• Skip to main content
  • Skip to after header navigation
  • Skip to site footer
James Maguire: Journalist, Author, Raconteur

James Maguire: Journalist, Author, Raconteur

James Maguire, Journalist, Author, Raconteur

  • Blog
  • About
  • Books Worth Reading
  • Music By Decade
  • Best Podcasts
  • Contact

Television is So, So, So…Dead

May 22, 2013

It’s odd that TV still has as much life as it does, given as close to the bottomless grave as it is. No one under age 35 or so cleaves to the cathode ray teat like in the golden era of classics like Love Boat and Mork & Mindy.

And it makes sense. TV offers set programming on a fixed schedule. If you were raised from birth with the Internet, would you want to look at a screen that stayed stuck on one page – and only when the screen itself decided to play it? That’s preposterous.

Traditional TV executives are doing their best to usher the medium to the grave, letting cable TV best them with smart stuff like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, Homeland and numerous other dramas worth watching. And House of Cards shows that little Netflix – a web site, for goodness sake – could kick the butt of deep-pocketed CBS, NBC and ABC, which churn out tired, safe stuff that quickly fades into the murky deep.

Even cable TV is being consumed by the Internet, as Hulu and Netflix grab younger viewers who aren’t willing to fit a real time schedule into their Twitter-Tumblr-Facebook lives.

I must admit I still like TV. It’s a deep vice, but I enjoy cable news, with its funky macrame of pundits; I can catch short doses and it helps me follow the news; I’m particularly fond of Howard Fineman, who’s always insightful.

Maureen Dowd writes an insightful piece about this fall’s upcoming TV schedule, its creative limitations and tired feel. “It turns out that Washington isn’t the only place where ideas go to die….”

In honor of TV’s impending demise, here’s a clip of Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show in the late 1950s. TV has hardly been as exciting since.

Category: Blog, Uncategorized
Previous Post: « The Great Gatsby is…Kind of a Snooze
Next Post: Clarence Thomas, Where Are You? »

Sidebar

Search

Blog

Running Days: Tales of a Teenage Oxygen Junkie

December 18, 2022

The Joy of Pfizer

April 5, 2021

George Floyd and the Protests Heard Across History

June 6, 2020

Women in Tech, Tech in Transition

October 26, 2018

The ‘Rustic Apple Tart’ (Can Barnes and Noble Survive?)

October 23, 2018

Who is James Maguire?

October 14, 2018

The Meaning of Autumn

October 12, 2018

The Red Tide in Florida: What Have We Done?

October 9, 2018

Humblebrag: I won an award for my feature writing

April 28, 2018

My Tribe in the Music Store

April 7, 2018

March for Our Lives in SF – Feelin’ It

April 1, 2018

I turned the corner and there it was….

January 21, 2018

Nightfall 

December 2, 2017

The Zen Mountaintop of Transcendent American Consumerism

November 25, 2017

Life in the Bay Area

November 18, 2017

Copyright © 2023 · jamesmaguire.com ·sitemap