Once upon a time, if you weren't in front of a TV set when a certain show aired, you didn't see it…often, ever. To cite one example of many, I remember watching The Tonight Show one night when Albert Brooks did a spot that may have been the funniest thing I ever saw on television. (I wrote about it here.) After I recovered from laughing, I got to thinking that (a) if I hadn't been watching at that moment I'd never see it because (b) it was probably gone for good.
Joey Bishop was guest-hosting that night and they never reran episodes with guest hosts. And since they never reran those episodes, I wasn't sure they even preserved them. The time John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared on The Tonight Show in 1968 was already lost since Joe Garagiola was the host that night. All that seems to exist of it today are a few poor audio tapes recorded off the air at the time by fans.
Technology has changed all that. I guess it started when home video recorders came in. If the network or studio didn't preserve the program, maybe some viewer did. It also became cheaper for the networks or studios to save old shows…and when the marketplace yielded an increased opportunity to "monetize" them via home video sales or new channels, more proprietors made the effort to keep them.
There are TV shows from the sixties and seventies that simply no longer exist because no one can locate even a bad 16mm print of even one episode. I doubt that will be the fate of very many programs done since someone began selling old shows on Beta or VHS. (All this is also true of movies, of course. It used to be expensive to preserve film negatives. Now with digital technology, it's easy and cheap to have back-up copies…and people all over the world have them.)
Once I had my first VCR, I no longer had to be home at the proper time to see a TV show I wanted to see. My first video recorder was a Panasonic U-Matic machine that took 3/4" tape cassettes. It was huge and heavy and the tapes were expensive so it cost serious money to build any kind of library. Most of the cassettes only held an hour. One or two companies made 90-minute cassettes but the tape in those was thinner and tended to snag…and once it did, you pretty much had to toss the tape away so those longer tapes were to be avoided.
But I remember that on evenings when I might not be home in time to catch Johnny Carson, I would set up my machine and its timer to record from 11:30 (his start time then) until the tape ran out. I could come home at 2 AM and still see two-thirds of Johnny's (then) 90-minute program. I could even watch him the next day or play a great moment from the show for some friends the following week.
I cannot tell you how liberating and empowering that felt at the time.
I felt like I owned TV instead of the other way around. I no longer had to arrange my life to please television…and it only got more liberating when I acquired my first Betamax. It had cheaper tapes which recorded longer, plus it had a simpler timer. Then came VHS with even longer tapes and — one great day — TiVo. Three clicks and I'd never miss any of my favorite shows.
I had one of the first TiVos made, purchased at a time when that invention wasn't even publicized much since the TiVo company couldn't yet make them fast enough to fill even the orders from folks who knew about their wonderful machine. For a few months there, I'd gleefully demonstrate mine for friends who came by — how you could set it to record your favorite shows whether you were home or not; how you could watch them and rewatch them whenever you wished; how you could pause in the middle of a live broadcast, then resume watching later; how you could slow-mo and replay the action.
The movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High had been on HBO or Showtime and I showed a friend of mine how I'd recorded it. He had me playback, slow down and freeze frame the scene with Phoebe Cates (men, you know the one) about thirty times. After the second time, he had his wallet out and was asking, "Where can I get one of these right this minute?" He was heartbroken to find out there was a waiting list and it would take almost a month.
As it turns out, you don't even need a Tivo or DVR these days. Even without one, you rarely miss anything on TV that you want to see. Shows that were broadcast last night can often be watched online the next day on the network's website or elsewhere. An awful lot of the best clips are on YouTube almost immediately.
There are several shows I never record but I see their best moments. Saturday Night Live and the talk shows of Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Conan O'Brien, James Corden and a few others are rarely captured by my TiVo. But when the Internet buzz tells me there was something wonderful on one of them, I just go to YouTube and find that segment. If one of my favorite guests — say, Lewis Black or Jim Jefferies — is on one of those shows, I might set the TiVo but increasingly, I just think, "Why bother? I can watch their spots online and I don't even have to fast-forward through the rest of the show."
I didn't bother setting the TiVo for the Presidential Debate last week. Twelve different channels were replaying it in whole or part after and since they stopped, there are still eighty places I can watch it or download it. I'm not going to bother recording the Vice-Presidential Debate tomorrow night. As boring as it promises to be, there will still be sources for it.
Actually, it may not be that boring if Tim Kaine or the moderators bring up some of Mike Pence's past statements about gay people. Those alone peg him as about as loathsome a human being as has ever held public office. But that gratuitous political comment aside, the point is that I don't have to watch to see the highlights, if any. YouTube and various news sites will do that for me. Or I have the option to watch the whole thing if and when I want. The C-Span site will have it even if no one else does.
Obviously, I am telling you nothing you don't already know here. You've all learned the same ways to locate content you wish to view and you probably all have a TiVo or some variation on its working principle. I just felt like celebrating how my life has changed because of this particular thread of science. I celebrate it more when I recall one incident from my childhood…
Back when I was eight, my favorite mustn't-miss show was The Flintstones, which was on ABC on Friday nights at 8:30 PM. That's how we knew it was an "adult cartoon," which was how they initially billed it. It wasn't on at 7:30, which was when prime-time began back in 1960.
No matter what else was happening in my life, I was in front of the TV each Friday evening in time to see the cold opening and every subsequent moment of that week's episode. Here — I'll embed an image from the show's opening its first year. I removed the color since the show, though produced in color, aired them in black-and-white…
I loved it but then one week came trauma: Someone gave my father tickets to a Lakers game one Friday night. Let me tell you how long ago this was. The Lakers had just moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, the players were all white and everyone was talking about this guy named Jerry West who was supposed to be amazing. Still, then as now, my interest in watching a basketball game was about the same as my interest in watching mold spores form in a dish of tapioca pudding.
My interest in watching The Flintstones could not, however, have been greater. I pleaded with my parents to leave me home alone with the TV but they insisted no, I was too young to be left by myself. Love me though they did, they were not about to miss this opportunity and I had to go along with them. I begged, pleaded, wheedled…everything. If I'd thought of it at the time, I would have said, "You know, someday I'm going to have a lucrative career writing Flintstones comic books and working for Hanna-Barbera so you may be harming my future earning potential."
But I didn't know that then. The best I could do — and I really did try this line of argument — was because I once heard someone say that the only really interesting part of a basketball game was the last quarter. I tried to convince my parents that we could leave the house at 9 PM, get there for the last quarter and still not miss anything important.
They somehow didn't buy that so I was dragged to the Sports Arena when I could have/should have been home watching Fred and Barney. I hated the whole stupid thing and did everything possible to communicate to my parents how miserable I was every minute of what they inexplicably thought was an exciting game. I must have done it well because they never did that again.
Still, that awful night, I actually missed an episode of The Flintstones! A whole, actual episode of The Flintstones! On Monday, I pumped my schoolmates who'd seen it for details…and expressed shock that some of them could have watched but hadn't. What the hell was wrong with those children?
I consoled myself that all was not lost; that some (not all) of the episodes were rerun near the end of the season…so I had a chance. As it turned out, this was not one of the ones that was repeated and I figured sadly I would never see it. Who knew at the time those would all be rerun and rerun forever and someday, I'd even be able to buy a copy of it and watch it whenever I wanted to? I finally caught it a year or three later in syndication by which time my interest in The Flintstones was somewhat diminished.
So let us pause to remember that because of technology, no child ever has to endure that pain today. Whatever ten-year-olds are watching today — Son of Zorn or Bob's Burgers or Elena of Avalor or Naked and Afraid — they never have to miss an episode.
It's a great time to be alive.