Channel Surfing

Television Previews by Bruce Christian

Turning Off the Tube
Strides TV made in normalizing gays reduce need to monitor

Television has played a major role in my life.

As a young child, I’d sneak into the family room and hide in a dark corner to watch shows my parents didn’t think were appropriate for my age, such as Peter Gunn or The Untouchables.

On my 6th birthday, I actually was on TV. Back then KOOL-TV (now KTSP) had an afternoon segment where a Valley youngster with a birthday walked onto the set and received a cake and a birthday present. (My father had connections. In fact, in the late ‘50s, he was a regular on the long-running KPHO kids’ show, Wallace & Ladmo.)

Because I was stubborn and couldn’t understand why I had to go to bed earlier than my older brothers, I’d lay awake straining to listen to The Tonight Show, until they finally were sent to bed.

As I got older, the primary tool for discipline. “No TV for a week.”

My idols came from programs I liked: Little Joe Cartwright from Bonanza and later James West from The Wild Wild West.

I’ll never forget sitting glued to the television for nearly four straight days, Nov. 22-25, 1963, as the three networks provided wall-to-wall coverage of the assassination and burial of President John F. Kennedy.

TV is where I discovered baseball; which was my passion until I went through puberty and found out about activities that are much more enjoyable.

In high school, TV helped me to babysit my youngest sister until our parents got off work. We would watch reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show, the original Star Trek, and of course Wallace & Ladmo.

Because I’m a news junkie, every major news event or story that has occurred since I became aware of television drew me to the tube. I cried when I saw the injustices of African-Americans during the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. I celebrated at Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace. I watched in horror at the destruction of wars in the Middle East.

It hasn’t been all news that attracted me. I watched baseball religiously through the years, and while in the U.S. Navy, I learned to like watching football. Because of the Phoenix Suns, I’ve found watching basketball can be thrilling.

Of course, you can’t watch all this television without seeing promos of networks’ entertainment programming. Sure enough, some of these programs intrigued me and I began to appreciate the writing and the way television can move society.

Norman Lear was a pioneer with All in the Family and the spin-off Maude. The writing took chances and challenged the mores of the early 1970s. In the 1980s, Steven Bochco introduced ensemble casts with arcing storylines and well-crafted dramas, beginning with Hill Street Blues.

In many cases, TV writing continued to become sophisticated and challenging. And as a young, struggling journalist, I found that I had a critical knack for picking and choosing what good TV was and what really sucked.

For more than a decade, writing, reviewing and commenting about TV for the East Valley Tribune was my profession. Some of what I wrote landed me on TV or on radio, where I’d be asked to discuss or defend my opinions. But when I left the Tribune, I gave up reviewing TV. That is until about three or four years ago, when Echo asked me if I would be willing to cover it.

Things had changed since my last column for the Tribune in 1997 and the first one covering TV for Echo. The television universe had expanded with all kinds of cable and satellite networks. Some networks are so niched, I can’t imagine more than a couple thousand viewers nationwide. And with the growing technology of Internet Protocol TV, anyone with a home computer can produce his or her own TV.

Within the next three or four years, the nation’s mobile handheld phones will all have 4-Generation capabilities, which means the bit rate will be so fast and powerful that you will be able to download and watch TV programming, as well as movies, on your phone.

What also continued to happen since 1996, after Ellen DeGeneres outed herself on her ABC sitcom, is a “normalization” of the way TV programming treats gays on television. It’s not uncommon for a character, major or minor, to be gay or lesbian. Storylines also treat gays as normal people; the stereotypes are gone.

While an occasional, isolated bigot appears on TV or a network’s Standards and Practices Division overreacts (as it did with Adam Lambert on the American Music Awards) for the most part, it seems the depiction of gays and/or lesbians on television is no longer something that needs to be monitored on continuous basis.

Therefore, this is the last Channel Surfing column I’ll write. That doesn’t mean I’m leaving Echo, however. I’ll continue to offer support through occasional news coverage, and I’ll introduce a more issue-oriented column in 2010.

Covering television has been a great joy for me. Or as Capt. Kirk (William Shatner) uttered before his death in Star Trek: Generations, “It was fun.”

Bruce Christian, a former managing editor of Echo Magazine, is a marketing and public relations specialist for SCF Arizona. He can be reached at btrethewy@yahoo.com.

Top