THE MORNING RANT: Post-Millenials Abandoning Television, and other Random TV Thoughts

At my day job, I recently participated in a gathering of 10 employees for the purpose of introducing a new company initiative. As an icebreaker, the moderator asked each person when introducing themselves to name a television series they are currently watching. Four of the ten individuals stated that they don’t watch any TV at all. Of those four, three of them were clearly under-35, possibly in their mid to late 20s (it’s hard for me to guess ages these days) and the other was a lady probably over 55. The moderator gently pressed a little and asked if they watch any shows on their tablets or devices, and all four of them said “no.”

I thought about old memories of how TV was demonized when I was a child in the ‘70s, yet today’s younger generation has somewhat abandoned television.

I also thought about what this portends for Hollywood. I knew that people had generally stopped going to theaters to watch movies like they used to, but I kind of assumed that meant more time was spent in front of the TV, and that there was still strong demand for all the streaming TV shows. Maybe not.

Since I’m talking television today, rather than my normal focus on the climate hoax, woke capital, or burning EVs, here are a few more television-related things that are on my mind…

Missing the Red Netflix Envelope

Does anyone else miss getting movies and TV shoes on a DVD from Netflix? It was great. I would still prefer to watch a movie or TV series this way, rather than streaming.

For one thing, there was never any question about what to watch. There were always two DVDs to choose from representing shows we had previously made a decision to watch.

More importantly, there were no commercials and no buffering. How did we get to the point that I am paying a premium to stream TV shows and movies, but unlike the HBO of my youth, I’m also still having to sit through commercials?

Back to Netflix, my wife and I were “red envelopers” right until the end. That is how we watched the entire Justified series.

Also, there was an abundance of movie titles that could be rented on DVD that were not available for streaming. I believe this was due to licensing reasons, but since Netflix had actually bought the physical DVDs in my queue, those could then be rented out to me. After we had returned our last red envelopes, my wife found out that Netflix wasn’t even requiring them to be returned, since they were just going to be discarded. Had I known that, I would have made sure my last two disks were something special to me, perhaps Jaws, or Animal House, or Live and Let Die.

++ What would your last two Netflix DVDs be if you knew you didn’t have to return them?

Why I Hated Star Trek and MTV

I hate Star Trek. Actually, I don’t have any actual malice toward the TV show, although I never got into it. But I hate how it ruined outdoor fun and play when I was a kid.

After school, I wanted to play catch, shoot hoops, ride bicycles, maybe get a pickup game of touch football going in the street, whatever. But at 4:30 every afternoon, reruns of Star Trek came on, and my two closest friends would go inside to watch it. They had already seen every episode numerous times, and for the life of me I did not understand why they wanted to re-re-re-re-watch a show for which they knew every line, rather than engage in some outdoor fun and play.

In retrospect, as my circle of closest friends changed around the high school years, I think Star Trek may have been a factor in me moving on from TV-rerun-addicted friends to new friends.

Related, MTV annoyed me the same way in college. Trying to pry some of my friends away from MTV to go out and actually engage in college fun could be exasperating. (“Hang on Buck, just a few more songs.”) As cool as Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More” video might have been, I could not understand watching it for yet another time rather than going to out to a college bar and chatting up some coeds.

If you’re too young to remember, here’s the video I’m referencing.

Do not misunderstand, I watched plenty of TV as a kid. When my wife and I moved for my job about a decade ago, I relocated six weeks before she did, temporarily living in a furnished apartment. The TV was over-the-air, but it included a channel that exclusively showed TV shows from the ‘60s and ‘70s, so I had sit-coms from that era keeping me company in the evening. Having not seen those shows in decades, it was fascinating to realize that the “erudite” shows were not as good as their reputations, but the sit-coms dismissed as trashy at the time were brilliant.

Maude and MASH are unbearably pretentious. Even Barney Miller was not as good as I recalled (although Dietrich made it much better.) The laugh tracks in all of those shows are horribly distracting too.

But Sanford and Son, Three’s Company and The Jeffersons were masterpieces of writing and comedic timing. Redd Foxx, John Ritter and Sherman Hemsley were comic geniuses.

Throckmorton’s First Law of Live Music, If There’s an Upright Bass in the Band, It’s Probably Going to be Good

As corny as “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” might have been, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were amazing musicians. I’m probably not the only kid who started dabbling in bluegrass at a young age thanks to watching Beverly Hillbillies reruns.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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