Mr. Spock's Beard and the Hyper-Fragmentation of Pop Culture

Over the years I have time and again been struck by how single episodes of shows like the original Star Trek or The Twilight Zone have lingered in the pop cultural memory so that a half century on TV writers can still make casual reference to even their smaller details, and expect a portion of their audience to remember what they were talking about to make the reference worth the while--as with Star Trek's "Mirror, Mirror."

That was the show that taught us all that if we see someone we knew well wearing a beard, it must be the evil alternate universe version of them. (Unless the one we know is evil, in which case the "evil" version of them is actually the good, like with Eric Cartman on South Park.)

That this has been the case seems natural enough in hindsight. People had fewer channels, enough so that anything in network prime-time almost automatically commanded a huge slice of the TV audience by today's standards. For much of the year a first-run show's new season consisted of reruns, just in case they missed it the first time--or refreshing their memories if they hadn't. And then if a show lasted for a while it made its way into syndication and, quite often, way more reruns apt to be watched by a significant share of the viewership, because there were only so many venues, picking from a limited pool of really successful content. And this seems to have especially been the case with fandom-inspiring genre television, to which the TV networks were only willing to go so far in catering, so that their options were limited indeed. So without trying someone only casually interested in science fiction could easily end up seeing the same episodes over and over and over again, just by the way memorizing the more striking or popular of them, with others doing the same, so that casually referencing it before a wide audience was plausible, even easy. That, of course meant more such reference, year in, year out (as the "bearded Spock" becoming a cliché demonstrates), which in turn reinforced its recognizability, translating in its turn to still more reference in a virtuous circle.

In this "peak TV" era the situation is very, very different, with the quantity of outlets and the quantity of their programming exploded, and many of them less casually available (with the prime-time networks' marginalization followed by the basic cable TV boom going bust), or casually accessible to viewers even if they are available to them (because of the increased propensity for story arcs, because of shared universe complexity like with the Arrowverse Crisis on Infinite Earths); with the networks inclined to yank reruns off the air in summer in favor of reality TV garbage and the like; with channels favoring their original, exclusive content over reruns of other people's stuff as the mainstay of their content. (To give one small example I saw Smallville in reruns on TNT, but the current crop of DC Comics-based superhero shows airing on the CW does not turn up there or anywhere else; it's something you have to seek out, or not watch at all--and I'll admit I haven't, and don't expect to be doing it anytime soon.)

The result is the ever-more thorough hyper-fragmentation of the viewing audience--and, I think, even if you are sure that TV today is better than it has ever been before, that even the best that is out there today is far less likely to give us a shared frame of reference. Certainly I do not think any show today, no matter how brilliant, will give us something that a half century on we will recognize as the way we do such bits of those '60s-era shows as the evil alternate universe significance of a beard. And I can't help suspecting that, even if there is much good, or at least potential good, in the profusion of material and options, we are not also losing something that way.