what TVs looked like in the 90s (history of sets here)Here's a must read for the day. Over at HitFix, Alan Sepinwall has reached his 20th anniversary as a TV journalist/critic . It's a fascinating piece on 20 years of writing about TV and how much has changed in that medium since 1996. It's a fun history and nostalgia ride, particularly if you're interested in serialized TV (the best assett of TV but it took decades for TV to get there). I love most of the article and I'll save the highlights for your reading there.
But I do want to vehemently disagree with this statement I've bolded below even though the general idea now that "everything is better with TV" is totally true.
I can appreciate nostalgia for those days, if for no other reason than that the beat was easier to cover when there weren't 400+ original scripted series airing every year. But nearly everything about watching and writing about TV is so much better now than it was 20 years ago. The technology is better, giving us stunning imagery (imagine Lost or Breaking Bad shot for standard-def in the old aspect ratio) and easy access not only to the best of what's on now, but most of recorded TV history.
As someone who likes to curate my own viewing experiences, rather than leave the programming to the fancies of contracts/conflicts between studios with both Netflix and Amazon, I am growing increasingly frustrated with acccess to both movies and television. It's getting worse not better (especially with movies) as everything splinters with "exclusivity" and things either stream or are just not available since physical media is going the way of the dinosaur. Many TV shows I've tried to watch for research purposes or silly side pieces over the past few years have been unavailable to stream anywhere with prohibitively expensive DVD prices (if they're on DVD at all) like, oh, say Emmy favorite "Family" (1976-1980) or even something as recent as the failed CW show "Tarzan (2003)" which I had hoped to include in the Swing, Tarzan, Swing! series we've been doing on weekends. That's just two examples that have come up recently. But lots of times when we're considering a Centennial series on a famous star, their TV work is unavailable, period. Not one bit of it. That's especially true of telefilms which seem to evaporate as soon as they air, unless they were made in the last 15 years when everyone starting taking TV more seriously. When we were celebrating Mercedes McCambridge recently it felt like the exception and not the rule that I was able to rent her appearances on both "Bewitched" and "Charlie's Angels". Hell, even if you just want to watch something from last season (like "American Crime" S2) often streaming services will only let you watch the last few episodes aired and not the whole season, so if you're late to a show you probably have to wait a year or two until one of the streaming services picks it up.
But enough complaining. What are you most grateful in the evolution of this medium?