The Tube: Why the classics?

Television is a medium that has a somewhat tenuous relationship with its own history. While it does have a long, illustrious history, television is constantly finding a way to distance itself from it.

Although people nowadays don’t delve into its past as actively as before, film is a medium with a past that is acknowledged and cherished. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be any effort by people like Martin Scorsese to preserve and re-release films that could be lost to time like the Australian outback film Wake in Fright.

Classic films like Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Psycho are still watched and revered by viewers new and old. Additionally, a lot of the older movies can still be seen on channels like Turner Classic Movies.

Like film, literature is a form that revels in its own history. If one walks into a literature class in any school in America, they can conceivably find someone teaching a book that dates to a time before the common era like Virgil’s Aeneid, the plays of Sophocles or Homer’s Odyssey. Books like Decameron, Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass have influenced generations of writers and activists.

Music works in the same way as literature. Generations of artists are influenced by what has come before them. Hip-hop music was inspired by the dance rhythms of disco music. Disco music was influenced by the sounds of soul and funk. Soul and funk would have never existed without R&B, and that would have never existed without jazz and the blues.

Music has always built upon itself. To even play music requires learning about what those before you did, so you can then do your own thing. While some artists have been lost to time, many obscure and forgotten ones, with the advent of the internet, have found a new audience. Once again, history isn’t lost on music.

If I were to turn on TV Land, a channel that started as a repository for historically important television shows, I would find The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy, Bonanza and perhaps an episode of Murder, She Wrote thrown in for fun.

In theory, this doesn’t seem like a problem. The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show are excellent shows; the latter is one of my all-time favorites. Your mom and dad probably love the westerns. And, if you can’t laugh at the comedy of Lucille Ball, I don’t know why you watch television.

The problem is that they show only these six shows for half of the day. The other half of the day is wasted showing reruns of unimportant shows like Full House and new programming like Hot in Cleveland, which is inspired by those old shows.

Meanwhile, a plethora of important shows are fading into obscurity. There are other channels that have tried to fill in this gap like Me-TV, which is one of the digital subchannels of KWWL. While the array of programming is larger with a rotation of great shows like Bewitched, My Three Sons, Mission: Impossible and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it is also full of janky cop shows like Car 54, Where Are You?, old man detective shows like The Rockford Files and poor quality historical programming such as Daniel Boone. This doesn’t really serve any purpose other than to entertain your parents and your grandparents.

Classic television shouldn’t be just for people who fantasize about the days when they owned a console television and had only 10 channels to watch. Legendary television programs have a universal appeal that spans generations, just like the best works of music, literature and film.

While the visual style and content is different in these shows, they bring the same joys as the other forms: They entertain and explore our own existence. Outside of entertainment, legendary television shows do the same work as the classics of literature and film: They inspire generations of future writers who improve and innovate within the format.

Seinfeld is one of the great television shows of all-time, if not the greatest. The reason for this is that it completely broke the mold of the sitcom through its use of self-referencing comedy and disdain of moralizing, among other things.

If you are a fan of any single-camera comedy show now, you should build an idol of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David because, without them, shows like Arrested Development and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia would not be possible. If you like the moral ambiguity of Mad Men and The Wire, you can thank St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues and Thirtysomething as these shows were the first to create those sort of characters, as well as tell stories that were socially relevant and difficult.

Television is a medium that frequently shoots itself in the foot—from changing the format of Nick at Nite from sitcoms (1950s-70s) into a perpetual marathon of George Lopez and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, to canceling shows that were quality but never gained an audience like Wonderfalls and Grosse Pointe—but there remain a ton of excellent shows full of heart, laughs, thrills and reflections on the human existence.

If you like anime, watch some episodes of Speed Racer, the first anime to hit the American shores. You’ll understand how lucky you are to have Bleach and FLCL now. If you watch a night soap, find episodes of Melrose Place or Dynasty, two programs that were groundbreaking in the genre. There are tons of great sitcoms to watch from The Honeymooners to Get Smart to Designing Women. Whatever you do, don’t think that television is what is being produced now: Television is nothing without its past.

A.C. Hawley still simmers in anger at the WB for canceling Grosse Pointe.