Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism

Modern merchandising offers us a ready return to our childhoods, but modern media provides us with more—a long list of TV programs that mark off the years, time capsules of fashion, speech, events, and values from another era—available throughout the day and night with a click of the remote. Television and now the Internet offer nearly instantaneous access to any ephemeral sound and sight bite generated in the accelerating wake of fast capitalism. In the summer of 2014, the oldest surviving retro channel, TV Land, offered a twenty-four-hour smorgasbord of nostalgia: an hour of the sentimental 1960s serial Andy Griffith at nine in the morning, followed by multiple episodes of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and still another western, Walker, Texas Ranger. The evening lineup changed daily, featuring a wide range of sitcoms, sometimes including four episodes in a row, from I Love Lucy of the early 1950s through King of Queens, which ran from 1998 to 2007.

Why would anyone really want to watch two or more successive episodes of an old series like Gunsmoke? They aren’t certified “classics,” like the old movies ranked by the number of stars on the cable information screens. They are not even particularly representative of what was on television when they first appeared. Missing from this and other nostalgia networks are The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dina Shore Chevy Hour, and other music variety shows that were featured in primetime during the “Golden Age” of TV, say, the 1959–1960 season. Gone too are the dramatic series identified by their corporate sponsors—General Electric, Westinghouse, Kraft, DuPont, Alcoa/Goodyear, and Armstrong/U.S. Steel. Many viewers today, of course, are far too young to remember these relics from Hollywood’s past, but the young still love Lucille Ball, and many have seen James Arness shoot it out on Gunsmoke, and these shows are a half-century old or more.

Nevertheless, this gathering included a surprising proportion of men (mostly) in their thirties and forties, Gen-Xers who were too young to have seen Lucy or The Lone Ranger when they first appeared on TV. A man in his thirties exhibited a large assortment of books that he had published on retro TV and movies. Comfortable in the world of past media fantasy, he went so far as to avoid all modern news and, for that matter, contemporary TV and movies. He told me that he got hooked on pop-culture nostalgia in the 1980s as a child, by watching reruns and old movies on TV. He cared little for media from his own youth. Like the others at the convention, he was “out of his time” and happy to live in another.

Despite the eagerness of exhibitors and representatives of collector clubs to tout the charms of their particular enthusiasms, there was a fog of sadness hanging over the crowd. The only original stars from the late 1940s and 1950s left to sign autographs and tell their stories were the child actors. Tony Dow, who played Wally, the Beaver’s older brother in the famous sitcom, told me of how he had lost out on residual income, but “that’s the way it is,” he said in resignation. The enthusiasts for old-time radio programs seemed the most pessimistic. Clubs like Buffalo Old Time Radio had enjoyed a long run (it was founded in 1975), but, when I met the retired auto worker (born in 1939) who was part of the last group of children brought up on radio and who wrote the club’s monthly newsletter, he made it clear that the group’s days were numbered. In fact, in 2011, another club, the Friends of Old-Time Radio, decided to end holding an annual convention after having met for thirty-six years.1 After all, although younger listeners are attracted to the radio detective, comedy, and cowboy shows of the 1940s and early 1950s (on Internet and satellite radio, for example), most of those who grew up with these programs are in their twilight years.² If old-time radio is in decline, nostalgia for vintage visual media is hardly so. The television industry, in fact, has a big stake in perpetuating it.

Television has shaped modern memory in unique ways. It has a distinct history of delivering packages of corporate-produced entertainment to the home, predominantly in scheduled series of stories with repeated characters and settings. It is the quintessential media of memory because from the beginning it was riddled with repetition, and its viewers were conditioned to expect and even desire recurrence.3 Taking a still longer view, TV can be understood as a culmination of a half-century-long revolution in how people experienced and modeled intimacy. It largely replaced the novel and magazine story as the dreamscape of fantasy relationships. TV built on what films from the first decade of the twentieth century and radio serials from 1928 through the early 1950s did. Young people identify with the people around them, and in the age of mass media—movie, radio, and TV—celebrities and their stories tended to replace the personalities and tales of parents and other relatives, workplace elders, and the clergy. A longing for intimacy was also the driving force in the attraction to the celebrity. While we might think of the “star” as an elevated being, akin to a celestial object, what raised the star was that individuals in the audience identified with them personally. Since early in the history of films, the star has been the object of fanatical adulation but also intimate familiarity, through the visual and, later, vocal cues that made her or him into a “personality.”⁴ Repetition and familiarity created fans.

This is what the movie serials that appeared as early as 1913 did. These thrillers featured the same characters in predictable roles and situations, especially the “cliffhanger” teasers at the end of each brief episode.⁵ But even for stars who played in conventional standalone movies, their often repeated roles and relationships in stories told audiences who they were and how they would behave, and this familiarity made fans feel as if these actors were “friends,” even possessions (akin to a doll or toy). Joe Penner on 1930s radio was famous simply for saying “wanna buy a duck?” no matter the occasion. Edward G. Robinson became the stocky tough guy, and Katherine Hepburn, the wisecracking self-assured leading lady—even though both were able to transcend these stereotypes. Nevertheless, mass media relied on repetition of representative roles—much as popular music required repeated tropes—simply because this gave audiences a sense of comfort, possession, and predictability.

The technology of radio helped create the recognizable, comfortable, and thus personal and intimate celebrity. President Franklin Roosevelt adapted this informality to his “fireside chats,” abandoning the incendiary meeting-hall speech for the intimacy of a personal “chat” with millions of listeners in their living rooms. An even more powerful precedent for the intimate celebrity was the invention of the radio sitcom. Drawing on the appeal of comic strips from the turn of the twentieth century, radio “sitcoms” offered familiar, usually friendly, voices attached to predictable characters set in formulaic “situations” that they stumbled through in each episode. Beginning in 1928 and through the thirties and forties, Americans ritualistically tuned in to hear Amos ’n’ Andy. There was comfort in anticipating the troubles that the African American characters (in reality played by white actors) would get into. And the stars and stories of weekly radio westerns, police dramas, and science-fiction shows had a similar appeal in predictability, and they drew people away from adult conversation and hobbies, children’s play, and other uses of scarce American leisure time.6

But all of this merely anticipated TV, the quintessential medium of personal identity, repetition, and ultimately nostalgia. And TV dominated the scene quickly. In 1950, only 8.1 percent of American homes had a TV, but by 1960, nearly 90 percent of households possessed one (or more), and the box was watched five hours per day on average. By contrast, between 1946 and 1953, movie audiences had shrunk in half. While network radio shows continued until 1961, the radio networks also developed broadcast TV and seamlessly moved popular radio programs to network TV.⁷

Viewers may “possess” the sounds and sights of TV for only that moment, but when repeated in serials these televisual images became the equivalents of other consumed objects. Even more, TV shows were associated with youth and early memory, producing in many viewers an urge to return to them later in life. These shows served as a substitute for personal memories because they were embraced so personally: people saw themselves and their situations in the characters and stories. Nostalgia is often evoked with “bites,” not narrative totalities: obvious examples are the opening theme songs, repeated expressions (“To the Moon, Alice!” said by Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners), and familiar story lines, which are so formulaic that specific details of any show seldom are (and need not be) remembered.

The commercial advantages of the TV series, when first shown and even more so in reruns, may seem obvious now, but the power of this package was not evident to early TV programmers. Historians of TV stress how early network brass expected TV to offer unique live programming—news, sports, but also real-time plays, documentaries, and musical variety shows.8 The box with the tubes was supposed to be a domestic site of a nationally shared, contemporaneous culture and an opportunity regularly to see and hear what hitherto had been available only in New York or occasionally via touring companies of artists—and then at high prices.

But TV only occasionally became a “window” on the world (as in broadcasting national crises), much less a domestic catapult to high culture. Instead, TV perpetuated a pattern of familiarity established by network radio. TV became a site of repetition at many levels—week-to-week reappearances of the same characters and stories in new serials, often daily aired reruns seen shortly after the originals, and reruns offered years, even decades later in syndication and cable TV. Moreover, TV became a filter (much was excluded that appeared in other media—movies, magazines, newspapers, pulp), and what resurfaced in reruns was equally a distorted image of the past, even of TV history. For example, nostalgia TV offers lots of Lucy, but not Chester Riley of the working-class sitcom The Life of Riley or the ethnic family comedy The Goldbergs; there are revivals of now-defunct formats like westerns, but not of variety shows. All this raises several questions: What from the past moves through the filter of time and why? What do these nostalgic choices say about our time? Who and what types of people are attracted to which programs? TV nostalgia adds a layer of complexity to our thinking about consumed memory. Let’s see how.

Challenging this vision was the idea of recorded and thus repeatable programming. In part, the recorded show grew out of the needs of local stations without the resources to do much live broadcasting to fill viewing time and deliver audiences to local advertisers outside the primetime of network programming. Moreover, to accommodate the convenience of viewers in western time zones (as an 8 pm live show in New York would air live in Los Angeles at 5 pm, too early for the ratings that primetime brought), the networks needed a way of repeating a program in the West later in the evening than when it was first broadcast in the East. In the 1930s and 1940s, these issues had concerned radio, which found solutions similar to what the TV business would later adapt for the screen. Local radio stations substituted live broadcasts with electric transcription discs, phonograph records that ran at 33 1/3 RPM (anticipating the long-playing record). Despite radio’s initial aura of simultaneity and immediacy, American audiences had been acclimatized to the idea of repeated, nonlive programs more than a generation before radio, by phonograph records and the mass-produced film reel. Radio transcription discs allowed local stations to air syndicated programming outside the control of the networks. By the late 1940s, even the radio networks used transcriptions of live programs on the East Coast to be heard later in western time zones.¹⁰

It was inevitable that local TV stations would follow suit, substituting radio’s transcription records with syndicated films (old movies and cartoons). Movie companies sold their archived films from the 1930s and 1940s to local TV stations for the “late show” or afternoon movie slot. This introduced a new generation (and many of their elders) to the “golden age” of Hollywood, and it later produced nostalgia for movies seen first not in theaters but at home on TV. Theatrical shorts like Our Gang (rechristened on TV as The Little Rascals) and The Three Stooges were handy weekday afternoon and Saturday fillers that attracted local advertisers, and old Popeye and Woody Woodpecker cartoons became standard after-school fare for boomers in the 1950s and 1960s.

In late 1951, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz abandoned the conventional practice of live TV programming in New York to film episodes of I Love Lucy in Hollywood. Soon independent (“off network”) telefilm companies produced series like Highway Patrol and I Led Three Lives for syndication to local stations. Ziv, UTP, MCA, and Screen Gems became a major part of programming and soon thereafter distributors of reruns. The networks also produced their own telefilms, with sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks (1952–1956), My Little Margie (1952–1955), and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958). An early telefilm for CBS (1951) was the TV version of Amos ’n’ Andy, now featuring black actors. It ran for two seasons before ending partly because of protests against its racial stereotypes. Still the series continued in reruns into the 1960s (and according to the staff at the Museum of TV and Radio in Hollywood in 2006, it was “by far” the most popular TV show requested by patrons). From 1955, many TV series that were first shown weekly were rerun as “strips” of episodes shown each weekday, usually in the late afternoon and early evening before primetime. As for live network broadcasts, the kinescope film (and from 1956 the videotape) recorded a live program in New York to be shown later in western time zones.11 Beginning in 1958, the networks broadcast summer reruns, realizing that viewers would not object. Meanwhile the demand for off-network syndication grew, and new independent channels like WGN of Chicago ran old episodes of I Love Lucy, Steve Allen, and Perry Mason during primetime.¹²

The tilt toward the recorded and repeated and against the live and unique made TV very different than first intended. While TV brought the here and now (in “breaking” news and big-time sports) and occasionally the best and brightest (less often artists and thinkers than pop celebrities), it increasingly introduced into the living room the comforting familiarity of characters and situations modeled after radio sitcoms and other series. As we shall see, it was these programs, deeply embedded in childhood memory, that returned in later life as nostalgia.

If variety has disappeared down the memory hole, so for the most part has early entertainment for children. This might seem curious until we consider kids’ fare in the 1950s and even 1960s: Miss Frances’s Ding Dong School consisted mostly of a matronly educator reading stories to toddlers and young children, and Howdy Doody, a mainstay of boomer childhood from 1947 to 1960, featured marionettes, a troop of costumed adults (Buffalo Bob, Princess Summerfall Winterspring, and the mute Clarabell the Clown), and a live audience of kids in the “Peanut Gallery.” These programs were not only crude (often available today only in low-definition kinescope); they were also too slow and patronizing to appeal to modern children. More importantly, I think, they don’t attract older adults, who are nostalgic for their childhoods but not for childish programs. What thirty-year-old adult today would watch reruns of Mr. Rogers? Cherished memory resides in shows originally designed primarily for adults but viewed by children, for whom these programs provided a transition into the “wider world.” It is retro sitcoms, cop shows, and, to a lesser extent, westerns and family drama series that stir memories. Let’s briefly consider these genres to see why they attracted us back then … and often do today. Because this is a history and because I am interested in origins, I will focus on older programs, but I will try to extend my view beyond boomers and Gen-Xers.

The most common form of nostalgia TV is the sitcom, a genre with significant variations over time; these changes mark TV eras and to some extent create distinct nostalgic/taste cohorts today. The early sitcoms depended on a few well-defined and never-changing characters, often in pairs of contrasting personalities—Ethel versus her stingy and too-old husband Fred in Lucy—and simple, largely domestic settings—the modest confines of Lucy and Desi’s apartment. What animated the episodes were the “situations,” consisting of a crisis, often with a complication (drawing on the classic theatrical form of the comedy of errors), additional confusion, and ultimate solution to or alleviation of the problem. Often the audience knows that the situation “will backfire on the characters.” But the chaos is contained, and everything is resolved before the final commercial.14 There are few surprises, and much of the fun is in anticipating what is said and done. But the sitcom also subtly refers to the wider world. As the media historian David Marc notes, “The genre comments on American society microscopically, portraying the effects of culture on a family, extended family, vocational group or other microcosmic social unit.”¹⁵

Of course, there were different types of sitcoms. Perhaps the most prominent and influential in the 1950s and early 1960s were “domestic sitcoms” like Father Knows Best (1954–1960), Donna Reed (1958–1966), My Three Sons (1960–1972), and, of course, Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963). These series played on the relationships between parents and children. Typical was the cast of Father Knows Best—Jim and Margaret Anderson and their children, Betty, an older teen, Bud, about fifteen, and Kathy, the baby of the family, about nine. The stories were mostly built around the foibles, immaturity, and life lessons of the kids: Betty’s overbearing confidence and snobbery, Bud’s lack of direction and masculine pride, and Kathy’s anxieties about being the baby of the family.¹⁶

The hold of these family shows on the memory of viewers, of course, varied. But the author Susan Cheever’s recollections of her fascination with Father Knows Best suggests how this “fantasy” might have worked in children maturing during the 1950s (she was born in 1943). For her, the Andersons ideally mirrored her family: “the siblings squabble and the parents have disagreements,” but unlike real life, “all this is somehow magically resolved by the end of the half-hour-long show.” The show projected a happy family for Susan that may have smoothed over the edges of her own less-than-perfect one: “My father was sarcastic, and my mother sometimes left the dinner table in tears.”¹⁷

The ambiguity that so many children may have felt toward their fathers may explain why domestic sitcoms featured not moms but dads (some, like My Three Sons, included no female leads) and thus were “therapeutic.”¹⁸ There was a definite bias: while middle-class nonethnic fathers usually “knew best,” but that was not true of working-class dads like Chester Riley in The Life of Riley (1949–1950, 1953–1958). Riley was a befuddled airplane-plant worker whose wife and his teen kids regularly bested him with their common sense and composure while Riley’s emotional immaturity and stupidity got him in trouble (announced with his trademark “What a revoltin’ development this is!”).¹⁹

Though most of this string of domestic comedies had ended by 1966, variations would reappear in the following decades (culminating perhaps with The Cosby Show in the 1980s). However, the 1960s were dominated by oddly escapist fare, with sitcoms that ignored the decade’s generational tension and cultural and political clashes. One form of this escapism was the sitcoms that made fun of the contrast between rural and urban values. This was an old comedic theme in American popular culture.20 This risk-free theme became ratings gold for the TV comedy writer Paul Henning with The Beverly Hillbillies, which aired for nine years (1962–1971). A seemingly endless stream of “situations” were drawn out of the absurdity of the hillbilly Clampett family, who had fortuitously struck it rich in oil on their farm and who then encountered Hollywood pretense and greed after they moved to Beverly Hills while holding onto their folksy ways. In a decade of profound social and cultural change, during which country life was disappearing and generational and social divisions were on the rise, this old-time formula would be successfully repeated in knockoff rural comedies by Henning: Petticoat Junction (1963–1970) and Green Acres (1965–1971). There was also The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968), set in the Southern small town of Mayberry, featuring the gentle humor of Sheriff Andy Taylor, his cute son, his bumbling deputy, and a cast of colorful characters (none of whom were African American despite the fact that the show was set in the South and aired during the middle of the civil rights movement).²¹

The escapism of these shows went even further in a series of sitcoms that were based on a magical/fantasy “situation,” though one set oddly in the context of ordinary American middle-class life. Included in this group were stories of a suburban man with a talking horse (Mr. Ed, 1961–1966), men married to witches (Bewitched, 1964–1972; I Dream of Jeannie, 1965–1970), “normal” families of “monsters,” (The Munsters, 1964–1966; The Addams Family, 1964–1966), and even The Flying Nun (1967–1970). As the controversial war in Vietnam heated up, network TV offered absurdly unrealistic military sitcoms (McHale’s Navy, 1962–1966; Hogan’s Heroes, 1965–1971).²² Many of these silly shows appear on nostalgia TV today.

Nevertheless, most of these escapist sitcoms were cancelled by the beginning of the 1970s, when the networks concluded that folksy and fantasy sitcoms would not attract the new generation of youth that ad agencies conventionally favored. This led to more “realistic” sitcoms, especially All in the Family (1971–1979), featuring Archie Bunker, the archetypical “social conservative,” overreacting blindly to the challenges of feminism, civil rights, secularity, and the cosmopolitanism of the 1960s in endless encounters with his liberal son-in-law Michael. All in the Family often reached fifty million households each week, enabling its creator, Norman Lear, to spin off variations with the liberated middle-aged Maude (1972–1978), a black variation on Archie’s family in Sanford and Son (1972–1977), a comedy about an upwardly mobile black couple, The Jeffersons (1975–1985), and another featuring poor black folk in the Chicago “projects,” Good Times (1974–1979).23

Lear’s success was matched by MTM, a production company launched by Mary Tyler Moore and her husband Grant Tinker in 1969. Moore’s company produced a less politically charged but no less sharp break from the domestic and escapist sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s. Beginning with Mary Tyler Moore (1970–1977), MTM productions specialized in postfamily (or perhaps, better, pseudofamily) sitcoms built around the interaction of members of intimate work or social groups. Gone or minimized was humor based on the “cute” child and fantasy. MTM’s spinoffs and variations on this format included Bob Newhart, featuring a central-city Chicago psychologist and his schoolteacher wife. This, like other MTM shows (Rhoda, WKRP in Cincinnati, Lou Grant) did not dwell on race or countercultural themes but drew on other social changes of the 1970s—the rise of childless couples and single adults. Even more characteristic of its age was M*A*S*H (1972–1983), the well-known medical/military sitcom, which began as a veiled anti-Vietnam war comedy set in the historically distant and thus less controversial venue of the Korean War.²⁴

These comedic takes on the cultural and social wars that broke out in the 1960s were doable in the 1970s (when those conflicts had abated), but the basic structures of the traditional sitcom remained: in the end, they were about families—nuclear, extended, or workgroup—in which weekly clashes were resolved without anyone changing. Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that the 1970s continued to produce escapist sitcoms, as in the nostalgic fare that harked back to the 1950s (recall chapter 3). Most notable was Happy Days (1974–1984), set in the prototypical working-class city of Milwaukee, and the spinoff Laverne and Shirley (1976–1983).

While early reruns provided older viewers with nostalgic memories from the end of the 1960s, younger audiences found in these retro shows a past that was as real as the present: it was their “present” as seen on TV, and it inevitably became part of their “television heritage” when they grew up. The novelist Jill McCorkle recalls her encounter with The Andy Griffith Show in afternoon reruns when she was ten in 1968. By then the show had nearly run its course, but she recalls her nostalgia for the Southern small-town life of Mayberry (which she knew only on TV, of course), and years later she felt homesick when hearing the theme songs of this and other shows of her childhood. “Something clicks in my brain and I am thinking it should be Saturday night and my dad should be alive and out in the yard with the dwindling coals where he had earlier grilled T-bones. My hair should smell like Prell and I would be feeling slightly depressed that I have to go to Sunday school in the morning.”²⁵

This particular form of TV “heritage” was repeated in the conservative 1980s with the return of fifties-style family comedies, albeit with different looks: Family Ties (1982–1989) presented lovable conflicts between ex-hippie parents and Reagan-era conservative children, and Diff’rent Strokes (1978–1986) featured white parents and adopted black children. But the most successful was The Cosby Show (1984–1992). Bill Cosby’s Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable was a resurrection of Robert Young’s Jim Anderson for the 1980s. Black and obviously cooler than Anderson, Huxtable was still a middle-class professional and the voice of maturity, while the kids did a modern version of the Anderson offspring of the 1950s, cute and confused, each playing their age and gender role. Cosby reached a nostalgic older audience as well as a more hip younger one, leading the TV ratings for four years (1985–1989). Perhaps ending the era was the inevitable retro sitcom The Wonder Years (1988–1993), narrated by an adult Kevin Arnold looking back with fondness and bemusement on his 1960s childhood. This traditional family sitcom had to be set in the haze of sugar-coated memory; it hardly conformed to the real world of fractured families of the late twentieth century.26

A sharper break in sitcom history seems to have occurred at the end of the 1980s with an abandonment of the family theme for a spate of sitcoms that mocked the old formula and took the MTM idea of the nonfamily family in new directions. These included Married with Children (1987–1997). The humor in that show consisted in turning the family sitcom upside down. The father, Al Bundy, not only didn’t know best; he was not even the loveable working-class goof. The dysfunctional family became a major genre of the sitcom in the 1990s and 2000s in shows like Family Guy, That ’70s Show, Two and a Half Men, and the long-lasting cartoon The Simpsons. Though there are many variations of the upside-down family comedy, each has role reversals—where the kids are the adults. As common is where the “family acts as a peer group, rather than a hierarchy,” everyone is obsessed with their own desires and foibles, and nobody plays the parent.²⁷

While the new family sitcoms of the 1990s and early 2000s were usually a cynical challenge to traditional domestic age and sex roles (a trend that continues into the second decade of the twentieth century), there was also a shift in peer-group sitcoms. The “classic” expression of this new type of peer-group sitcom is Friends (1994–2004), consisting of near-thirty-year-old New Yorkers, three men and three women, who, instead of settling down in marriage as their parents and grandparents had done, act like siblings in the old family sitcoms, teasing yet supporting one another through their challenges in love and life mostly without the support or interference of parents. In many ways, Friends was a comedic take on the protracted singledom of many Americans in their twenties, who, when the show aired, were sharing apartments rather than raising families.²⁸

Sitcoms are at the heart of nostalgia TV. They reflected their times (even if through rose-colored lenses) and reminded people of varying ages of those times and of their childhoods living through them. Far more than other formats, the sitcom does what TV is “supposed” to do: it “distracts you as you watch it. It doesn’t hold your attention, it eases it,” as the TV critic Lee Siegel notes.29 Along with its variety and time-tied specificity, the sitcom offers comfort and familiarity, in reruns an ideal form of nostalgia.

The second most common TV genre in reruns is the western. With roots deep in American pulp fiction, movies, and radio, the western formula long predates TV. Westerns reached especially an adult male audience across social classes who were attracted to a nostalgic “return” to the simplicity, excitement, and virtue of an age before cities, factories, and offices. At a time when most American men rode in sedans and station wagons, not on horses, and strove to get through a day of office paperwork or factory production lines rather than fighting Indians or outlaws, the western filled hours of leisure time with male fantasy. By 1959, there were twenty-eight Westerns on primetime TV.³⁰

Most popular was Gunsmoke (1955–1975), topping the ratings between 1957 and 1961 and remaining near the peak for years thereafter. Gunsmoke went well beyond the duel between Marshall Dillon and the weekly bad guy, incorporating sophisticated story lines and morally ambiguous characters.³¹ Other westerns included The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955–1961), another sheriff of a frontier town, and Have Gun Will Travel (1957–1963) featured Paladin, a hired but cultured gunman. The western came in many varieties: Cheyenne (1955–1963) offered the adventures of a former army scout; Rawhide told stories of cattlemen driving their herds to market. Wagon Train (1957–1965) and The Virginian (1962–1971) featured weathered western patriarchs. Most primetime Westerns met adult tastes (though kids watched most of them, too). Among the more familiar today through reruns is Bonanza (1959–1973), built around a patriarchal widowed rancher, his adult three sons, and the vicissitudes of character and relationships.³²

Another formulaic genre was the crime show, beginning with the documentary-style police procedural Dragnet (1951–1959), produced by Jack Webb, which he reprised between 1967 and 1970, along with the spinoff Adam-12 (1968–1975). Webb combined repetition (“My name is Friday”; “I carry a badge”) with a realistic narrative that sounded like a police report. Other cop shows followed the original Dragnet, including Highway Patrol (1955–1959), starring Broderick Crawford, a beefy version of the lean Webb, whose trademark was his barking “ten-four!” on his police radio. Later crime shows, including 77 Sunset Strip (1958–1964) and its sequel, Hawaii Eye (1959–1963), traded up to exotic locations and sophisticated heroes but oddly do not seem to have generated the nostalgia audience Webb’s products attract.

But probably the most popular crime shows from vintage TV are Perry Mason (1957–1966) and Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996), both highly stylized whodunits. Mason shared much with the sitcom: the appealing, entirely predictable, leads—Perry, the calm, rational lawyer, who weekly defended an innocent person from a murder charge with the able assistance of his “confidential secretary” Della Street and debonair private investigator Paul Drake. Mason defended the wrongly accused and inevitably uncovered the clues, usually forcing the real murderer into a courtroom confession.33 Following the long tradition of the improbable middle-aged female crime solver, Murder, She Wrote featured the mystery writer Jessica Fletcher, from peaceful Cabot Cove, Maine, who somehow weekly found herself in the middle of a murder case, often gently combating patronizing police detectives to unmask in the end the “surprise” criminal.

For all their variations, these crime shows still offered the predictable in character and situation. As Horace Newcomb writes, each program presents the “inevitable movement from crime to capture, the pattern of events, clues, false leads, etc., a game that the audience plays along with.” Combating acts of passion and selfishness, the hero ultimately restores order.³⁴ Once again the fondly recalled characters and predictable “situations” made for successful retro TV.

From the beginning, TV was built on the recorded and repetitious. Despite innovation in sitcoms and the near disappearance of the western, the 1970s also began an era of nostalgia for TV in the golden age of its infancy.35 Inevitably the three networks took the opportunity to air multipart anniversary documentaries of their contributions to TV “heritage.” Though touted as retrospectives, they neither chronicled the history of programming nor studied the origins and development of the network or TV medium, instead offering a series of clips designed to evoke warm memories of past shows. Produced at a time when broadcast networks and the variety show still prevailed, these anniversary shows offered something for everyone, from young to old.

The first, a week-long tribute to fifty years of NBC aired in 1976, began not with the origins of the first network in 1926 (radio) but with a mélange of clips from 1950s NBC TV icons (Dragnet’s Jack Webb, variety-show stars Dinah Shore and Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the pioneer Tonight Show host Jack Paar) to establish the idea that the 1950s represented the “Golden Age of TV.” The five nights of memories were an almost random mix of featured TV genres, with appearances by everyone from the ancient radio crooner Rudy Vallee to the then cutting-edge pop singer David Bowie. As Dean Martin says early in the first episode, “No matter how old you are, your favorite is going to come along.” Clips from shows were unidentified for a few seconds, probably to give viewers a chance to recall and play the game of “name the star” in their living rooms. And instead of presenting a parade of shows from oldest to newest, the clips consisted of a back and forth between old and new (a bit of the Mills Brothers of 1950 followed by the Rolling Stones of 1968). The producers stressed not difference or conflict between different artists or genres but similarities (pairing, for example, the image of the classical orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini of the 1930s with the white-bread big-band leader Lawrence Welk).³⁶

The other networks, CBS and ABC, inevitably followed with their own nostalgic specials: ABC’s was a lovefest of present and former celebrities like Fred MacMurray, whom ABC made great (and vice versa). And, like the NBC series, there was no attempt to identify TV generations, presenting instead an image of one big happy family. And, to make the harmonious theme complete, the ABC series included gestures like the rock music host Dick Clark introducing the old-fashioned Lennon Sisters on Lawrence Welk’s show.³⁷

CBS’s version was similar, but with more showmanship: veteran stars focused on a single genre, and each night’s show featured what was viewed that day of the week on CBS during the “Golden Age.” Saturday night was (as Carol Burnett sang in the opener to the final episode), “When CBS Ruled the West.” The CBS special offered a bit more history and even explained the famous quiz-show scandal of 1957 (where the producer fed answers to a popular contestant, Mark van Doren). But there is no effort to identify a TV generation (the “greatest generation” or boomers, e.g.). This was still the age of the broadcast, when producers tried to reach everyone’s nostalgia, a time when many families watched a single set in the living room. This would change by the 1980s.38

It is no wonder that the aged leader of CBS, William Paley, inaugurated in November 1976 the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City on the fiftieth anniversary of network radio but featured the TV “heritage” of its formative decade in the 1950s. As the media historian Derek Kompare notes, 1950s TV became in the 1970s a “cultural touchstone, instantly signifying particular times,” not a distant epoch but a time in living memory, providing comfort to many distressed by the upheavals of the 1960s. This “heritage” fostered “the subsequent development of the cultures of retro and nostalgia that pervaded the last quarter of the century.”³⁹ Still, nostalgic TV would enter its modern age only later, as audiences fragmented and attention spans decreased in the age of cable and the ultrafast sound bite.

In the early 1980s, innovative cable networks expected to find niche audiences for new programming that focused on high or specialized cultures and tastes that broadcast networks inevitably neglected. This was the hope of the Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, Arts and Entertainment (A&E), and others. Instead, cable quickly found that fresh documentaries, concerts, and plays were prohibitively expensive, given the small audiences that a cable channel could draw. Instead, they discovered that niche programming of popular shows (many of which were cheap reruns) was far more cost effective and profitable. For example, A&E ran reruns of off-network syndicated shows like Quincy, Columbo, and Remington Steele. Bravo abandoned its “film and arts” format in the 1980s for youth-oriented programming and made its mark in “reality TV” with the fashion program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in 2003.⁴¹

After thirty years of cable evolution, several conclusions can be drawn. (1) The narrowcast channels that were profitable were news, sports, and children’s channels, not specialized arts networks. (2) The proliferation of channels meant that programmers focused on attracting narrow age, gender, ethnic, and religious cohorts designed for specialized ad markets. (3) Cable television ended up looking a lot more like the old TV than once expected, but with hundreds of channels and with many more hours to fill. This meant a lot of reruns. (4) Out of this came a “new” type of format, channels playing “classic” TV all the time.

The consolidation of media reinforced these trends. In the 1990s, Fox created a series of new cable channels (Fox Family, Fox Sports, Fox Movie Channel, and especially Fox News) in combination with an empire of local stations. In an effort to challenge Fox, Ted Turner merged in 1995 with Time Warner, creating an empire of broadcast networks, movie studios, and cable networks. This led to a 2006 corporate shakeup that excluded Ted Turner himself.42 In the late 1990s, other consolidations followed the vertical integrations of Fox and Turner. These included Viacom’s purchase of Paramount and CBS, NBC’s partnership with Microsoft and purchase of Universal, and Disney’s acquisition of ABC. More consolidations followed, with, for example, Comcast’s purchase of NBCUniversal shares in 2009. The result was six multimedia corporations in control of both broadcast and cable TV as well as most movie and TV archives. Networks became content providers with access to a vast array of old films and TV shows.⁴³

Cable meant more—but not necessarily more diverse—TV. The logic of the business required cheap (and thus often old) programs as well as niche advertising and audiences. With dozens of channels, the old logic of trying to “broadly cast” to a large share of a “general”—preferably eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old—audience gave way to the logic of reaching “purer” audiences, specialized “demos” (demographic groups) to whom specialized advertisers pedaled their wares. These audiences included children (Nickel-odeon), working women (WE), male sports fans (ESPN), youth (MTV, VH-1, and E!), conservative religious audiences (Christian Broadcasting and, later, the Family Channel), males in their late teens and twenties (Spike), and, yes, eventually aging baby boomers and others nostalgic for their youth (Nick at Nite, TV Land, etc.). With so much choice and viewers’ armed with remotes, the best way to create channel loyalty was to immerse viewers in blocks of similar programming. All this was part of a broader process, the breaking up of America into ever narrower taste cultures—and the decline of family viewing (with multiple TVs per household) and the programming that had dominated the network era.⁴⁴

Distinguishing themselves from others and winning a distinct “demo” required cable channels to adopt a new way of branding programs in their schedules. Each channel used promos, as Joseph Turow notes, to cue “viewers to read and understand it in particular ways.” This branding of mostly cheap programs began with MTV in the early 1980s, when it created a cable channel featuring rock music videos. Nickelodeon pioneered a number of branding devices to win a children’s audience: specially designed logos and bumpers (program promotions).45 The idea was to create a kind of media community based not on specific programs but on the channel and its presumed appeal to a target audience. Nickelodeon used focus groups of children to evaluate its lineup of kids’ programs and network promotions. Its promotions were designed to make viewers into a “nation,” encouraging youngsters to identify with “Nick” as a channel made for them (not parents and educators, as was PBS’s kids’ programming). Nickelodeon claimed in effect to “empower” its viewers with programs that met their needs and desires.⁴⁶

By 1985, this strategy would be applied to nostalgic viewers with promos that assured them that they were not watching dated TV but instead their TV “heritage.” The business and technological imperatives of cable assured age marketing of cheap, ready-to-hand reruns. This led cable channels to devote themselves wholly or in part to the TV “heritages” of different age groups.

This shift was anticipated by a new wave of nostalgic specials that contrasted sharply with the all-inclusive network retrospectives of a decade earlier. While Disney and other specials continued to appeal to a broad audience,⁴⁷ by the late 1980s boomers were entering their forties, and, as the largest age cohort, TV and movie producers were ready to tap into their fond memories with “homecoming” specials based on the characters of their favorite old TV shows.

Still the Beaver (1983) picked up the lives of the Cleavers (minus the father Ward—Hugh Beaumont—who had recently died). Deftly written, the story brought back the two brothers—the Beaver, now a father with two boys of his own but struggling with a failing marriage, along with Wally, a successful local lawyer, married but still without children. The story played on the contrasts (and parallels) between the brothers as kids and as adults. The story ends happily as the Beaver learns how to be a good father, and he and Wally learn to be friends. And June says over Ward’s grave, “You would be so proud of your boys. They turned out just the way you thought they would.”48 And boomers would be proud too that the fantasy family of their TV childhoods had a happy ending.

More curious was the 1989 reunion of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a variety show that was cancelled by CBS in 1969, despite high ratings, because of the brothers’ vocal opposition to the Vietnam War. Two decades later, all had been forgiven, and boomers, who recalled with fondness the (in fact) rather gentle radicalism of the show, were expected to watch and remember the fun of the 1960s. And inevitably, PBS, following the popular trend in a neverending effort to find an audience, offered in 1991 a six-hour series on “Making Sense of the Sixties,” with plenty of footage flattering to sixties sexual and political rebels.⁴⁹

Repeatedly, producers fished in the same river of niche nostalgia, appealing to often narrow cohorts of viewers. In the late 1990s, there was a number of movies based rather uncreatively on TV series from the 1970s (The Brady Bunch and Charlie’s Angels) trying to appeal to older Gen-Xers who had been subteens when these shows came out. And then in November 2001, reunion TV specials featuring footage of Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball were followed in the spring of 2002 by specials (with diminishing ratings) recalling The Cosby Show, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laverne and Shirley, and other long-gone programs. More followed in 2004.⁵⁰ There were, of course, numerous efforts of PBS to make documentaries out of the history of commercial TV programming (for example, The Pioneers of Television series beginning in 2010), though this series was much more about factoids and sentiment than a serious recounting of that history.⁵¹

Given all this, it is no surprise that in the new world of narrowcast cable there was ample room for channels dedicated to rerun TV. This category rose from Viacom. An early cable player and spinoff company from CBS in 1971, Viacom controlled key network “evergreen” programs, once broadcast on the networks (I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith, etc.), and had been a major syndicator of rerun TV programs even before cable. Viacom had acquired key cable networks, including MTV and VH-1, which had pioneered video music, and the fledgling Nickelodeon, for daytime kids’ programming. Understanding the power of age-linked TV channels, it isn’t surprising that Viacom spread from narrowcasting children and youth programs to marketing nostalgia for the oldsters. The first dedicated block of nostalgia shows was aired on Nickelodeon in July 1985 in the evening, presumably to discourage parents whose kids had been watching Nickelodeon until bedtime from changing the station. What Nickelodeon offered were the sitcoms of mom’s and dad’s own childhoods. Dubbed Nick at Nite, early fare included Green Acres, Bewitched, and The Donna Reed Show, programs from the 1960s and early 1970s that young parents in 1985 would have recalled from their earliest memories through their early teens. Frequently, the lineup changed (a process familiar to any regular TV viewer), and Viacom producers tried to make sure that everything shown, as one official noted, was what “our TV-generation audience grew up with.” Before running a series, Nick at Nite used focus groups to test the appeal of proposed shows. These shows were not simply run half hour by half hour and interlaced with commercials; they were packaged as “classic TV,” with catchy, whimsical promotions for many of the shows (similar to the strategy for daytime Nickelodeon). For example, in 1990, one promo stated, “You’ve gained ten pounds. There’s a hole in the ozone. Your dog has worms. Donna Reed can help,” openly acknowledging the escapist motive of viewers, but this rather bleak statement was presented in merely mock seriousness, by overenthusiastic announcers and overlaid with pastel-colored images of 1950s space-age kitsch. Again, the 1950s represented the nostalgic even though most Nick at Nite shows had actually been produced later.52

Early on, Nick at Nite recognized the possibilities of branding its reruns as nostalgia for older audiences and as camp to reach younger viewers who might find ancient shows amusingly corny. Cable channels often have used “marathons” of sequential episodes of a sitcom to make a day’s viewing an event or to bring an audience in for hours to compete against a high-viewership event (like the Superbowl, for the millions of viewers uninterested in football). Other ways of dressing up reruns include the “hosted program,” as in the trivia-filled introductions to the films shown on Turner Classic Movies; another is the revivals of gag hosts for “B” horror films on Friday or Saturday nights. The intentionally obnoxious Gilbert Gottfried for the USA channel’s Up All Night played this role in the 1990s. More recently, this same gimmick has reappeared on the retro channel Me-TV on Saturday nights with the character Svengoolie (Rich Koz), who wears face paint and a top hat while telling corny jokes and making fun of the were-wolf or Dracula movie being aired. In 2012, Me-TV hyped its varied twenty-four-hour lineup of sitcoms and crime shows with the tag-line “Me likes it,” an exuberant statement of unreflective pleasure in old TV as a right of personal choice.53

The clear purpose was to repackage old TV, not just to air cheap entertainment fillers; it was to create audiovisual time capsules, but also with a dash of irony, whimsy, affection, and the promise of fulfilled longing. Scott Webb, the vice president of Nick at Nite in 1990, claimed to base programming on two driving ideas: serving the “TV generation—everyone who grew up on television” and creating the idea of “TV Land”—a place where viewers feel that they are part of a “common family. … We probably know more about the characters and places of TV Land than we know about the history of America or our own extended families.”⁵⁴

This “commitment” to those who grew up with TV and longed for a “family” experience in watching old shows was not confined to the first “TV generation.” Nick at Nite gradually shifted from programs linked to the (late) boomer childhoods of the 1960s to appeal to a younger group who grew up in the 1970s. In 1992, Nick’s parent Viacom acquired MTM’s 1970s adult workplace sitcoms (Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart) to reach this younger group and also scheduled the more naive family sitcoms from the 1970s (Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, and The Partridge Family). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Nick at Nite shifted again to 1980s (and some 1990s) programming for new Gen-X parents. These shows included Cheers, Cosby, The Facts of Life, Three’s Company, Family Ties, Full House, and Roseanne.⁵⁵

This trend created a “demo” gap: boomers and their fixation on earlier shows were left out. Viacom solved this by launching TV Land in 1996. TV Land reverted back to boomer nostalgia (without abandoning younger viewers) under the moniker of “Classic TV” and the promise to preserve “our television heritage.”56 The 1996–1997 lineup included the occasional rerun of old variety shows (Sonny and Cher and even Ed Sullivan), but these soon disappeared. The wide range of sitcoms and dramas included the ancient western Gunsmoke, the silly sitcom The Munsters, the once provocative All in the Family, and the barfly family of Cheers. In 2000 and 2001, TV Land added action and drama with The A-Team, Barney Miller, Charlie’s Angels, 77 Sunset Strip, (briefly) the satirical Get Smart, and especially Dragnet and Adam-12. By 2007, the age gap between the two sister stations was enormous (a mean of twenty-three years of age for Nick at Nite, with an obvious share of teens and kids, and fifty-five for TV Land).⁵⁷

Viacom recognized the need for a distinction between pitching to parents of young kids on Nick at Nite and to an older audience of “heritage TV” on TV Land, but there was clearly no long-lasting loyalty to boomers. TV Land’s president Larry Jones made this clear in 2006 when he noted that “With the boomers there’s an opportunity we identified, and now our focus is on viewers in their forties, but in ten years, we’ll still be targeting the forties; we will not follow the boomers. It’s the life stage we want.” This point of view was reflected in TV Land’s introduction of “reality” shows, including The Big 4-0 (2008–2009), about the life-changing transition to the forties; High School Reunion (2006), featuring a high-school class from 1986; and She’s Got the Look (2008–2010), a search for a female model over thirty-five. As Jones observed, “a show [like The Big 4-0] that resonates with forty-year-olds will still generate more dollars than if it’s The Big 6-0.”⁵⁸ In 2007, TV Land shifted programming to viewers just entering their forties with Murphy Brown, Third Rock from the Sun, and even the Gen-X medical sitcom Scrubs, for late primetime viewers. The point, of course, was to attract a “demo” with age-segmented nostalgia, and, following the old logic, viewers over the age of fifty were not valued, at least during primetime.⁵⁹

Thus, like Nick at Nite before it, TV Land tried to disassociate itself from an aging demo. In 2012, TV Land began an effort to spruce up its increasingly dowdy image with a new logo and the slogan “Laugh More,” even though western dramas—Gunsmoke and Bonanza—still filled the channel’s weekday afternoons. TV Land added more recent sitcoms from the 1990s and later (Everybody Loves Raymond, The King of Queens, and That ’70s Show).60 Yet, despite this attempt to reach the under-fifty-year-old crowd, TV Land in 2012 still offered many of the same range of reruns as a decade before (including Lucy in the morning), and most of its advertising was obviously directed toward viewers over fifty (from companies offering help with disability claims and supplements to Medicare to sellers of powered wheelchairs, catheters, and even burial insurance). It seems that there was still gold in the “Golden Years” crowd. After all, in 2012, boomers were projected to hold 70 percent of disposable income over the next five years, and at seventy-eight million, they still constituted a large portion of the U.S. population.⁶¹

Inevitably there were others who tried to tap into the nostalgia TV market, especially of those well beyond forty. One was Nostalgia TV, subsequently called Good Life TV and then American Life TV. It went so far as to relabel itself “Your Baby Boomer TV” in 2005. However, in 2007, the channel reached only eleven million American homes.⁶² Another small network is Retro TV, launched in 2005 as the RTN channel, one of four digital networks owned by Luken Communications. RTN adopted the TV Land model of 24/7 reruns of shows from the 1950s to early 1990s (though by 2012 it specialized in dramas, mostly westerns and crime shows, rather than the sitcoms of TV Land).⁶³

Perhaps the most successful is Me-TV (“Memorable Entertainment” Television), owned by Weigel Broadcasting and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Like TV Land, Me-TV has access to telefilm archives, including CBS Television Distribution, Twentieth Century Television, and other companies. Originating in 2005 and growing out of a local Chicago station that had specialized in classic TV shows, Me-TV’s programming was taken national by its owner John Weigel in November 2010 with a standard schedule available to local stations via satellite. By early 2012, Me-TV reached 45 percent of American homes. With about one hundred series to choose from, Weigel’s network embraced the boomers with programming that extends from the 1950s to the 1980s with weekday blocks of both vintage sitcoms (from Mary Tyler Moore and The Beverly Hillbillies to the inevitable I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners) as well as dramas (from Gunsmoke to Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone). In 2011, most of its viewers were in the fifty-to-sixty-four-year range—and the channel was determined to hold that demo. Neal Sabin, the vice president of Me, claimed that the network has received more than twelve thousand letters from viewers, imploring it not to adopt the strategy of the Viacom nostalgia networks: “please don’t change, please don’t get younger—don’t start showing things from the ’90s. … Our niche is truly classic television, and that’s where we plan on staying.”64

Similar to Me is Antenna TV, a product of the media giant Tribune Broadcasting, which was launched in August 2010 from a base of seventeen Tribune-owned stations. It followed the same strategy as Me and TV Land, with block scheduling by genre and decade to lead niche audiences through hours of viewing. For example, in the summer of 2012, weekday afternoons on Antenna TV included double doses of McHale’s Navy, Hazel, Dennis the Menace, and Leave It to Beaver, all from the late 1950s and early 1960s; it featured crime shows during the late afternoon and evening (Adam-12, for example), and the vintage Alfred Hitchcock Presents at 11 pm. Like Me-TV, Antenna can draw on its link to a large library of four thousand films and 270 TV series owned by its partner Sony Pictures Entertainment as well as access to NBC Universal Television Distribution (shared with Me).⁶⁵

From the mid-1990s, a wide range of other cable channels used inexpensive retro series (often shown in five-day “strips”) to win young as well as older viewers to their formats. In 2014, TV One and Centric targeted African American audiences with numerous airings of Cosby, The A-Team, and other programs with black stars. In 2012, family-friendly channels like Hallmark and GMC (originally the Gospel Music Channel and since 2013 UP TV) offered sentimental historical series like The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie. HUB copied Nickelodeon by airing sitcoms from the 1980s (for parents) after a daytime schedule of kids’ stuff. Women-oriented channels (WE TV and Oxygen) featured blocks of Frasier and Roseanne; young-adult channel Reelz ran 1990s sitcoms (like Becker, Spin City, and Cheers).66 All this amounted to another form of consumed nostalgia in an era of fast capitalism: a daily opportunity to return to a childhood that for all Americans—from the boomers through the Gen-Xers and on even to the millennials—was so largely lived in front of the TV set.

I began this chapter wondering why people today would spend so much time watching old, but surely not the “best,” TV. Many have offered ideas that may help us understand. The most common theory was advanced more than thirty years ago by Fred Davis in Yearning for Yesterday. We watch old shows for the “contrast or, more accurately the way we make them contrast—with the events, moods, and dispositions of our present circumstances.” The attraction comes from a sense of loss that for Davis emerged from the stresses of the 1960s and was manifested in the 1970s nostalgia for the 1950s. Davis found this especially true of boomers whose identification with 1950s TV (and much else) created a kind of generational bonding.⁶⁷ This analysis is easily transferred to later generations who, fifteen to twenty years after their childhood viewing, rediscover, as part of a general disenchantment with the present, “their” old shows on Nick at Nite. By 2014, this led to a spate of nostalgia shows for the 1990s, even the 2000s. The speeding up of social and cultural change seems to create age cohorts that identify with particular pasts, deemed superior to the present when seen through the distorting lens of old TV shows and childhood memory. However, this argument may focus too narrowly on “historical crises” and generational identity to explain viewer attraction to rerun TV. It ignores how changes in modern media and marketing make retro appealing.

According to Frederic Jameson and others, nostalgia TV shows (like much other retro) are substitutes for a “real past” (events, social and cultural institutions, even personal relationships). This results from the simple fact that we spend more time in front of the screen than we do engaged in “reality.” Modern media has not only become a substitute for relationships, but, because memorable bites of media can be and are cut, recirculated, recontextualized, and even intensified thanks to the technology of recording, editing, and replaying, TV can become “hyperreal.” The result is a mediated memory detached from events and artificially constructed. Thus the real past is replaced by a series of media stereotypes of the past. The fifties of memory becomes a series of seemingly random images—Lucy wrapping chocolates on an assembly line or stomping grapes into wine.68 This argument gives weight to the enormous impact of TV and other forms of modern consumption on our psyches and memories. The power of mediated sight and sound has been radically expanded since Jameson’s writing (1991) with cable and Internet downloading. Still, does this postmodern critique explain how viewers actually consume retro media, or does retro necessarily lead to its passive consumption, as Jameson assumes?

Another, more positive take on retro media comes from a younger generation of commentators: Paul Grainge, for example, argues that the prevalence of nostalgia TV reflects the availability of reruns and the need of so many channels to fill time slots rather than some pathological need of aging viewers to recover a lost innocence or the inexorable power of the simulacra or the hyperreal media. Of course, it isn’t just a matter of supply (many if not most people won’t just watch whatever is cheap and available to cable channels). The pastiche of sound and sight bites of retro programs and their promotions may have displaced other forms of experience, but this can be understood in a positive way as a modern aesthetic. Grainge explains:

Rather than suggesting an amnesiac culture based on sanitized or hyperrealized memory, I would argue that the proliferation of nostalgic modes, markets, genres, and styles may instead reflect a new kind of engagement with the past. … Retro America need not describe a culture in crisis, but may rather suggest a moment distinguished by its re-evaluation and re-presentation of the forms, contexts, and values of the past.

In other words, the availability of reruns and digital technology of cable has produced a new way of relating to the past—not necessarily a crisis or a loss of “historicity” in a postmodern illusion. The modern technology of cable TV and the remote (as well as YouTube and other downloadable features of the Internet) give us a multimedia past that we choose for aesthetic as well as psychological reasons.69

I don’t see why a synthesis of views is not possible. Nostalgia TV attracts different audiences for different reasons, and some shows reach more of one age (gender, sex, class, or other sociocultural category) than another—or, at least, that is what the cable channel owners hope. Thus first, repeatedly we see generational longings for an idealized past (memories of TV when viewers were between six and twelve) and, with this, efforts by cable channel programmers to target successive cohorts as they reach about forty years in age and become the newly nostalgic, longing for a “simpler” time. In effect, these groups are seeking an escape from the fast capitalism of today in a frozen focus on a few faces from the rapidly passing parade of their commercialized childhoods. Viewers reinterpret that TV experience in an often illusory and nearly always negative contrast with the present—thus the popularity of the many retro shows that feature “inspiration” (The Waltons) or naive sexuality and family life (Three’s Company and Leave It to Beaver) as an antidote to the cynicism and the flippant vulgarity of the present. Second, these longings are expressed through a childhood of TV watching, which is at most a distorted mirror of the real-life experiences and historic events of that childhood. Thus, because of reruns, this nostalgia is not confined to the generation of first viewers but can be part of any generation of viewers (who become nostalgic for small-town America, for example, by seeing Andy of Mayberry on afterschool reruns).70 Finally, nostalgia TV can often become a playful reinterpretation of the past or simply a first-time or renewed encounter with the “foreign territory” of the past. Why shouldn’t youth today get a kick out of the pratfalls of Dick van Dyke from the 1960s? All of this can be part of the channel surfer’s ahistorical and many-sided TV culture; it meets diverse “needs” or simply whims because of the sheer ease of access. It may reflect a growing toleration, even embrace, of endless change, especially among younger consumers.

Retro TV, like other forms of “reconsumption,” need not be an escape from the present and future, or an inauthentic read of the past, or a cocooning into some comfortable identity. Old TV can be experienced in many ways: reruns can led us to new understandings of the past that correct and enrich memory because we bring to our viewing a perspective that differs from our memory of what we saw as children. Rerun TV can tell us how the world and we have changed (and not just negatively).⁷¹

Still, classic TV, like so much of consumed nostalgia, turns on the simple appeal of predictability and on our longing to recover our childhoods, which seem to be inescapably defined by those bits of consumer culture that we possess and that possess us. And, since the first generation was brought up on TV in the 1950s, despite and even because of TV’s constantly changing palette of programs that divides us into different taste cultures, TV has shaped the psyches of almost all of us.