In what at one time prior I would have anticipated greater fanfare, a small on-line blurb I recently scrolled past reminded us that a cornerstone fixture of my formidable youth, and no less than a significant piece of American cultural furniture long gone, has struck the esteemed age of seventy.
There were no specially-crafted collector's editions in the magazine section of CVS or any other stores published to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the national launch of TV Guide. Sad as it might appear, the defining reality is that the very medium in the form that the publication once nursed is also, for all intent and purpose, no longer.
Yes, there is today something called television. You can plug it in, and turn it on, and even without any kind of subscription service attached, you might get a requisite batch of channels watchable. But the mediascape today is so narrowcast and scattered that finding your way through it on any short notice is the equivalent of what a curious crystal set owner like young Bill Paley in the early 1900's, "DX"-ing his way across the dial may have done.
The last print material digest-form issue of TV Guide would arrive in 2005. And by that time traditional TV was all over but for the magazine's farewell. While it would continue as a standard-sized tabloid newsstand item, it's purpose, and for a good many, its identity, was no longer.
What made this long top-selling publication the consumer magnet that it was..?
It served a distinct purpose, for one. An East-Coast newspaper publisher in 1946 recognized what was going to happen with this thing called television, that wasn't going away. He figured that in short time there would be enough activity on that dial to warrant a constant offering of convenient and accurate daily listings, better than a daily paper could provide. So to supplement the new medium fan-zine called TeleVision Guide, which he'd just acquired, a news-print insert of the week's local listings would be added. If it took off, bureaus could open in other cities to provide the same locality to the nationally-released fan-zine. It worked..! Go figure..! The inner text of those daily listings would become visual icon to a nation over the decades.
Much as the medium's style, form and content would see radical revision over the years of the Guide's run, so did the magazine's format see it's cosmetic revisions. The type-setting of the listings would become smaller, more concise and uniform in description, sleeker by the decade.
My family's home, the one in which I first began to grow up, was a TV Guide home. My aunt bought it every week from the checkout rack at Waldbaums. If I didn't see it on top of her Ethan Allen coffee table all the time, I might have doubted I was home. It was in the early 1970s that my eyes, aged five, six, seven, began to recognize the glowing box in the living room, and the offerings I liked. The Guide was somehow an inseparable supplement. Even if I wasn't yet reading it.
In time, though, I was. I was one of those egg-headed, nerd-cliche early readers. Parents love and celebrate those kinds of kids. Other kids usually sneer and threaten them. When I wasn't being sneered at and threatened, or buried in homework, I was perusing the Guide.
While my relationship with TV Guide began largely with the quest for a command over the forecast of any important movies I longed to catch, the listings alone were an exotic voyage. Not only did they include the full VHF assortment (all six channels!) and various UHF's you couldn't see (I certainly couldn't with those old UHF twister dials), but also present were inverse-colored channel designations for those in the nearest broadcast state, in our case, Connecticut. While reportedly, some in the far reaches of New York, New Jersey or Long Island could in fact pick these stations up on their TV, no such offering existed in the deep of Queens. This meant that if A Hard Day's Night starring The Beatles was on Channel 8 at four in the afternoon, all you could do was lament not being able to finally see it. But the presence of all that throughout the weekly Guide made it all the more an experience. Much like some claim to equate reading picturesque tales of abroad with actual travel, to me TV Guide did the very same. At age nine I would wonder just what it was like to have what was my usual I Love Lucy re-run at 7pm in my life at 4pm, the way Channel 3 viewers did in Harford. While to many that may seem insignificant, for those whose lives held TV and it's schedule as their compass, this was life's identifiable shape.
It was in the early 1970s that the magazine would probably reach it's peak of sophisticated distinction. That was the decade that saw a tidal wave of the urbane population expressing outward snobbery toward the proclaimed "Idiot Box". In reality, it was little more than what was later the rock-loving crowd loudly disrespecting Disco. To be accurate, the ubiquitious joke on the whole thing resided in the fact that most of these TV-attacking snobs somehow always knew what was happening on The Young And The Restless, or who was on the Cavett show the other night. If they were questioned about this mysterious knowledge, there was always a ready excuse, such as, "I was at my sister's house....she's always got the damn thing on..."
TV Guide however, knew of this denial in the dichotomy. To capture what was a more intelligent population, the magazine devoted most of its article and editorial space to the debate and critique of the medium, by some pretty austere writers like Richard Doan, Edith Efron, and weekly review sections by Cleveland Amory and Judith Crist. No one was going to show more unbiased critique of The Box than TV Guide. And what could be more honest than doing so in a booklet full of TV listings..? In the same way that Norman Lear's All In The Family found its wild popularity in the audience's ability to see itself in a full-length mirror, TV Guide was America's way of justifying a guilty pleasure that would help us realize wasn't quite so guilty. Could a magazine serving up original writings by such occasional contributors as Arnold Toynbee or Isaac Asimov, and original cover artwork by Al Hirschfeld possibly be in advocacy of anything bad..?
It was during that historic Vietnam War-Watergate period, a time when my folks paid a little more attention to offerings like The New York Times Magazine and the Saturday Review, that TV Guide was probably something of a literary contender. In more recent years, as my charcoal temples have lightened, I've come to absorb more and more the subject articles amidst my cultivated library of 1970s TV Guide editions. It wasn't just for movie hunting.
The deep dive into those editions and their articulate scriptures allow this former child to live vicariously in a time fifty years prior, perhaps among the adults, Back To The Future-style. In the 1970s, times weren't good. Everyone was hit by inflation, crime and uitility strikes in a way still unknown to many today. My folks were raised by those who survived The Great Depression. And to leaf through a TV Guide replete with listings for ABA Basketball, Star Trek re-runs and Cannon at 9pm, just as my uncle watched it each week, I'm made aware of what kept our republic quite so grounded and unified in it's most precarious time: Television.
Perhaps though, the greatest gift one could glean from one or more vintage editions would have to be that of personal nostalgia. If fond memories and TV were a common connection in your life, there's a good chance that the TV Guide from your particular city on that particular date remains one of your prized possesions. I've one or more such Guides, and for those like myself, there is no more comforting, warmer blanket in an oft-tepid world. If an unforgettably miserable night in your childhood is one for which you maintain that evening's TV Guide, you just might take comfort in perusing those listings now, with the greater awareness that a night is just a night, with a Tony Orlando & Dawn hour you looked at while worrying about something else. Much like the sun, moon or weather each day, so there was television. TV Guide reminded us of that.
I've nurtured my nostalgia through more than one publication, like editions of Archie Comics, MAD Magazine, and preserved vintage electronics store catalogs. TV Guide however was like a homing device. The very listings at 11pm for "News" on all local channels was kind of a visual equilibrium. If I wasn't in bed asleep by that hour back then, I knew something was very wrong.
When the mediascape widened just enough with no point of return to anything minimal, the makers of the magazine keenly knew when to hang it up. From age eleven I can recall the alienated beginnings of Pay-TV listings making their way prominently into the Guide. Just one more inclusion I could only read about but not see. Twenty-five years later, the so-called Box would be an anarchy of over several hundred channels, more that even Fred Silverman may have predicted decades back. No weekly journal could conceivably document all of it. The era of TV Guide was well over.
But what makes the second-hand bookstore such a draw in the world..? Surely one could find nearly any literature relevant or necessary over the web today. The reason is that demand for the material, in a nutritionally dense virtual world. To pick up that published work bearing a pub date of 1978 is, almost regardless of content, a voyage to another time, a parallel universe. So it is and more with the preserved back issues of TV Guide.
My childhood fascination with the pop cultures that preceded me were aided and tour-guided certainly enough by my earliest discovery of the Guide's beginnings. I must have been eleven years old when the world around me was absorbed with Star Wars. School was all about King Tut and the New World Explorations. I couldn't get into any of it. I was busy reading and watching any documentaries out there on the Golden Age of Television, and it's earliest 1950s beginnings. There was actually a lot of that stuff floating around back then, and I lapped up as much as I could. And whatever the shows and books didn't present, there was the genuine article: Rare editions of TV Guide. To me, they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. None of my folks would ever come to understand of course why this eleven year old was buried in an old 1959 TV Guide he bought for six bucks at Mike's Comic Hut. But I did.
To peruse that journal was to visit the very world David Halberstam would later write about in The Fifties. It was an artifact of a time we would never see again. Decades later, into the next century, the shape of the medium itself, and the population TV Guide long serviced would be an element of the society we'd never quite see again. For a good many of us, the young curmudgeons unimpressed by the new personal technologies and trends, our compass remains on those previously printed grounds. And we're not ashamed to admit it.
Much like anything else it ripped unapologetically, the creators of Seinfeld at some point took comic aim at TV Guide collectors. What those creators chose not to acknowledge was that there were even, during the height of the show's wild fame, a good many contemporary people that did not know what Seinfeld was. But if you were a Seinfeld enthusiast, you probably recall observing its Thursday night listing in TV Guide.
It's those of us by whom our best memories are measured by the Guide's inner listings over the decades that are loyal friends to the Facebook pages administrated by those benevolant original-page scanners, those who provide that nostalgic comfort to like souls and the historically-inclined. With similar types devoted to the uploading of obscure and valuable old TV broadcasts on line, it's not so impossible to suddenly match a found TV Guide excerpt with an actual hour of that stuff. One just might be able, for a few moments, to live virtually, in a world once purely material.
The Saturday Review, it ain't.
Amidst all the other published fact-filled journeys of our life's once-iconic structures, there is unquestionably more than ample space on the bookshelves and order sites for a studied history of TV Guide, it's founding, it's sales growth throughout late 1900s economy-decimated America, and it's slow and polite decline. But in spite of my life's notable craving for such non-fiction literary adventures, I've somehow no appetite for that when it comes to the Guide. Rather, I'm more than content to adopt my intimate recollections of those inner pages as my very own. No need for advanced analysis or deeper observation. To some extent, it's art. And if you have to explain or define art, as Groucho Marx proclaimed in Horse Feathers, "....I'm finishing this ride with the duck".
I remember the first time I caught that film as a small boy, with my mom on a Sunday afternoon. I still recall it fondly from time to time. I just happen to own that TV Guide.
Noah F.
