Cable TV: The Loss of a Common American Culture
I am about halfway through the new book by my friend Michael Hyatt: Free to Focus. I will be reporting on it in detail next week.
It's a book on time management, but it's different from most of those I've read in the past. It makes more sense. It took what he thought was a heart attack to bring him to his senses.
One of his crucial points is this: time is a zero-sum game. Every minute that you extract for one thing, you're paying for because you've lost the time for something else. Every time you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to something else.
THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR
Entertainment was always a lure for the rich. There were not many of them. Capitalism keeps making the masses richer. It makes entertainment cheaper. It broadens the market, but at a cultural price.
One of the great problems of mass entertainment has always been the problem of the lowest common denominator. Until the development of cable television, the big three American networks dominated our entertainment criteria. We were forced to immerse ourselves into a culture that was truly homogenized. We don't do that anymore.
When we think of television, there is no shared American culture any longer. There was for radio, beginning in the 1930's. It was for television, beginning in the late 1940's. That common culture unified Americans for the next half-century. Then, it began to fragment.
Every once in a while, I watch a segment of a rerun made available on Amazon Prime: shows out of the 1950's. These were popular shows. Sometimes they were dramas. Sometimes they were comedies. What is astounding in retrospect is how dated they seem. I don't mean just the fact that they are black and white shows. The scripts seem dated. The shows look like what they really were: low-budget shows. The money generated by the networks must have been astounding. They didn't start paying the actors a significant amount of money until the second half of the 1960's.
The comedy shows are rarely funny. Have my tastes changed that much? I doubt it. At age 9, I saw Alastair Sim's Christmas Carol. I was enthralled. Cyranno had the same effect on me. At age 11, I saw Shane. I still regard it as the greatest of all the Westerns. I am convinced that my level of sophistication artistically is not superior to what it was at age 10. Yet, in retrospect, the time that I spent watching TV in the mid-1950's was clearly wasted. I'm convinced that getting a job at the age of 14, which forced me to work 23 hours a week, helped me budget my TV viewing time better than anything else I could have done. The tube really is addictive.
The problem was the common culture. The audience's need for laugh tracks was recognized almost as soon as they began to have comedy shows. The laugh tracks were not sophisticated. They didn't need to be.
The time that we spent watching those shows, multiplied by tens of millions of households, reminds me of what we always knew, but didn't want to face up to: time passes relentlessly.
Some shows do hold up. The Mary Tyler Moore Show is timeless. Four decades later, it still makes me laugh. My wife and I did watch that show every week. We also watched The Bob Newhart Show, which still holds up reasonably well. Newhart had a gift of timing and stuttering. But that was it. We budgeted our TV viewing time by charging ourselves $.25 per half hour. Then we gave the money away at the end of the month. That was $1.50 per show in today's money. We found that the entertainment available just was not worth any more than that. We were right.
As for Yes, Minister, that is timeless. We forget how few of these shows there ever were.
We place too little value on our time. We squander it. What enthralls us as far as entertainment is concerned in one decade ought to enthrall the next decade. Today, the reality shows are popular. We elected a President because of one of them. I never watched any of them. They are the mass-audience shows.
With cable, we have choices. We do not have to tolerate or adjust to the lowest common denominator. This is a great advantage. But there is a price: fragmentation.
Among the few ancient shows whose names are remembered from television's first five years, only one is still watched: I Love Lucy. No one in the industry thought it would work until the third week. An unknown comic genius, a former movie sidekick, made it work. Then there was this, the lowest-budget show of all: Life Is Worth Living. The long-defunct DuMont network paid the sole performer nothing. There was no laugh track--just an unpaid studio audience. Props: a blackboard and a piece of chalk. It sometimes had 10 million viewers, running second in its time slot to Milton Berle, "Mr. Television."
It could not hold a national audience's attention today. On a Catholic cable network, maybe . . . among a hard core of traditionalists, very old and relatively young.
CULTURAL JAUNDICE
On the big issues of life, including culture, we are no more sophisticated today. We are suffering from a kind of cultural jaundice. It was not always so. Cultural naïveté is surely not worse than cultural jaundice.
Americans are too easily bored at too young an age: "Seen that. Played that. What's next?" What, indeed?
Better computer graphics.
Man does not live by computer graphics alone, or even mainly: stones into virtual bread.
We are easily distracted. Our wealth increases the number of affordable distractions.