The Portal in the Living Room: The Art of Waiting Again: Television's Golden Era Spins the Block
Apr 4
When television sets lasted well over 20 years, and for a fleeting moment before my family finally upgraded to a modern TV, I watched some of my favorite shows in the late 90s from my mother’s vintage 1980s console. I can still hear the sound of those dreadful knobs. I was the family remote, spending hours sitting on the floor in close proximity to the screen, just in case we got bored and needed to change the channel. The first time I watched Pretty Woman, I was lying under the coffee table, and the first time we got real cable TV, I sat there with the huge 1-page channel guide from the cable company looking for cartoons (channel 31 was Disney, 32 was Cartoon Network, 33 was Nickelodeon). I was a shy, introverted, film-obsessed kid with a big imagination, and TV was a portal.
This was a time when “Nick at Nite” had a line-up that was ICONIC. I fell in love with I Love Lucy and all of its successors. As I hid under the covers with the TV on mute, Lucille Ball was impersonating Superman for her son’s birthday party, and something about it felt important, and I was right. On Saturday mornings, I enjoyed cartoons, but in the evening, I witnessed proof of the first Golden Era of TV. Desi Arnaz, with help from his cinematographer, Karl Freund, and business partner, Lucille Ball, started the first scripted show to be filmed in front of a live studio audience. It was also the first to use a multi-camera setup, shot in 35mm film. The content was a breath of fresh air — experimental, raw, still finding its footing, and laying the foundational building blocks for the TV eras that followed. Shows like Happy Days in the 1970s, for example, shifted over to multi-camera use and saw an increase in ratings because they borrowed brilliant ideas from their predecessor. Could you imagine Happy Days without laughs? Go check out the first season.
As the decades went on, television evolved from the Golden Era to the Network Era, where sitcoms dominated and talk shows/social commentary entered the chat, to the Prestige TV era, where HBO and the likes took everything by storm. The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Oz — these were serialized shows with cinematic-level storytelling and high production values, not to mention less censorship. I didn’t watch much of this live because I was too busy with boybands and Disney movies, but I knew then, this was ART, and it quickly became my favorite kind.
Back then, my parents couldn’t afford movie dates often, so my father would take me to get a Happy Meal at the local food plaza in my neighborhood. On our way out, he’d buy me a VHS tape of an older movie I hadn’t seen yet from a local entrepreneur. Twenty dollars for a tape I could keep forever, versus movie tickets and snacks for two, seemed like a no-brainer to my dad. I would watch that film for a week straight until the following Friday, when he’d take me to eat my favorite junk food again and get me another VHS if I behaved. As I grew older and TV became more compelling, I appreciated it deeply. I was slowly veering away from cartoons, and while VHS tapes turned into DVDs, my family couldn’t consistently afford this very expensive passion of mine. So, TV carried the weight of my weekly screen time. Because of that, I learned what good content was very early on, especially as television’s production value inched closer to that of film. I could sniff it out the second I saw it, because, like most good content, it built a connection.
This expansion of television eventually led to the streaming renaissance we’re all too familiar with; a movement that evolved in incredible ways, especially with the help of a traumatizing pandemic. Streaming went from watching shows on a channel’s website or Hulu, to launching original content that was bingeable (shoutout to Orange is the New Black), to creating a binge-watching boom that changed the way consumers digest content. New platforms came out of the woodwork to keep up with the changing climate — it was intense. Honestly, new platforms are still popping up. In a short amount of time, this movement went into hyperdrive. And though I love a good binge of an AMC, HBO, or Netflix series, I started to have serious binge fatigue.
This movement became the new norm, but after the pandemic, streaming left us feeling periodically empty after completing a series. Finding out a show you rotted in bed for after nine consecutive episodes would be canceled (Justice for Sense8) or that the wait for the next season is a projected 2–3 years became common, and I, for one, began to search for weekly satisfactions to hold me over until my bingeable content resurfaced after a long hiatus. I’m looking at you, Severance. The tide was changing again, and I am not the only witness to it. Somewhere between then and now, we’ve gone back to appreciating the old formula of linear television. What was so bad about one episode a week, anyway? Were cliffhangers really that painful? We love entertainment so much, but the wait for another season seems far worse than the wait for another episode week to week. So here we are, in a new renaissance that feels like the world just spun the block wanting that old thing back — weekly drops of shows with in-depth creativity and high production value.
This all leads me to the point of my little rant. The Pitt on HBO, Severance on AppleTV, Abbott Elementary on ABC, Paradise on Hulu, have all reconfirmed and cemented the idea that a weekly drop helps to somehow reverse our slow attention spans, analyze and make predictions, build suspense and just savor each episode. I’m sure this is making a comeback primarily because it helps with retention and subscriber growth; marketing departments around the world are rejoicing, but we, the consumers, enjoy it because it means consistency in entertainment. This is the type of content I fell in love with on those hot summer days in my living room. The Pitt is one of the most compelling and realistic scripted dramas I have ever seen and it would not have the same effect on me if HBO served all episodes to me on a platter — not to mention the other shows that quite honestly should all be Emmy contenders until the foreseeable future.
Severance is one of the most original and refreshing shows in production toeing the line seamlessly between suspense, comedy and drama while Paradise delivers an acting masterclass on a weekly basis with their incredible lead, Sterling K. Brown. Abbott Elementary brings millennial humor to primetime television with a diverse cast and lighthearted energy. These shows are faces of the new television era that is a hybrid of previous golden ages. One does not work without the other. I need a bingeable show like The Residence just as much as I need Severance to air every Friday. I need a show as heavy-hitting as The Pitt, just as much as I need something with double-digit episodes like Doctor Odyssey. This new era has brought us to a sweet spot, a place where we can savor creativity and consistency. The shows currently in rotation during this new renaissance are the reason I fell in love with television in the first place. That feeling of real, original, life-changing content being shared, the kind that offers escape and expands the imagination, is where the magic is. This is the portal I recognize, and the kind I hope never closes.