I am a child of television. Even though it was invented a few years before I was born (Now try to figure out my age with that information), it really took hold when I was a small boy. Shows like I Love Lucy, Your Shows of Shows, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Father Knows Best, and many classic shows from the beginning of the television era were just hitting their stride. I remember waiting for the next episode to drop or wait and streaming the whole season at one time…HA! Got you there. There was no such thing as episodes dropping or streaming way, way, way, way, way, way back in the day…wait, my wife must have sneaked in while I was hitting the fridge and added a few “ways” to my sentence. She’s giggling in the corner.
Streaming is a fairly new pastime created by access to multiple platforms that carry more content (another new word for things related to streaming). When I was young, there were three networks. For those of you who think I left out the FOX Network, I didn’t. That didn’t come along until much later, and the only thing worth watching on it was NFL Games unless they were showing the Bears. Now, that is terrible programming.
Yes, we still have the traditional networks, but they are not the same as they were in the 1950s. We had a small black-and-white television, and except for a few private stations in a few cities, we only had CBS, NBC, or ABC to choose from. That also meant that all Americans had a very narrow choice of shows to watch. If a show was popular, the water pressure in a city could drop when a commercial came on due to tens of millions of people who were watching the show needing a bathroom break at the same time. If they missed any shows, they could not stream them later or use TiVo to record them. You would have to wait for the summer rerun. Yeah, I agree. How did we survive such primitive conditions? My sons think that I had to share the couch with a woolly mammoth while watching the boob tube. No, wait, that is not inappropriate language. The television was one time considered a dangerous device for children, and it would rot their brains and turn them into boobs. Get it? Just looking at all the crazies trying to overrun our country proves the critics were correct.
In today’s world, networks are just a tiny part of the many platforms available to watch a rich television content source. But would you be surprised if I told you that “streaming” started in the 19th century?
I admit that I am not talking about the content you watch. I am talking about the content you read. In the early 19th century, reading was a significant form of entertainment. The problem was that books were expensive to print and purchase. Many authors created one chapter at a time (equivalent to a TV episode). The “episode” would drop in one of the many popular periodicals of the time. It was called serializing. While that sounds like a step down from classic literature, it was a way of getting “classic literature” to the common folks. Examples of great literature that first appear serialized in a regular periodical include War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, and Hounds of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
You could read one chapter a week (or month) or wait for the whole book to drop and read it at once. When Great Expectations was assigned as a required high school read, I wish I could have done it one chapter at a time. If I did that, I would still only be about a third of the way through. That is a long, damn book. I wonder if people were saying at the time that continually reading serialized books would rot your brain. Who knew these “streamed” stories would become great literature, respected throughout history, except by bored high school students?
I confess that I am into streaming. There are shows I can’t wait to drop on either Netflix, Prime, Hulu, or Paramount+, one of the hundreds of streaming platforms sucking money out of our wallets in the form of a subscription that we don’t know how to cancel. Admit it. We have all signed up for the 1-month free trial and are stuck paying the ever-rising subscription fees because we don’t know how to stop it. Maybe I can get one of my sons to move back in and handle the problem for me. They were born into the digital generation, and knowledge of everything electronic is bred into them…right?
Until I can get them to cancel my subscription to FLowBlow, Tibby, WatchNow, or whatever the names of some of these platforms are, my wife and I will kick back and catch up on some of our favorite streaming shows. Anything Star Trek, Star Wars, or Agatha Christie-based is in our wheelhouse. We love BritBox and all those British murder mysteries. As I have said, the Brits know how to kill a rival properly. Many platforms have started creating their own content. The problem is the shows tend to be only 8-10 episodes long, and it takes them more than a year to come up with the following season. There are times when we sit longingly in front of our television, wondering when the next season of Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer, and The Diplomat will drop. By the way, The Diplomat is an excellent show, but the last season was only six episodes long, and they left it as a cliffhanger. I’m old and may be dead by the time the next series airs, and I won’t find out who the President is, and anything with Alyson Janey in it is amazing…but I digress.
Now for a blatant plug. I have been writing this blog since the pandemic began five years ago. I have compiled the first 68 blog posts into a book called “Being Funny Is No Laughing Matter; A Humorous Look At Why Bob Dylan Won The Noble Prize in Literature And I Didn’t…An Other Amusing Observations.” Quite a mouthful.
My book was chosen as “Best Comic Relief” by Inland Empire Magazine for its Best Of issue. (Ignore the fact that I still work for them; I’m sure they made an unbiased choice.) One critic said it is a great bathroom book. One chapter every visit, and depending on your digestive system, you’ll be through it in days.
I hope that one day, people will look upon my work as a literary masterpiece. Like many of the other great authors who created their classic books through serialization, I hope that in the future, it will be assigned as a reading assignment to unsuspecting high school students who will dread the thought of having to read it. That will mark the day I join the other literary giants.
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