What I’m about to say might sound like an old man story to some of you, but I’m not old, so
you’re just wrong. Deal with it.
Anyway, I was thinking the other day and I realized that . . . I miss TV. I don’t miss
having a TV — I’ve got one, it’s right there, I watch it all the time. I guess what I mean is,
I miss how I used to watch TV — how we all used to. The way we consume television has changed
so much over the last ten or fifteen years or so — mostly for the better,
I must say. I am a cord cutter and have no regrets about that, even as streaming
services continue to fragment and multiply so that the initial reason why many of us
canceled our cable subscriptions in the first place seems less and less relevant every year.
I like having everything, or almost everything, available on demand. I like having access to
massive libraries of content both classic and new. If there is something airing live
that I want to see, I like having the option to DVR it and watch it later,
when it suits me. All of those things are marked improvements over how we used to do it.
And yet . . . sometimes, I miss how we used to do it. I can’t help it — it’s nostalgia, I guess.
Sentimentality.
At my house growing up, we didn’t even have cable until I was a teenager. Before that,
we had a rooftop antenna. I remember the day we had it installed — I must have been, I don’t know,
four? Five? I don’t know what we did before that — maybe we just had a TV with rabbit ears,
I don’t recall. But, one day some men came and dug a hole about, oh, two feet square and,
I don’t know, a few feet deep, next to our house. Then, they lowered a metal tower into the hole,
made sure it was standing up perfectly straight, and filled the hole with concrete. They also
attached the tower to the side of the house with brackets and screws. When the concrete was dry,
they came back and attached this big TV antenna to the top of the tower,
which was a little bit higher than the peak of the roof of our house.
And a TV cable ran from the antenna, down the tower, through a hole they’d drilled through the
wall, and into the house where my Dad screwed the other end of it into the back of our TV.
There was also a box next to the TV, attached to the antenna by a power cable. It looked like this,
with a big directional dial on the front. When you turned the dial, a motor attached to the antenna
would turn the antenna so that it picked up TV signals from whichever direction you selected on
the dial. So, if we wanted to get good reception for a TV station in Hagerstown, we’d turn the
dial so the antenna pointed east. If we wanted to pick up stations in Baltimore, we’d turn it
southeast. If we wanted stations from Washington, D.C,, we’d turn it a little more southeast.
When you turned the dial to move the antenna,
there was a light-up indicator that moved incrementally in the direction you selected,
and every time it clicked one notch over it would make this incredibly satisfying KA-CHUNK sound.
If you didn’t have a TV antenna like this, you may never understand just how big a part of my
childhood this was. It was a ritual we carried out multiple times a day, every day, for years.
And of course, not every channel came in at the same quality. Channel Twenty-Five,
the local station from Hagerstown, came in pretty clear most of the time.
The public TV channels, Twenty-Two and Thirty-One, both came in really well, too, because the
transmission towers were on top of a mountain that you could see out the front windows of our house.
The high power network stations from Baltimore and D.C. came in clear, too. But then, there were the
independent stations from Baltimore, and D.C., and Harrisburg, which was about a ninety-minute drive
to the north. Their signals weren’t as strong. We could get them, but there was usually a good bit
of snow in the picture. But we watched them all the same, if there was something we wanted to see.
Every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and most of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,
I watched on Channel Twenty out of Washington, D.C. Picture was a little snowy most of the time,
but I didn’t mind. Channel Fifty, also out of D.C., had pro wrestling on weeknights at six,
a different show every night — WWF Superstars on Mondays, WCW Main Event on Tuesdays, WWF Wrestling
Challenge on Wednesdays, WCW Pro on Thursdays, and USWA Championship Wrestling on Fridays.
How many hours of snowy, blurry pro wrestling did I watch in the early 1990s? I have no idea, but it
was a lot. For me, and for my Dad, who usually watched with me, it was appointment television.
That’s another thing I miss. Appointment television doesn’t really exist anymore,
at least not like it used to. Back then, if something was on TV that you wanted to see,
you watched it when it was on, and if you missed it you didn’t know if you’d ever see it again. If
it was a live event, like a baseball game, you assumed you wouldn’t. If it was an episode of a
series that was popular enough to go into reruns, there was always the possibility
you could catch it again at some point, but you had no idea when — it might be years!
I vividly remember playing in the backyard one evening and realizing all of a sudden
that the series finale of Mr. Belvedere was airing right then and I was missing it!
So, I sprinted up to the house and managed to catch about the last
fifteen minutes or so. Mr. Belvedere, mind you. Far from my favorite show,
but I’d watched it since it started, I was in, and I didn’t want to miss the end.
When I was a kid, I knew I had to go straight home from school, because He-Man came on at
three. A few years later, I knew I had to be home by four because that’s when Batman:
The Animated Series came on. Saturday mornings I made sure not to miss Super Friends,
and The Real Ghostbusters, and a few years later the X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons.
Even after we finally got cable, appointment television was still a thing:
wrestling on Monday nights, NYPD Blue on Tuesday nights, Friends on Thursdays — that’s right,
I watched Friends, I was fifteen when that show started, you think I wasn’t gonna watch
Jennifer Aniston on TV every week? Are you out of your mind? — The X-Files,
on Friday for the first few seasons, then Sunday. The Simpsons and King of the Hill, also on Sunday.
Sure, I could have set my VCR to record these shows if I wanted — and sometimes I did if I
had to — but watching them when they were on was part of the experience. It’s just what you did.
You watched the show, and then the next day you went to school and you found your friends
who watched the same shows as you did, and you talked about it. For a time back in the day,
me and my pals were quite heavily into The Wonder Years, and we had strong opinions
as to who Kevin’s girlfriend should be — there was Team Winnie and Team Becky, and I remember
once when this other kid who wasn’t a part of our usual gang overheard us talking about an episode,
and he got Becky confused with Winnie, and I was like, “See, this is why we can’t be friends.”
These days, the only show I regularly watch live when it airs is wrestling — AEW Dynamite
on Wednesday nights — and even that I DVR so I can watch the first hour live and then watch
the second the next morning, since I usually go to bed at nine p.m. during the week — not because I’m
old — because I get up at five a.m. to work out like the vigorous and active young person I am.
Everything else I watch on-demand. In fact, most of the shows I watch regularly don’t
even air on broadcast or cable TV — they’re released directly to streaming services.
And, like I said, it’s better this way. Nowadays, we, the viewers, are in control of the TV,
rather than the other way around. Or at least . . . it feels like that. . . . When I say I miss TV,
or I miss the way most of us used to watch TV, I’m not saying I wish things would go
back to being that way now. Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. It lies to us. It overlays
our memories with this warm, comforting haze. It can have us believing that things
were better the way they used to be merely by virtue of the fact that that’s the way
they used to be. It’s not the foundation for a thoughtful, healthy, progressive worldview.
But when you approach nostalgia from the proper perspective, with the right mindset,
there’s no harm in it. You have to be clear on what it is, specifically,
that you’re missing. Because when I say that I miss how I used to watch TV,
I’m not talking about mechanics, or technology — I’m not saying having to turn that antenna
tuner to get a channel to come in clear enough to watch is a superior system to
streaming shows through a high speed internet connection in 4K high-def crystal clarity.
I’m saying I miss the feeling of sitting on the floor of our living room, feeling that shaggy
green carpet against my legs, turning the dial and waiting for it to KA-CHUNK its way around.
I miss the anticipation and the excitement and the little spark of joy that I got from doing that —
from being able to do that. And sure, there are lots of things in my life right now that give me
joy. But nothing is exactly like that was, because . . . no thing is exactly like another thing.
Maybe the best use of nostalgia is in helping us to realize that, so maybe
we’ll remember to appreciate the good times a little more while we’re actually living them.
Team Winnie, by the way. Nothing against Becky, but — come on.