If you're like me (and the Geneva Convention strictly prohibits such sins!) and grew up in the last quarter of the 20th Century (which Millenials are trying to outlaw), you are probably aware of the great technological accomplishments of that era, particularly in the realm of chia pets!
And how did we learn about the chia pet? I mean, aside from the person down the street conned into buying one the same way some schnook gets a My Pillow now, That's right, it was good old cable TV! Cable is, or rather USED TO BE, a marvelous invention with a very important aim...to make us grateful for more Diff'rent Strokes seasons after being subjected to the horrors of local access shows!
No, don't be ridiculous, that show was useless right after the Bicycle Man 2-parter starring Mr. Carlson. Seriously, the original purpose of cable was to bring TV signals to homes in rural areas or at least semi-rural areas.
Of course, many didn't want to pay for cable and instead opted for a huge aerial outside their house and connected to the TV. When I was really little and we lived in Michigan, we had one that easily got the Detroit stations whose transmitters were only 20 miles away. However, when we moved to Pennsylvania in 1976, we lived in an area where any station was at least 35 or more miles away. In fact, we had 2 choices: aim the aerial to the west and get the Susquehanna Valley stations or aim to the southeast and get the Philadelphia stations...my dad chose the Philly suite, probably the better choice. Most of the stations came in well except for one of the independents.
A few years later, we moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. NOW it was time to get cable as there were only 3 stations in town: ABC, NBC, and PBS. I distinctly remember when the cable truck pulled up in late June of 1979...it was plastered on both sides with an advertisement for WTCG Channel 17 in Atlanta...it was named a Superstation. At 6 years old I wondered what that even meant. Well, it turned out to be one of 2 independent sitcom/cartoon stations we'd get. Our CBS came out of Durham, and we got a couple other networks from other eastern NC towns. At one point, someone hooked up a wire to the TV and got us an illegal (I assume) connection to HBO. That was pretty cool! I remember seeing Grease for the first time there.
Well, the South was a fairly short experience, lasting only 16 months. We ended up moving back to PA in the fall of 1980, and THIS time we got cable. All Philly stations came in along with a few Susquehanna Valley stations and a couple up in the Scranton and Allentown areas. A couple of years later, our service, Berkscable, got a new station called USA! It was its own network, airing a lot of older shows, including my beloved The Edge of Night starting in late 1985! I also caught the old Dragnet on this channel. Also in 1983 we got a decoder box in order to have a local HBO-type station called PRISM which aired movies, sports and, late weekend nights, soft-core porn...or so I heard wink wink! Yeah ok...teenager me turning that opportunity down? Let's move on.
In 1986, Berkscable got a MAJOR revamping: cable boxes! Suddenly we had 60 channels instead of just 12...of course we didn't watch all of them. Still, we not only had USA, we had ESPN, Nickelodeon, A&E, BET, MTV, VH1, Discovery, HSN, CNN, Weather Channel, Cinemax, TNN, and a few other channels to sort through. A year later we also got WTBS (previously WTCG) which was later just TBS, and even later TNT.
Later in the 90s we got some other channels like Cartoon Network, Science Fiction (later just lazily Syfy), FX, Game Show Network (later lazily just GSN) and TV Land. I liked TV Land for a while because they aired a lot of classic shows and some classic commercials. By the mid 2000s it had gained too many ads and cut their shows more. As Cartoon Network began airing more original shows, it spawned its own offshoot Boomerang which eventually became like its mother.
On top of all this were various incarnations of HBO, Cinemax, Movie Channel, Showtime, Starz, and Encore...most of which required an added subscription. Then there were tons of shopping channels as well. Long ads called infomercials replaced the test patterns on broadcast stations. Pretty soon, a lot of cable channels began running long marathons of the same damn show, inspiring the current trend of streaming show binge-watching.
And with the growing number of cable channels out there, cable package prices got astronomically ridiculous, even just for basic, due to all the licensing fees either the channel or cable provider charged each other. It wasn't that way back in the good ol 20th century, even early 21st. We had Cox for quite some time, then when DirecTV made a deal with AT&T, we switched. It was ok for a time, but then in 2019, DirecTV couldn't reach an agreement with the company that owned our CBS station. That pretty much cut it for me. In the fall we dropped DirecTV (but not without a hefty early termination penalty that we recently finished off) and just used an antenna for regular channels plus their digital offshoots which carry any combination of classics depending on the day's signal strength. Plus a friend gave us one of her spare Fire Sticks, so we also stream with some selected services.
What I have noticed, however, is the new tricky nature of streaming services, charging rental fees instead of just making all their shows and movies free...Amazon is guilty of this! Plus, other smaller streaming companies offer their own bundles of channels once attainable only through cable. Translation: they saw cable dropping in popularity and needed to find a way to make money.
All in all, I miss the old days...don't we all? Progress is not always good. In fact, progress in terms of TV viewing has created a system, an ENABLING system if you will, of making us feel ok to just sit and veg on a show all damn day, whereas when I was more youthful, I knew what was on and when, and did other things during those times. If I sit for a binge-watch now, I fall asleep around episode 2! None of the shows are what I'd label RIVETING.
They don't even try to sell me a chia pet!
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