We’ll be dedicating this week to a series of articles of about Peak TV. In advance of that, here’s a trip back to the pre-Peak TV era.
I can’t believe I threw away the videotapes. Not that I needed them anymore. No one really needs videotapes anymore. DVDs made them obsolete. Blu-rays made them look quaint. Streaming video made them look like, well, what they are: A technology never meant to survive into the current century. By the middle of the ’00s, they were pretty much clutter. But for a while, in the era before what we now call Peak TV and — not coincidentally, an era before DVRs and Netflix — anyone who really cared about television had a stack of tapes like mine, a precious, irreplaceable hoard.
“What if something’s on TV and it’s never shown again?” goes a line from the Lemonheads song “The Outdoor Type.” It’s tough to imagine it now, but in 1996, the year of that song’s release, that was a real anxiety. So those of us who worried about it set our VCRs. I had stacks of Twin Peaks episodes, recorded at SLP to save money and space, and some of them got pretty worn out from multiple viewings. I taped Late Night with David Letterman every night and watched it after school the next day, saving a few standout episodes. Because, the thing was, there was a good chance it wouldn’t be shown again.
I’m recalling all this now not to sound like an old fogey with stories of how hard it was in the Olde Days so much as to note that the changes in technology have mirrored our relationship with TV. We live in a golden age of TV, with more great shows being produced than even those of us who do this for a living could possibly watch. We also live in an age when more of it’s readily available — at least those with some combination of internet access, cable TV, and some subscription services — than ever before. I enjoy The Mindy Project, but I’ve yet to watch the second half of its most recent season because I take it for granted that it will be there for me when I’m ready to watch it. It’s a time of abundance and accessibility, and it sometimes seems like we had to invent the technology to keep up with the massive amount of should-see TV being produced. If there weren’t so much to watch, would we have invented the machines we did?
I wouldn’t trade it for the old days, the pre-Peak TV, sopranos-are-singers-not-mobsters days. But that doesn’t mean something hasn’t been lost or that scarcity and inaccessibility. While it was easy to take for granted that good shows like Family Ties and Roseanne would live on forever in reruns, it wasn’t necessarily a given that anything weird or different would stick around in any form. It’s hard to believe it now, but there once was a sense that some shows were too good for TV. So when something like, say, The Simpsons came along, it was smart to save it in case it burns out and disappears. And when something unusual or really great unexpectedly appeared, it became a big deal to those who loved it, even if the rest of the world didn’t notice. I still wish I’d kept recordings of the short-lived, New Orleans-set CBS series Frank’s Place, a hybrid comedy/drama that ran for one season in 1987 and 1988 and which has never been released on DVD or shown up on streaming services. (What if something’s on TV and it’s never shown again?)
I treasured the tapes I did keep, however, maybe too much. I still remember getting angry at my best friend because he accidentally recorded over a tape containing a rare airing of Police Squad!, the short-lived Zucker-Abrams-Zucker series which led to the Naked Gun movies. And, looking back, maybe all that time spent recording reruns of The Avengers off A&E or The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse on Saturday mornings could have been better spent.
Then again, could they? I loved those shows, still do, and having them around me felt important. It’s not like the era in which I grew up wanted for great TV. (We’re running a piece next week arguing the ’90s were a kind of golden age as well.) But if there was a show that really mattered, there was really only one way to keep it close at hand. So I stacked up tapes and carted them around from a succession of dorm rooms to a series of apartments because I couldn’t imagine not keeping every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Mr. Show I’d recorded around.
I wasn’t even the biggest hoarder I knew, far from it. Someone I met in grad school had an apartment whose shelves were lined with complete season after complete season of important series. In a vision of DVD and Netflix binge-watches to come, I spent far too many hours watching episode after episode of NYPD Blue when I could have been studying. When I see all the old, odd commercials and whole episodes of half-forgotten shows uploaded to YouTube, I think it must be the result of people like my old grad school pal. Bless him and all those like him.
Nonetheless, I threw my tapes away. Time and technology made them unnecessary. When I first started dating the woman I’d marry, we would curl up and watch episodes of the then-new HBO series The Sopranos I’d recorded. By the time we moved in together, we didn’t need the tapes anymore, thanks to the DVD box sets. And chunk by chunk the tape collection went away as the shows on them became available elsewhere. But I tossed them with more than a little bit of remorse as I looked at hand-written labels that dated back to my middle school years. They’d been loved. They just weren’t needed anymore.
Funny thing, though: I found one just the other day, an old Late Night anniversary show I’d kept, one no doubt filled with some of the funniest moments from David Letterman’s original show. I don’t think it’s one of the ones that’s been uploaded to YouTube, either. I wish I could watch it. Too bad I also threw the VCR away.
