GREAT piece on the opening-credits sequences of those classic old 70s sitcoms.
Opening credit sequences are a lost art these days. “Lost” because the ritual of collective TV watching is a thing of the past with no real place here in the streaming era. And yes, once upon a time, Network TV watching was a ritual. Like a formal State dinner with seventeen different kinds of spoons and a new glass for each course, Network TV viewing came with a set of rules and an irresistable order. All over America families gathered around the TV set at the appointed time, tuned our sets to the proper channel and waited for the opening notes of the songs we all knew by heart, excited to spend half another hour with characters we’d come to think of as friends.
There was something gratifying too about the idea that all across the country millions of our fellow Americans were doing the same exact thing at the same exact moment. If you are of a certain age, you probably have a memory of getting up during a commercial break on a warm night, maybe to let the dog out, and hearing the sound of the same commercial you were just watching coming from your neighbor’s open window. There was something special about that sense of shared culture, all of us participating at the same time, no matter where or who we were…city mouse and country mouse…doctors, lawyers, electricians and plumbers. There was an irresistable allure to being a part of something magical that would only happen once and then never again.
Streaming TV viewing, by contrast, is a solitary act with no real sense of time or place and where nobody knows your name. By the time a popular 70’s show entered syndication, a committed fan would have watched the series opener one hundred times or more. But memorable credit sequences are more rare now, a function of their incompatibility with the churn-and-burn binge-viewing nature of the streaming model. Easier to just click the “skip” button, or “next episode”, and get on with it.
Instant gratification saves time, certainly, but in the process something is lost that perhaps should not have been. There is value in waiting. Part of what makes Christmas so special is the month long run-up that precedes it. There is also something captivating and mysterious about the idea of being treated to a show. To the knowledge that we can’t speed things up at a whim. That we can’t just skip to the good stuff. It is satisfying in a way that the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am rhythm of streaming will never be able to deliver. And it’s hard not to wonder if the old ways of network TV might not have been good for us in some critical way we can no longer recall.
Sit down, relax…be still. Someone else is in charge for the next 26 minutes and you can’t skip ahead. You are not in control. If the episode ends in a cliffhanger, you’re going to have to wait a week to find out what happens. And that’s OK.
Everything moves faster now. And while it may be an article of faith at Wharton Business School that the customer is always right, there is no immutable law that says the customer will always be happier, or even better off, once they get it.
“Sometimes you wanna go…where everybody knows your name…and they’re always glad you came…”
The above closing line, of course, comes from perhaps my personal favorite of all the shows featured in the post’s embedded videos:
Cheers, Taxi, KRP, Kotter, M*A*S*H—they’re all here, folks, and it’s one hell of a great ride. No true child of the American 70s will want to miss this one, and definitely shouldn’t.
(Via Stephen Green)
Update! The comments-section discussion betwixt myself and Barry compels me to append a typical, wonderfully silly cab-depot exchange featuring Andy Kauffman as Latka Gravas and the incomparable Christopher Lloyd as the Reverend Jim Ignatowski in Taxi.
Heh. LOVE that show. What kinda disturbs me is that, what with all the things that have slipped from my increasingly unreliable memory over recent years, I can still recall both Kaufman’s and Llloyd’s characters full names without batting an eye.
- Entries
“Cheers, Taxi, KRP, Kotter, M*A*S*H…”
I admit it – I have never watched a single show of the first 4 in your list, and only ever watched M*A*S*H in a few reruns…
I did often watch Archie Bunker though.
ZOMG–never watched Cheers, OR Taxi, OR KRP? Three of my all time TeeWee faves, right there. Kotter I never cared much about, I must confess, but Taxi’s “Jim” character, played by the awesome Christopher Lloyd, is worth watching the show for all by himself. Plus, “Jim” went on to play the CO of a Klingon Warbird in a ST flick, and acquitted himself quite well, too. How many actors can say THAT, huh? 😉
“I give TWO minutes for you and your gallant crew…” Classic, just classic.
🙂
I really never have watched much TV. Andy Griffith of course…
As a kid I would watch a couple shows on Sat morning, “Sky King” comes to mind, but then it was out the door as there was much more interesting stuff outside than on the TV. Sunday nights we would watch Bonanza and Disney. That’s late 50’s/early 60’s stuff. And we had one of the first color TV’s available due to Dad being a TV engineer extraordinaire. I’d rather climb a tree…
Oh man, when I was a kid we were out and about during the day for sure–riding dirt bikes, playing ball, the usual–but at night the whole fam damily would pile up on top of my dad on the living room sofa for Lost in Space, STToS, Andy, Archie, Dick Van Dyke, Wild Wild West, Mary Tyler Moore, and all the rest. Saturday mornings it was Jonny Quest, Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, Tom & Jerry, and the rest of that zany bunch.
When my Uncle Gene and Aunt Evelyn, scions of BP’s drummer Mark, became the first in our neighborhood to spring for a color television set and a big, fancy-schmancy rooftop aerial that could be rotated and aimed via a remote-control set-top box, the whole danged block crashed their crib every Sunday evening for Disney, Lassie, Carol Burnett, and the rest of the Sunday night standbys. On good old Cedar Lane in Mt Holly, NC during the 60s, that was what we called partying hearty, man! 😉
Nowadays, I’ve gotten bored enough with the TeeWee that I haven’t even bothered to turn mine on in three years or thereabouts. I even yanked the batteries out of the various remotes so they wouldn’t leak and ruin the blasted things. Late-middle-aged white suburban women cuddling with their Neegrow husbands; sassy, strident lesbians and their transgender “life partners”; fat, stupid, beleaguered white men being made sport of by the wives and children who despise them; seventeen trendy urbanite 20-somethings tossing stale one-liners back and forth in the capacious Manhattan apartment (yeah, right) they all share–I mean, seriously, who needs it?
I was a reader, read everything, so I missed a lot of TV as a result.
The one’s I remember watching regularly include The Fugitive, Bonanza, Rawhide, Dr. Kildare, Have Gun, Will Travel and the one the family never missed on Sunday The Ed Sullivan Show.
I basically missed all the TV series of the 70s and 80s because I was working in Northern Ontario spending about half the time in the bush and the other half in the office, with my digs usually being TV-less government or university dorms or low grade hotels, also without TVs.
I then moved to ranch country west of Cochrane, Alberta, where my lodgings were also TV-less. I didn’t miss it.
The boob toob, yes I watched as well. Wished I would a read a book or been out target practicing