Carter Chill 2020

I cut the cord. After decades of being tethered to the slouching rough beast known as cable, I am free at last, free at last, etc. To be accurate I am free of satellite TV, but it is a fine distinction, considering both providers’ customer care ranks one notch above room service at Buchenwald. It is a common characteristic of companies who subscribe to the “Got ‘Em by the Balls” business plan.  Every month new charges would magically appear on the bill. $3.98 for the Small Badger Protection Act. $4.65 for the Larry in Accounting Daughter’s Wedding Fee. “I’m sorry your promotional fee has expired. Your new monthly fee is the square root of your zip code times a prime number picked by Larry in Accounting. Now, could you verify the number of Small Badgers in your household?” Technical support consisted of someone asking me in marginal English if my TV was plugged in.

For decades, consumers bent over for this abuse, because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. Life without cable meant returning to the caves. No COPS. No CNN. No Fox.  Even the most basic cable packages came with ESPN. No ESPN? What are we, Barbarians?

In 1966, my old man dropped $600 on a GE Park Avenue American Provincial Color TV. That’s $5,000 in 2020 dollars.  It was a beast with 25 inches of a kinda-sorta rectangular TV tube surrounded by five hundred pounds of solid wood cabinet.  Veneer was for commies. The Park Ave cabinet was constructed from Red Oak heartwood ripped from virgin Appalachian timber with speaker trim harvested from the deck railings of the original Mayflower. An ornate wood (solid) door slid out and over the screen when not in use, which imbued the room with the Feng Shui of a child’s funeral.

The 1966 Magnavox tuner had more knobs than a Cessna.  Changing channels wasn’t a matter of “clicking.”  Changing channels on a Magnavox tuner was like finding first on a Peterbilt gearbox.  It was a commitment.  In 1966, color television technology was commercially viable, but still glitchy. (Think Windows Vista). You had to futz around with knobs like “Tint” and “Flesh” to manage skin tone. Thankfully, everyone on TV was white.

In those days TV came in two flavors, VHF and UHF. ABC, CBS, and NBC were on VHF. UHF was home to PBS, and stations like Channel 50 in Detroit. On Saturday Nights, Channel 50 would show horror movies that even drive in theaters would sneer at. But the local host was “The Ghoul”. The Ghoul was a guy named Rod Sweed who would dress up like a cross between Frank Zappa and a morgue attendant, and mock the movie by farting, belching, shooting cheese whiz on everything, and yelling “Overdey” and “Parma.” No one knew why. It was freaking hilarious.

We lived close enough to civilization to get VHF, but UHF required the time honored tradition of signal dancing. Signal dancing was a ritual performed by walking around a room with rabbit ear antennae, until you found the sweet spot that enabled you to snag the Ghoul. It’s best to have a younger sibling to perform the dance, as it often required the liberal use of aluminum foil and yoga. 

Our relatives in rural Nebraska weren’t as lucky. Despite mounting grand, convoluted TV antennae on the roof, they would rarely get anything other than the Chicago Cubs and Lawrence Welk.  The Cubs weren’t on every day. Lawrence Welk was on every day. Lawrence Welk was broadcast by KTLA, the first California Superstation, and the signal was so strong it would fog X-Ray film in Omaha. Lawrence Welk and his band played “Champagne Music” or “Sweet Swing” which was the leading cause of diabetes in North Dakota for three decades. Welk played music so square our cat hung himself with a ball of yarn.

Still, Lawrence Welk must have soothed the undiagnosed PTSD in a good portion of the post WW II, Cold War American population. That’s my theory anyway. After a few hours in a Guadalcanal foxhole, or a long day worrying about raising a family ten miles from an ICBM bunker, Champagne Music might be just the ticket. My old man was 20 in 1944, and by 1974 he was 92. He had a hard time finding anything wunnerful.   

Welk also had the distinct advantage of being “on.” In 1966, you watched “What Was On.” “Hello dear, “what’s on” tonight. I’ll have a martini, dinner and then we can ignore each other for several hours and watch “what’s on.” It didn’t take long to become junkies. It really didn’t matter what was “on.”  “My Mother the Car?”  It’s not the good stuff, but let’s shoot it up anyway.

The Baby Boom was dosed from the womb by Captain Kangaroo, Lambchop, Popeye, and Bugs Bunny.  We sat there slack jawed in our Mickey Mouse onesies, silently mouthing greetings to Buffalo Bob every morning.  By 1966, we had seen McCarthy, Missiles in Cuba, Zapruder, fire hoses in Mississippi, Ali, the Beatles and Nam. We had also seen Chesterfield, Pabst, Tide, Playtex, and a guy ready to deck his wife over a shitty cup of coffee. Thank God for Mrs. Olson.    

The Golden Age patina of early television was heavily tarnished by 1966. Playhouse Ninety from New York was supplanted by Gunsmoke from Burbank. Gunsmoke started as a pithy radio drama chronicling the comeuppance of world class psychopaths that drifted through Dodge on a weekly basis.  By the time it hit TV, it was a family values cheese fest, with a few bloodless gunfights thrown in to keep the NRA happy. Madison Avenue eventually figured out that pathos didn’t sell Chevys at the same clip as The Beverly Hillbillies. Keep it light. 

TV might have been free, but we were a captive audience. The networks would decide what we would watch and when. At 1AM, the stations would play the Star Spangled Banner, followed by static radiation from the Big Bang.  That white noise was a message from the Universe and TV executives that it was time to go to bed, for Christ’s sake.

The FCC was there to rein in any nonsense, like the notion that married people slept in the same bed. Presumably, Ricky Nelson was conceived by an accurate toss from Ozzie and a better catch by Harriet.

It was really crappy TV. I mean really awful.  Gomer Pyle. Lassie. The Rat Patrol. The Flintstones. Petticoat Junction. The Beverly Hillbillies.  Networks added canned laughter to sitcoms so audiences would know when they were funny. Talk about dumbing down. People were quoting Gilligan at cocktail parties. Sure, it’s easy to wax nostalgic about I Dream of Jeannie, until you actually watch an episode. “Ohh Master!!”

There were exceptions: The Twilight Zone. Star Trek. The first Super Bowl was in 1967.  Newscasts featured Walter Cronkite and trust.  Rock and Roll seeped into the culture between sword swallowers on Ed Sullivan. But even at its finest, all that was good about TV was infested by the growing blight of commercial interruptions.

In 1953, Dragnet had three commercials in a half hour. By 1966, Peyton Place had five. In order to keep TV Guide listings tidy, the networks would shoehorn movies into a two hour time slot. In order to watch Citizen Kane with commercials on NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies, someone had to cut twenty minutes out of the story. That’s almost 17% of the movie. So who decides which twenty minutes to cut?  An intern named Stu. “Hey, let’s cut the Rosebud scene. Rosebud.  What’s that even mean, anyway?” I had to go to film school before I could watch Citizen Kane unedited. “Ohh Yeahhh…, ROSEBUD!”

But the absolute nadir of free TV was the locally produced commercials. Local TV ads were cobbled together by used car salesman and producers who didn’t know what a VU meter was. One minute you’re watching a tender moment from “It Happened One Night,” and out of the blue, “THE 1967 MODELS MUST GO” would blare out of your TV with the force of a Metallica sound check. Our parakeet was stunned and killed by a late night mattress commercial.

But then, just when we were running out of pets, cable came along.

What is ironic is that when cable first came to town, it represented freedom. First was the freedom from the tyranny of the antenna.  Cable killed Lawrence Welk. There was channel 50 and The Ghoul, clear as a bell.  PBS was no longer an outpost. Picture quality was solid and predictable and available to everyone. Democracy restored.

Secondly, it brought freedom of choice. The Big Three networks thought they had us by the balls, too. Cable spawned an avalanche of competing programming: CNN, ESPN, WGN, TNT, TBS, and Fox.  The Networks never saw it coming. Who owns NBC today? Comcast. 

If you weren’t into daytime soap operas or game shows, WGN out of Chicago played a movie every day at noon. I learned how to watch hockey from WKBD in Detroit. PBS countered Daffy Duck with The Muppets. ESPN proved that we didn’t all go to bed at 11. HGTV revealed that people will watch drywall being installed.

But the real game changer was HBO.  You could watch an entire movie without commercials The first HBO movie on cable was “Sometimes A Great Notion”, which was a so-so film, but at least it was free of Stu’s ham handed editing.  You could watch it at home. Popcorn at home is pretty cheap, and you don’t have to ask anyone to remove their hat. Did the theater chains see THAT coming? Ok class, who owns AMC? The Chinese.

As if to underscore the fact that corporate vision is an oxymoron, by 2014, Comcast was honored with the title of Worst Company in America.  That ranking included agencies like the IRS. DirecTV’s BBB rating is a solid F. Cable and satellite companies found their grip on the National Gonads to be tenuous. They are losing subscribers by the millions. It is estimated that by 2022 25% of all households will discontinue traditional pay TV plans. The people have spoken, and cord cutting is now so ubiquitous that it has a Wikipedia entry.

I cut the cord. Frankly, Cold Turkey is not so bad. I can live without the bickering on CNN and Fox News. I only watched COPS to remind myself that there were people with a lot shittier lives than mine. You can only watch so many Interventions. The History Channel abandoned WWII for Aliens and Hoarders. It can’t be coincidence that the Home Shopping Networks is a lot louder than all the others.

With my new found freedom, I had time to pursue other pastimes. I could read. Catch up on the classics. Play Chess. Write my memoirs. Learn Chinese.

Unfortunately, I didn’t cut the cord in an attempt to suddenly become erudite. I’m not spending evenings thumbing through “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Chess sucks. Who really gives a shit about my “early years.”

Look, I’m still an addict. I just switched dealers.  I have Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Now. I bought an HD antenna so I can get the games and keep track of hurricanes.

But Fargo is coming up on FX. The new season of Better Call Saul is going to premier on AMC..  The early rounds of The Masters are on ESPN. So it looks like Hulu. Or maybe Sling. Of course, that means buying a Fire Stick. Or a Roku device.  Apple TV? 

It looks like freedom isn’t exactly free. But it’s worth it every time I look out my patio door and see that satellite dish sitting in my backyard on a $90 pole I didn’t know I had to buy. Apparently, they don’t want their dish back. We’re using it as a bird bath.

I smile every time a Finch takes a shit in it.