It’s hard to believe. Even for those who grasp at misty memories from a past life in the primordial haze of a pre-digital age.
But it’s true.
Once upon a time, television ruled the earth. TV sets regimented American evenings, with families huddled around the glow of the cathode ray hearth, first in shades of black and white, then in vibrant living color.
Make no mistake, it was television that dictated what would appear across those convex windows into the world. But it proffered to viewers a faint sense of choice by meting out a menu among a whopping three networks from which to partake.
The mystical vagaries in the ancient age of television were such that many souls summoned the oracle known as the “TV Guide” to augur what programs would appear and when.
Like a fleeting cosmic phenomenon, if you weren’t gazing at the tube in the appointed hour prophesied by the “TV Guide,” you missed the ephemeral broadcast of your favorite show, left haunted by an existential dread that later generations would call “FOMO.” A missed episode was a moment lost to the sands of the electromagnetic spectrum (but could, with some luck, re-emerge as a phantasmic rerun on some future day).
From sunrise to sunset and beyond, television shone forth a flickering menagerie of soap operas, sports, sitcoms, and talk shows, broken apart by unskippable ads.
But then, as evening gave way to night, and night flowed into the murky ink of the very early morning, something happened that once seemed so ordinary, so proper, but would be shocking today.
Soon after midnight, that towering behemoth of television just … dozed off.
With a dulcet disembodied voice proclaiming, “This concludes our broadcast day,” followed perhaps by the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the raging TV bonfire surrendered to smoldering embers of a static test pattern and a high-pitched tone shooing away any lingering audience.
Now, it would be like if you opened Netflix at 1 a.m., only to be met with a message that tersely announced, “We’re closed. Come back in the morning.”
Dreamlike though it seems, for a time each night during the dominant epoch of television, the commercials, the shows, the spectacle of it all, simply – stopped.
Who would be watching in those wee hours, anyway? And how could it be possible to stretch programming to fill the full rotation of the Earth’s axis?
Today, after the once fiery sun of television exploded into shards of glassy light fused with telephones in the palm of our hands, and the once tight tribes of viewers are now isolated masses wandering their own bespoke algorithmic worlds of infinite scrolls, it seems impossible: First to imagine that any one medium could have reigned as TV once did, standing astride the monoculture like a mighty Ozymandias. Then, to think such a colossus could simply yawn, “Enough. To bed for us all.”
It seems too alien that such quietude could have existed for an hours-long interlude without the clenching embrace of constant entertainment.
But that was before sales departments realized there was a way to conjure cold cash from dead air through overnight infomercials and syndicated shows reaching a nocturnal audience of hotel front desk clerks, pajama-clad insomniacs, and bleary-eyed parents desperate to get their restless toddlers to slumber. It was before TV went from a splendid phoenix, reborn each new broadcast day, and instead morphed into a frenetic hamster never let off its spinning wheel of endless 24-hour programming.
Before the chaotic digital era of limitless choice, TV gave us a false image of agency, doling out a ration of shows at a time and place of its deciding, rather than our own. But it was all we knew in our blissful innocence, before we partook of the tree of knowledge of cable and the web.
The ghost of television – real television tethered to the linear tyranny of time, not the faux “TV” of streaming that ethereally floats above space as a jukebox of on-demand content – that shell-of-itself television whispers ruefully, dustily, “Come back, dear friend. Come back to the simpler time of scant options but shared viewing reality, when you gathered round me together transfixed by my electric gleam, laughing along with the studio audience, making references that everyone got.”
Indeed, it’s true. Television once commanded the pop cultural world. But all that power to shape civilization and chart the course of human history while selling cereal and hawking soda pop must have been exhausting.
Because every 18 hours or so, even TV went to sleep.