Conservative Conversation and Community
The United States Open is the ultimate conservative golf tournament. Let it sink in for a second. I know what you are thinking. What about The Masters? I am not saying it is not great, if not the greatest golf tournament in the world. I am saying The U.S. Open is the golf tournament a […]
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In the late 19th century, when television was first imagined and written about, no one talked about television as broadcasting at all, because the concept of one voice or image speaking to many others in remote locations didn’t exist. It wasn’t even widely understood that there would have to be a camera sending you the picture; many early sketches imagine it as an electrified super-telescope, able to randomly focus in on distant events. Even as late as 1933, Paramount Pictures produced “International House”, a zany, racy comedy about a Chinese hotel full of scheming global businessmen competing to buy “Radiovision”, a television invention that can form an image of entertaining events anywhere in the world.
MoreAsk any critic: We’re living in the era of Peak TV, when major cable and streaming projects have become as important and glamorous in our world as theatrical films are, sometimes even more so. Television’s been an important part of our lives for seventy years, but other than for live events, it’s always been the (relatively) family-friendly, 21 inch-wide, generally low prestige cousin of the movies. That all changed in this century, and this post will claim it’s partly due to a non-artistic advance that’s supposedly “merely” technical, as if anything is “merely” technical: The stunning quality, size, and affordability of today’s high definition home screen.
The traditional movie theater is increasingly reserved for spectacle; your living room flatscreen is now your movie screen, just as your laptop or tablet has become your kitchen table TV, and your mobile phone became your daily, carry around computer message center. Just considering sheer cultural impact, “The Sopranos”, became “The Godfather” of our era, and “Game of Thrones” has been “The Lord of the Rings” of the past decade. It’s hard to recall how recent this all is. Even a quarter century ago, you’d have to have been a Hollywood millionaire with a 35mm home theater to see a picture anywhere nearly this good in your living room. Now you only need $500, and 55 inches (diagonal) of wall space. The story of how video reached film quality, and is now approaching the limits of human eyesight, involves enterprise, decades of backdoor deals, art, science, the politics of the Sixties through the Eighties, and a high money stakes engineering fight with Japan; which we won. Here’s how it happened.
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I hate to admit this, but MacGyver is not good. I’m not referring to the unwatchable reboot currently withering away on CBS. No, I mean the original Richard Dean Anderson vehicle of awesomeness which aired from 1985-1992.
Dat dat dat dat dat dat daaaaa, dat dat daaaaa. The theme song gets you pumped, right? It makes we want to go rifling through the kitchen junk drawer, grab the broken can openers and fashion a defibrillator, just in case we need one. Or take the mercury out of those unused curly cue light bulbs (still in the four-year-old box, because they suck) and make…something with mercury, and batteries!
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He was many things. A gag writer, a sailor at war, a novelist, the grandson of a rabbi. But above everything else, he was a storyteller. Herman Wouk has died at age 103.
He is best remembered for his breakthrough novel, The Caine Mutiny, and an epic pair of television mini-series The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Caine won the 1951 Pulitzer and was made into a classic film starring Humphrey Bogart as the mentally unstable Captain Queeg.
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A favored televisions series grows on the viewer. One relates to characters, often eventually seeing them as old friends. The end of a favorite series causes a period of mourning of sorts. Not like the loss of a loved on beloved pet, but there is a sense of mourning nevertheless. My wife made an interesting […]
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Google’s presentation of its impressive new game streaming service began with images of boardgames, arenas, sports stadiums, and concert halls to show how entertainment has provided a social glue throughout history to bring people of different backgrounds and beliefs together in joy. Hence the name, Stadia. “Create + Scale + Connect” are the three goals […]
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In August 1973, my girlfriend (and future wife!) wanted to visit some friends in Maine, so we drove up there from New York. She loved all this healthy air and the break from living in a city. Me, I was … less enthusiastic about a week or so of rural life, but damned if I […]
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In “Back to the Future”, one resident of Hill Valley, California in 1955 is puzzled by a word that Marty McFly uses. “What’s a rerun?”, she asks. Like much of the film, it’s a witty exaggeration. Television viewers of the mid-Fifties were just beginning to see reruns show up in morning and afternoon TV time slots.
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Back in 2013, the executives at NBC decided to hark back to an earlier time in the network’s history and stage a live musical. While the post-show reviews were mixed, The Sound of Music did well, pulling in 18.6M viewers.
Much of the viewership was driven by its lead, country music star Carrie Underwood. Much of the criticism was driven by its star, country music star Carrie Underwood, who had little acting experience and big shoes to fill. Still, all of the broadcast networks except CBS decided to board the musical train.
MoreWhen I was a kid, children’s books had holiday stories about getting in the family car and driving to Grandma’s farm. (Schoolbooks back then were usually old and worn, and the cars in the pictures had that lumpy round prewar look, so strange to “modern” kids of the Fifties). Amid the ducks and the horses and the sheep, they’d chop down a tree at dawn on Christmas morning and decorate it with candles and strings of popcorn. Then, after a big country breakfast, they’d go to church. More strange stuff: they had “ministers”, not priests, and they were addressed as “Doctor” or “Reverend”, not as “Father”. Weird place, the American countryside. We used to wonder if it really existed. Christmas was nothing like that where we lived.
This was the New York City of The Honeymooners era, of West Side Story. You see a bit of it in The Godfather. For the price of a subway token, you could visit Macy’s, Gimbels, the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store, the gigantic Lionel train layout at Madison Hardware on 23rd Street, and the big tree at Rockefeller Center, a convenient stroll from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Protestants had their own cathedral farther uptown, St. John the Divine.) New York was always a city of tiny apartments. Back then it was also a time of big families; I was the oldest of six boys. Everyone had lots of relatives nearby. Grandparents almost invariably had European accents of one kind or another (In my family, a thick Scottish burr; in my wife’s family, Yiddish). The city’s churches and synagogues were packed year round, but Easter/Passover and Christmas/Hanukkah took it to the highest level.
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I do not view television as a place for Shakespearian productions, be they comedies, dramas, or whatever. Sure, there is room for all kinds of things on Television. The advent of C-SPAN has been, I believe, an unalloyed good. If PBS were not publicly funded, the idea of a niche station catering to that part […]
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Two weeks ago, we made a nostalgic return to the launch of America’s small market television stations. Last week, we took a look at an early form of television that could have blanketed the country twenty years before it did. This week we do an autopsy on a flashy offshoot of television that became famous, then forgotten.
You’ve spent most of or all of your life in a world where you could buy or rent a copy of a movie and see it whenever you wanted. “Let’s run ‘The Godfather’ after the kids go to bed tonight” is a privilege that only a couple of well-heeled electronics hobbyists enjoyed before roughly 1980. That’s the home video revolution you grew up with. It’s centered around pre-recorded tapes, usually Hollywood-made entertainment.
MoreIn last week’s premiere edition of Thursday Night TV History, we talked about the little-known, dollars-and-cents realities of how television came to smaller cities and rural areas between the coasts. Many commenters on that thread contributed their own memories of what the first generation of TV viewers thought about what they were seeing. That was the start of American television as we know it. But what about television as we don’t know it? What about the forgotten What-Ifs that could have happened differently? This week’s TV History is a couple of examples of paths not taken, or long abandoned. First of all, television might have come to the American home much earlier; fifteen to twenty years earlier, in most cases.
Here’s history as it was: A relative handful of rich or fairly well to do people had TV in their homes before World War II. (One of them was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a set at his Hudson Valley estate.) The price of a television set had dropped since they first went on sale in 1939, but was still roughly half as much as a car. Of the roughly 5,000 U.S. sets sold by late 1941, about 2,000 were in the New York City area, more than half of them in bars or a handful of other public places like hotel lobbies, department stores, or the YMCA. The other 3,000 were split between Schenectady-Albany, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. There, too, most people’s first encounter with TV wasn’t in someone’s living room, but in a bar watching wrestling. Pictures were small—about the size of a 12- to 14-inch screen today—but clear enough to be seen halfway down the bar.
MoreIt’s 1948. After the war, it seemed like everyone was impatient for television to reach them, but incredible as it seems now, radio station owners had a hard time deciding whether or not going into television was worth the financial risk. There were two competing, less expensive prewar experiments ready to be big time postwar realities: FM and facsimile. FM got shafted almost immediately, when the FM frequency bands were abruptly shifted upwards, making every existing prewar FM radio in the country useless. It would take until the mid-to-late Sixties before the superior quality of FM gave it most of the music audience, by then a rock audience. AM went from being “radio,” period, to something you listened to in your car.
In 2009, Microsoft brought the game show format online through Xbox Live. Every owner of an Xbox 360 video game console had a cartoonish avatar to represent the player in a variety of virtual interactions. In the trivia game show 1 vs 100, these avatars could fill a virtual crowd of a hundred players competing […]
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I wrote this column about Paul Ryan’s retirement for USA Today, and C-SPAN was nice enough to have me on this morning to talk about it. An excerpt: More
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Do you watch any television shows that you’d be embarrassed to let people know you watch? Since I use an alias here at Ricochet, I’ll boldly come out and tell you one of mine, Family Feud. Yes, the insipid game show which began on the networks and moved to syndication and has been around since the invention of the cathode tube (or more precisely 1976).
MoreOne of the good things about the rise of cable, Internet Television, and the like, is that we get to the see programs from yesterday. And we realize how different they were. As bad as the 60s were, there were a precious few bright spots. Television, in many ways, was one of them – at […]
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Hollywood actor says his brave new TV show will be bravely brave by featuring a brave gay lead character. Alan Cumming thinks his new show, which portrays the first gay leading character on a network drama, could not be coming at a better time. More
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