because she enjoys the show, and I play a little game by trying to guess which patient is going to die before the episode is over (there’s always at least one, as the show has to deal with REALITY).

So let’s compare notes. When I was 6 years old (the age of my triplets right now), here were the prime-time options that were available for my family in 1965 to watch together:

ABC – Shindig / The Donna Reed Show / Bewitched
CBS – The Munsters / Gilligan’s Island / My Three Sons
NBC – Daniel Boone / Laredo

I remember watching all of these shows with my family, and don’t recall anything that was treated as “questionable” by my parents.

Here are the current Thursday night prime-time options that are available to my family to view together:

ABC – Movie (My Best Friend’s Wedding) / Primetime Live
CBS – NCIS / CSI / Without A Trace
NBC – Joey / Will and Grace / ER

Sure, the Andy Griffith Show may not seem very realistic by today’s standards. It can be defined as a cop show, but these police officers aren’t like the ones on NYPD Blue or CSI. In Andy’s world, there’s never a dead body to examine or a gangland execution. There is a town drunk who, ironically, would probably not get by the network sensors…hate to promote alcoholism, someone may complain about that.

And even though there are now sitcoms that deal blatantly with homosexuality, no one in Mayberry ever questioned why Barney, Gomer or Goober never married. Did anyone even think there was something strange about that? Even Andy was a single father, but not because of divorce. He was a widower who never really spoke about his departed wife.

Was there ever an opportunity for sexual innuendo on the Andy Griffith Show? You bet! Let’s not forget Daphne and Skippy, those trampy girls from Mt. Pilot who would come to town to hit on Andy and Barney (or Bernie, as Skippy would refer to him). And in later years, when Andy and Barney would always double-date with Helen and Thelma-Lou, I’m sure the writers could have come up with SOMETHING off-color if they had tried hard enough.

The point is, they didn’t. Those writers tried, successfully, to come up with something that depicted the way life SHOULD be…pure, honest, hard-working people who cared about one another. The real challenge was to make it funny so viewers would keep tuning in week after week. Now I may have what is considered a juvenile sense of humor, but you’ve got to admit…it really was funny!

Is there hope for TV? I don’t think so. It has become so segregated that I doubt it will ever have the wide appeal that it did during the 50’s, 60’s and into the 70’s. It’s just another situation where “more” turns out to be “less”…kind of like radio.