The Rhythms and Texture of the TV of Yesteryear

Older TV--TV from before our prestige TV-dominated era--certainly had its particular rhythms and texture that, even when the show isn't black-and-white, or its age given away by ostentatiously period elements (like a cast swathed in eye-offending polyester), is produced by those elements of television production that one is much less likely to see in any recent show. The often leisurely opening credits sequences presenting the cast in a montage set to a theme song. The narratives that would unfold with their dramatic beats timed to coincide with cuts to commercial and run their course within the span of a single episode's running time (save for those occasions when we would realize that the story couldn't be wrapped up in the very little time remaining and, sure enough, the words TO BE CONTINUED appeared on the screen in the final, frozen, frame). The tendency of such narrative toward a procedural format (the cops cracking the case of the week, the doctors resolving the medical emergency of the week), and frequently to the making of episodes that were a 45-minute low-budget version of some feature film "everyone" had already seen (which movie had almost always "done it better," usually much, much better). The "canned audience" track that not only automated the whole range of claqueur's sounds but enabled the viewer to experience that range at home as if they were in a theater (as immortalized in such masterpieces as "Sounds of the '80s Studio Audience").

Alongside the rhythms and texture of single episodes were the rhythms and texture of whole seasons, and even a show's run. Their fall-to-May seasons with their predictable alternation between new episodes and reruns organized around premieres, finales and "sweeps" periods, the latter of which tended to promise something "special" to the audience such as some character being in mortal danger and maybe not making it, their enlivening particular episodes with "special guest stars" (perhaps playing themselves, perhaps not), their seasonal episodes where some character learned "The true meaning of winter" of somesuch, episodes where a character asked "Remember when?" and started the whole group reminiscing in a manner dramatized by bits of past episodes and we realized that rather than a "proper" new episode what we were getting was (yet another) budget-stretching clip show--and of course, a lot of "Will they, won't they?" crapola about a pair of characters of whom one is obviously romantically interested in the other from episode one but due to an endless series of obstacles that the writers all too obviously contrived solely for the purpose of keeping them apart (she's finally realized she has feelings for him, too, but here he is dating a different woman, until he isn't anymore but now she's involved with someone else) they don't have their first date until season seven (often, after the audience had long since stopped caring). There was too how, as shows wore on, they would replace audience favorite characters and actors with new ones that people usually liked less than the original and in the end never got around to accepting, and in the process (just like those gimmicky episodes where at the end we found out that "It Was All a Dream") made it all the more obvious to everyone but the desperately-in-denial network executives that a show had run longer than it ought to have done.

All if this must seem antediluvian today in that way that draws sneers from those overgrown obnoxious "cool kids" who dominate professional reviewing of pop cultural crap--all as someone to whom it isn't probably wouldn't say that they loved all of it. (I certainly won't.) Still, even its worst wasn't a complete barrier to laughter, dramatic substance or intelligent storytelling, just as those of us who can see through the claquing-gone-mad of the critics, the cinema grade-caliber production values and the pretentious tricks and turns that inspire such respect in the Midcult-gobbling middlebrow mind to what prestige TV has actually offered (or not), the absence of those things do not guarantee laughter, dramatic substance or intelligent storytelling. Such that people continue to watch many of them today, over and over again, as the ballyhooed prestige TV shows after airing their last episode commonly cease to hold any interest for those who had once (or so we were told) breathlessly followed--leaving the critics scratching their heads over their continuations in some other form's failing to draw an audience, as when, contrary to the idea that The Sopranos was going to replace oxygen as the thing we need to breathe in order to live, few felt that they had to go back for more when The Many Saints of Newark hit theaters.