by Wayne Mclaughlin

Created on: February 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

FUNNY IT'S NOT

When I was in high school and college in the fifties, a favorite discussion or debate topic was about pay TV. Television as a popular medium was less than ten years old and in the small town where I grew up, we had two channels and sometimes three depending on the weather. It was strictly a broadcast medium which you generally tuned in with rabbit ears antenna unless you had a roof top device which could sometimes be rotated to advantage depending where the signal was coming from.

The pay TV question centered around the premise that it would provide the means to televise limited interest entertainment like opera and ballet or it would be a source of revenue to program more popular venues like Broadway shows. And all of this would be without commercials!

I saw my first telecast of anything in the summer of 1948 while visiting an aunt and uncle in New York city. They had taken me to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes and while visiting the lounge at intermission, I happened upon a television set carrying a Yankee game. I cannot describe how mesmerized I was. It would be a few more years before TV made it to the hinterlands where I lived and my uncle, living in New York city, would not have one because he feared it might be a corrupting influence.

I reflect on all of that to show how nave we were to suppose that anyone with the facilities to bring television into our homes would pander to anything higher than the lowest common denominator. Cable TV is just another outlet for bad sitcom reruns.

I became aware of the Nielsen ratings in the 60's and have always had the suspicion that placement of the Nielsen boxes didn't follow any demographics that I'm aware of. If I were cynical in addition to being nave, I might even think that their placement had something to do with making bad, cheap entertainment popular. It was about this time that Milton Berle literally made above the fold headlines with a lifetime contract with NBC for a million dollars a year which sent up an alarm to networks about the cost of talent. Chump change now, a million dollars excited the imagination then.

Shortly thereafter, a whole new entertainment genre made its fall debut featuring brand new names who did not and never would make a million dollars a year starring in sitcoms. These were performers untrained in comedy reading lines from innocuous scripts overly punctuated with laugh track to convince viewers that what they were watching wasn't really that bad. And the "ratings"

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