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amyghost (6)
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Tel, I like your boat analogy--the Titanic meme got a workout in the last days of The Forum That Shall Not Be Mentioned By Name, and that's the perfect follow-through. Not luxurious quarters, but a decent berth and that'll suffice for now. A high-five, shout-out, show of love should go to the creators of this site. In the short time allowed, they did indeed perform a little herculean miracle--I tried to promote them around on some of my favorites boards during the final week before the shutdown; I'm hoping more survivors are out there waiting to be seen above the water line as the days and weeks pass.
I recall the initial Me format with real love, Tel. They tried, in fact, to replicate the programming schedule of the CBS 'golden age' comedy years, running MTM, MASH, Rhoda and a number of other shows in a 'block' format that was great fun. The Noir night was fantastic: I'd often sit up way past bedtime to catch all the shows (arriving bleary-eyed at work Monday morning, lol). I was so pleased that it seemed a channel which was really going to live up to its pledge to bring back the best of the past had finally arrived. Then came the--alas, probably inevitable--scaling back, and the introduction of 'stunt' programming to appeal to a younger crowd--Brady Bunch marathons, endless replays of Gilligan's Island, the emphasis being placed on what the hipsters and millenials found amusing. The audience who wanted the cream couldn't compete with the need to draw the younger crowd; as you say, it wasn't the vast lowbrow conspiracy, it was simply the usual numbers game that did in Me's initial format. And no, sadly they're not running an art gallery, and the days of the cable 'boutique' channels who could afford to do just that got plowed under in a similar way in an avalanche of cheap-to-produce reality shows that drew in the inevitably larger crowd of mouth-breathers like a magnet, shoving out everything else in the wake of the dollar bonanza these shows proved to be for their parent networks. Business...it's life alright, but it still tarnishes everything it touches.
And yes--the bad news becomes worse with the fact that you'll always draw the kiddies with the latest, shiniest set of bells and whistles, because that's the nature of children--short attention spans and a craving for novelty. The horrible part of this reality is that it's now surrounded by a cultural reality that takes low boredom threshold in its stride, and no longer tries to provide the young with the critical and cultural tools to supersede those cravings and find worth in the older, slower models. Much as I think entities such as The Children's Television Workshop, in their heyday, did to improve the vast wasteland of kid's programming back in the day, I can agree with the conservative argument that shows such as Sesame Street and The Electric Company created their own set of problems in helping to spawn a generation of minds that required jumped-up, hyperactive presentation as a must and left little room or inclination for slower and more thoughtful presentations. Eventually we'll reach a point where even the traditional 60-second commercial will become too lengthy for the average viewer to tolerate, and where we'll be when that happens God alone knows.
I can agree with you totally on the misnomer of 'classic' as applied to a lot of the content of these channels. A good many of the shows, such as the ones you mentioned specifically (A-Team, WW) appear to be the ones that are being re-marketed to young audiences as tie-ins to movie remakes (usually horrendous) of these series. In essence, they're a bountiful supply of cheap commercial for the latest Hollywood 'product', and of course Hollywood feeds endlessly on itself; in this re-boot crazy culture these channels are often not much more than a hall of mirrors. I suppose I tend to less mention the really golden era precisely because it's just not there anymore, for the most part. You make a very good point about the variety of style to be found in the popular 'genre' categories--private eye, western...'Coronet Blue', one of the few titles I've seen turn up from that particular period is indeed quite different from Hawaiian Eye, and the point is valid that many of these types of series tended to dissolve into the action shoot-out mold that became standard issue by the Seventies, though there were a few notable exceptions.
When I mention color comedies, I tend to to refer to the ones that were mold-breakers for that era--All in the Family, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Barney Miller. They are classic in the fact that they set a new standard for their particular genre, and even today still stand out as sui generis among television comedies. God knows, many of these subchannels run far more homogenized dreck than not--Antenna runs the truly godawful Small Wonder on weekends, and has the gall to refer to it as classic comedy, and that's just one example. Much of the product that gets aired on these channels seems to fall under the category of tickling the baby boomer's sense of "gosh, I haven't seen that in ages" nerve, rather than any intrinsic merit of content.
I'd have to conclude that you're more than a little correct about the lack of programmer enthusiasm for TV shows from the era you mention--unless they're pieces of indelible pop culture such as The Twilight Zone they tend to fall into the deep wastebasket of shows that are deemed as having no longer any sort of interest or relevance to the coveted 18 to 40 year old demographic, and languish away unseen. I don't know what can be done about this, apart from making the shows more available on home media, and of course the same trap applies--they're deemed as having little market, so they don't get put to disc, tape or whatever the current popular media format is. Like pre-sound film, the television content of that era would appear to have a certain niche market, but unlike silent film, golden era television lacks the cultural and critical clout to get it revived in ways that might create appeal to a current audience.
It's one reason I somewhat like the Sony-owned GetTv channel--they do run a fair number of B&W's (for now anyway) that are rarely seen anywhere else. But as I noted, even they seem to be scaling back on that. I think it's an unfortunate given that we'll see less and less of this programming as even these 'retro' subchannels skew to attracting a younger market.
I've heard a lot of complaint about the Decades channel, which I don't get. In my area This shares frequency space with some other sub in the daytime, so instead of anything remotely classic, we get Steve Wilkos and Jerry Springer. When This finally signs on in the evening, it's mostly films, almost no television shows. ME seems to run the same endless spate of Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island and the like. AntennaTV does at least give a lot of their airtime to genuinely classic comedies, but they're mostly the Seventies color ones. Their B&W roster isn't much more imaginative than ME's.
Waiting to see if she puts her head up someplace--most likely that V2 board, or whatever it's called (I keep meaning to sign up there, haven't got around to it yet).
So agreed on the sorry state of B&W--films fare a little better, but television is virtually off the table. I was just mentioning to a friend last night, when have you last seen a rebroadcast of the original B&W 'Dragnet'? Hardly a classic, but since the color reboot turns up with some frequency on those retro channels, you'd think the earlier version would be a natch to be shown as well. But no dice. One of the few places I've seen some more obscure B&W television series turn up is that Sony 'GetTV' channel, but even they seem to be phasing a lot of that content out. It's frustrating, and the more so because many of these shows are getting more and more difficult to come by even on DVD.
On the other hand, I admit I'm enough of an old timer to be completely gobsmacked when coming up against a generation that thinks shows produced in the 90's are already ancient artifacts. Time, thou art not friendly to those with long memories...
Tel, good to see you here (wave emoticon, lol). I'm not terribly surprised to see this move, in a way I'm somewhat more surprised it didn't happen sooner. Col Needham showed no interest at any point in working with the users to try and improve the forums, or to save them. He's an odd duck, to say the least, and his attitude toward his creation has always been ambiguous; certainly after selling it to Amazon it became clear that he had no intention of working for the users behalf. IMDb 'staff' was clearly more about the 'cool kids' getting to be in on the fringes of the red-carpet scene, and certainly the passion for educating their user base about film had died some time ago. That they finally decided to become totally bald-faced about their bottom-line motives for operating the site should really shock no one, I guess--but it's saddening nonetheless.
I think use of the word 'customer' may be a tipoff in more ways than one. IMDb has stressed the fact repeatedly that the boards don't pull in revenue (at least not enough by their standards). Best guess is that one of the 'new features' that little sermonette mentions will be the institution of paid messaging boards, a la IMDbPro.
Pro wasn't intelligently marketed when they debuted it several years back--they tried pretty much ramming it down regular users throats, and weren't offering any particular attractions over and above the fact that it was a sight designed 'for professionals in the business'. They weren't even guaranteeing troll-free, moderated boards for what was--and still is--a pretty exorbitant fee. In other words, unless you needed the site for industry contacts, there was little practical reason for Joe Average User to fork out $100+ per year to post some messages on chat forums.
They've learned from that failed business model, and will now switch over to a money-generating forum site, with, hopefully, better moderation and likely fewer boards. The problem they'll face is that they've lost customer trust through this move of imploding the existing forums; and if enough alternative talk sites take off successfully, there's a good chance IMDb will never win back the level of usage on any forums they may offer, no matter what benefits they throw in.
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