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Who knows TV better than us? As America's largest online DISH Network dealer, we've got the inside dirt on the channels, shows, and events that keep you tuned in.
 Well! Unless you've been paying attention to less important items such as some stupid tire trade war with China and domestic terrorism rings, you are well aware that the world ended at approximately 9:42 PM Pacific time, when rapper Kanye West strode onstage in the middle of Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for Best Female Video on MTV's Video Music Awards. With his career in one hand and the microphone he'd snatched out of Swift's hand in the other, West magnanimously informed Swift that he'd "let her finish in a minute," then announced to one an all that he considered his friend Beyonce the winner.
As media splashes go, this was a cannonball. The story was granted above-the-fold status on The Drudge Report, and DJ's buzzed for hours between spins: "Does this guy just base his entire career on making idiotic comments on live television?" one asked, invoking West's utterly inappropriate and obnoxious "George Bush hates black people" rant during a Katrina benefit, all spewed as an increasingly suicidal Mike Meyers shared the camera frame.
But this comment ignited far more outrage. Why? Admittedly, I'm no fan of Swift's--she announced "I sing country" before West snatched the mike, and I would dispute both "sing" and "country"--but really... why? I can't remember a time I,or anyone I know, watched either a music video, MTV, or a music video on MTV, and yet, here we are in this post. All it took was the sad news of Patrick Swayze's death to conflate the two stories: "YO PATRICK SWAYZE I KNOW YOU JUST DIED AND ALL AND IMMA LET U FINISH," read one tweet, "BUT MICHAEL JACKSON'S DEATH WAS THE BEST ONE THIS YEAR."
This is perhaps a Michael Vick moment, the football player who became a 215-pound hate magnet when he was convicted for running a dog fighting ring, despite the fact that professional sports are rife with sexual assaulters, DUI kings, and perpetrators of assault. We live in a scream-saturated society; you see the tweet quoted above, a slash of capital letters using the name of a cancer victim in a joke barely twelve hours after his death. How is it our society is all right with that... but not with West's decided lack of tact in the presence of a living person who could defend herself?
I'll let you finish.
As we all know, I consider the 1980's the apex of Western Civilization; then $ale of the Century went off the air, and it was all downhill from there, straight into the OJ trial.
And now, WGN America (DISH Network 239) is for one night recreating what was perhaps the strongest sitcom lineup in the history of television: Thursdays of 1984. The network is running the bloc in order, just as it did in The Year of Mary Lou Retton, and and it's doing it just as viewers slog through the usual parade of lameness which is a new television season.
The stunt takes place on Sunday, September 20 (oh, what a nostalgia bomb this would be were it actually dropped on a Thursday.) Beginning at 8 PM EST, it includes The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Hill Street Blues. I haven't dug up which episodes are going down, or whether or not they'll all be shows from the same date. I have my fears, if non-1984 liberties are taken. Oh please, don't let the program director pull from the Great Cosby Era of Suck, which may be dated from the first moment the Cosby home played host to a be-ruffled Raven Symone, four years old and already finding it necessary to go about with a last name. And oh please, don't let this be one of the many Very Special Episodes which waterfalled from the Keaton kitchen, especially the one with Elise's suddenly dear-to-the-family aunt contracting Alzheimer's. Big laughs!
It's bound to be a bittersweet experience: For all its strengths, How I Met Your Mother's MacLaren's Pub is no Cheers. But for one brief sitcommy moment, jelly shoes are worn, cola wars are raging, and OJ is starring in The Naked Gun. Enjoy.
When I wrote of Erich Kunzel in the wake of PBS' broadcast of A Capitol Fourth that “next year’s show wouldn’t be the same without its most reliable sparkler“ I was rather hoping that, at worst, he might not feel well enough next year to take up the baton. After all, at the Fourth of July rehearsal concert I attended, Kunzel bantered with Big Bird in his usual high spirits, but sat when he could, something I’ve never seen him do in thirty-two years of growing up with him as the maestro of my hometown’s Pops. I’ve since learned that he was in agonizing pain for the duration.
He died this past week, just a few weeks after conducting his final concert in the city where he founded one of the most formidable Pops orchestras on the planet. “Hey, I made it!” he said to the cheering crowds, but one of the musicians later reported that he conducted in tears. He knew. A memorial concert is planned in Cincinnati next month, using music Kunzel pre-selected. He knew.
I raise this topic in a column about television not because Kunzel started in so many Cincinnati Pops and National Symphony Orchestra specials, but because he embraced what television is all about: Making entertainment available to the masses.
The almost paradoxical idea of spreading musical appreciation didn’t daunt Kunzel. He employed indoor fireworks, costumed characters, and Christmas trees which rose from beneath the stage. For an MTV era, he was well aware that strings and brass simply weren’t enough for some viewers. He wanted to make music a visual medium.
He knew.
And now Kunzel leaves behind not only his specials and hundreds of recordings, but his protégé, Keith Lockhart, now the conductor of the Boston Pops. Young Mr. Lockhart learned well from the master; while touring with his own orchestra recently, he wasn’t above unfurling an enormous American flag from the ceiling of the hall at a particularly patriotic moment.
Erich Kunzel began in an opera pit, toured the globe, and ended in a little amphitheatre by the river in the city he made to sing. He could have made his last concert anywhere, with any selections, but Kunzel chose to stick to the orchestra’s usual schedule—this was about the music, not him. He knew.
I recently wrote an article for a higher education site complaining that my just-out-of-their-teens students were lost when it came to the ability to analyze. But I had to concede in the middle of it that this wasn’t necessarily their fault: From the time they were born, their entire lives, up to the current second, have been analyzed for them.
Witness the proliferation of VH1’s “I Love” series (DISH 162, various times.) Originally released as “I Love the ‘80’s” in 2002, the series featured cultural commentators as well as actual participants in the decade’s most memorable moments. “Yeah, I was kind of everywhere, wasn’t I?” confessed a then-thirty four year old Mary Lou Retton. It was a fun program, with just the right mix of nostalgia and snark. Just enough time had passed between the Regan administration and the air date to gain the very first glimmers of historic perspective.
But then came “I Love the ‘90’s,” and… then… well… what happened two years ago. At that point, you’re just mocking last year’s jeans. Doubtless there will come a day when we as a country will snicker in utter embarrassment over our national obsession with American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, but that day has hardly landed within the calendar confine of 2009.
My generation—I’m thirty-two—was at the back edge of this. The first national event most of us could grasp was the loss of Challenger, and most of us didn’t witness the tragedy live. We saw it via Big Three replays, and replays, and replays. CNN was around, but the bottomless pit which is the cable news monster was just beginning to develop its appetite.
And so thanks to those of us in the media who provide instanalysis, many schoolchildren don’t necessarily have to provide their own, or they mirror what’s already out there 140 characters at a time. We’ll probably all laugh about it very hard on “Hey, Remember 2009?”, due out next January 1.
CBS reran an episode of The Big Bang Theory (DISH 107, Mondays, 9:30 PM) tonight which threw down a cultural marker which in ten years will either be quaint or hideously dated.
Ten years or ten minutes. The episode focused on the general inability of one of the main characters to maintain a romantic relationship, and his roommate’s horrific attempts to “help” him cement things with a new love interest. In the middle was an undercurrent of angst on the main character’s part: Was he even in a relationship? When to assume he was? Would he ever be in one?
The resolution came swooping in when Mr. Horribly Fix-It hacked his roommate’s Facebook account, setting his “relationship status” to “single.” There was much freaking out until the love interest, too, set hers to “in a relationship.” “Well, I guess I’m in a relationship!” the happy new boyfriend beamed, with his girlfriend who knows how far away.
A deft commentary, to be sure, on how current social mores come to pass. What’s pushy? What’s not? Do we have to have The Talk before resetting that status? What if someone “un-relationships” before the relationship has been officially undone?
Relevant questions for 2009, and episodes such as these could serve as handy time capsules in years to come. “You see, kids, your mother and I met on a forum for collectors of vintage staplers, and then she set her Facebook status to “in a relationship” with me, and I couldn’t bear to say anything, and, well, here you are.” But what if, like Will and Grace, the up-to-the-second references simply make the show very stale very fast, giving it all the cultural lasting power of a daily soap episode?
Seinfeld, like both Bob Newhart sitcoms before it, solved the problem by tackling timeless social issues. Yes, there were shoulder pads, leisure suits, and teased curls, but the classic nature of the material superseded the stamps of the age.
It’s a gamble, but, at the moment, it’s an entertaining one. Pass the passwords.
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