The TV Activist, Pt. 3 - Variety & the Spites of Life

I know, I was going to finish up the 3-D series.  (Come to that, I was going to finish up the series of TV posts, too.)  But in the world of blogging, there is the cardinal rule that a good overexposed viral video is just too sweet to pass up.

And as at least half the Internet has seen by now, last Sunday on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars", Olympic gold gymnast Laurie Hernandez danced with partner Val Chmerkovskiy, costumed as Disney's Dewey and Scrooge McDuck, in a themed tribute to the 1987 DuckTales cartoon theme.

Naturally, the Scrooge McDuck fan in me had to sit up and take notice.  Well, curse me kilts.

Like most other soullessly corporate-synergized viral Disney plugs on ABC (ahemonceuponatime), the number may in fact have been simply just trying to stoke 80's-nostalgic hype-machine fires for a new inferior '17 DuckTales cartoon reboot premiering on DisneyXD, but why nitpick over details?--Like anyone watches XD apart from the Marvel shows anyway, at least after they cancelled the first Avengers series, Tron: Uprising and Doraemon.

But nostalgia, corporate plug, or just imaginative variety number, if there's a column-long lesson to be learned from it, it's one question a lot of TV fans have wondered about for decades, but never really put their finger on answering:  

Thirty-five or forty years ago, we'd be seeing this on a top-rated network variety show.  (Or even a modest little embarrassing six-week summer-replacement network variety show.)  And whatever happened to the network variety show, anyway?

The first answer that comes up is the glaringly obvious one:  "Whatever happened to it" was Carol Burnett and Kermit the Frog.  The two iconic "last" 70's TV-variety staples that set the bar so high, no human achievement could even hope to duplicate them in a lifetime.  When they left in 1978 and '81, if "The Carol Burnett Show" and "The Muppet Show" didn't retire the TV variety show's jersey like Babe Ruth's #3 hanging in Yankee Stadium, nothing could.  (And second attempts to try and give Carol and Kermit new shows in the 80's and 90's have long since been forgotten.)

Another was networks' continuing El Dorado search to try and explain why Ed Sullivan had had such a hold on the American TV public in the 50's and 60's, and whether lightning could ever strike twice.  The answer, of course, was that Ed Sullivan in the 50's had brought "Toast of the Town" over from radio, where he had already been famous as one of Broadway's leading entertainment-news reporters--If anyone in New York knew which new acts were in town to find that week, whether a Broadway show, a new nightclub comic, or four British lads, Ed knew from experience where to find them and find them first.

Networks, however, didn't quite grasp the subtleties, thought Sullivan's appeal was how incongruously "boring" and un-entertainer he seemed by comparison, and searched for the next "unlikely" network host for the next anything-goes vaudeville-act variety series.  Dick Clark briefly had a short-lived variety series in the late 70's, and in 1975, ABC gave us "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell".  Guess which NBC show premiering that same year had to temporarily change its title to satisfy Legal.

Entertainment also fractured with the rise of pop culture in the 80's:  We no longer needed to see a popstar guest on a prime-time show to sing their hit song, or even see the show's host (try to) cover it for them.  With pop music becoming more of an industry again in the early 80's--where it had been stuck in TV's mainstream influence in the 70's--stars were now too expensive to appear on a mere network.  Paul McCartney, for example, found it easier (and networks found it much cheaper) to simply stay home and send the show his new idea of an artistic short film of Wings singing their latest hit, instead of appearing as the week's guest star in person.  You probably know where that idea led to, and by 1982-'84, if you looked for a singer's latest hit, it just didn't make sense to look anywhere else.  If you got your music, you got it from the source, and the cable network's VJ's were in "your" music culture enough to find it for you.

We also no longer needed singers or athletes pretending to be sketch-comedy stars to fill out an hour, either:  Like 70's SNL's stock of ex-Toronto and Chicago Second City performers who had to compete with ABC and Cosell's "Prime Time Players", comedy culture had two attacks of creative sabotage in the 70's.  One from the new club culture of angry Nixon/Ford-era political satire and underground Improv-club creativity, and the other from the New British Invasion of silliness when the first PBS airings of Monty Python became Friday night's best-kept cult secret with 12-24 yo's.

When reliable comfort-food variety shows like Donny & Marie eventually found their writers trying to fan-copycat their way into Python's new meta-verse of abandoned sketch premises, stream-of-conciousness segue links in place of punchlines or blackouts, inexplicably silly non-sequitirs and fourth-walling about their own existence as comedy sketches, the writing was on the wall even for the big stage-laffs of Carol Burnett dressing up in window curtains.

Even the format was changing.  In the old days, variety of the 70's was to give us a "taste of Las Vegas", and just a little of the glitzy thrill of seeing star A-list crooners and comics play to sold-out audiences on the gigantic stage of Caesar's Palace, without having to leave our living room.

But that was in a generation when Vegas was still Vegas, and Dino, Frank, Sammy and the Rat Pack could still dictate what old-school nightclub entertainment happened there and what stayed there.  Nowadays, the "Vegas-style" show entertainment the town's industry had to generate on its own has almost vanished, replaced by the corporate outreach of touring Broadway, Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group and recording-contract stars.  Apart from the loyal stage-magicians, only one or two old-school showgirls-in-feathers variety shows still remain, and then, largely for symbolic tourist pageant, to satisfy that particular portion of the audience that, er...still has a thing for glitter-pizzazz, showtunes and showgirl outfits.  If ya know what I mean.

But at least we did get to see the Jabbawockeez, the current sold-out kings of Vegas, win first place on MTV's America's Best Dance Crew.

But the main problem seemed to be what made a variety show:  The celebrities.  Entertainment news first became a new pop industry by '81 and '82, and our culture gradually came to realize, hey, y'know something?...We hated celebrities.  We didn't want to see them show off their rich glamorous sheltered lives behind our backs, on our dollar, and we didn't want to see them in carefully created media images, when we all knew what nasty, self-destructive lunatics they could be offscreen.

At the same time, networks found the rise of the Reality Show was a new miracle for them--As Albert Brooks quipped just before the first Survivor finale, "You've got hundreds of non-union actors beating down the doors to be in your show, for thirteen weeks you can do anything you want to them, and when it's all over, you only have to pay ONE of them!"

When British producers decided to sell America the license for their American Idol spinoff, it solved both problems:  We had variety shows without celebrities--they were just like us, so if they succeeded, you rooted for their starlet dreams like they were your BFF, and if they were bad, you had no problems of conscience gleefully booing them offstage--and since they were not even no-names yet, producers could get them for free.  The concept at first appealed to the dominion of the audience daring the performer to entertain them; the initial sales-marketable appeal of the show was not so much the young singer who rose to stardom, as what Simon Cowell, love him or hate him, would say to the unsuccessful singer who didn't...Another wannabe bites the dust.

The Audition show, while meant to save money, instead became a sort of Bastille revolution against watching celebrities pal with hosts on stage at our poor peasant expense.

In the narcissistic Internet age, audiences now consider it an insult to be mere "slaves" as spectators--It has to be THEIR show, too, like a rock-concert audience, and the camera is now on their reactions and the judging panel's for almost equally as much time as on the performers.  The show must be about them, as the act of being spectators, and provide the fodder for social-media fan-networking as the "power behind the thrones".  They don't want to be the ones simply watching, they want to decide whether new performers continue to "interfere" in their cultural lives enough to determine whether the acts still have a paying career or not.  They want the right to boo performers off or say that if the act was a hit, they were the first ones hip enough to say so, and the performer should owe them that much more gratitude for it.  And if the acts, like the AGT or Idol winners, go on to successful careers, well, it's just a reflection on who was smart enough to spot them first.  Y'know, like Ed used to.

But after a while, it just wasn't enough.  We wanted to see, well, somebody famous who knew how.  We didn't mind washed-up celebrities, if they Thought They Could Dance, or tried to get a job with Donald Trump.

And when the acts on America's Got Talent started showing us performers who could perform again, and even wow us, we started to miss the feeling of being audiences, sitting in a theater and being wowed.

Enter the latest attempt for networks to figure out What the Fifties Did Right That We're Not Doing.  And what everyone's TV-childhood remembered was Mary Martin playing Peter Pan.  The idea of bringing back a live-musical Pan, with or without Martin--with the urgency of an awards show, and nothing LESS than an un-reschedulable live event would convince NBC to give up NCIS for even one night only--became so popular, the network insisted on doing it every year, with The Sound of Music performed live the next year.   (I mean, hey, remember when we were kids, and they used to show the Sound of Music movie every Christmas or Thanksgiving?--The movie, how cool was that?)

That soon led to The Wiz: Live, Grease: Live, an upcoming Hairspray, and even the Rocky Horror Show.  And if they keep at it long enough, NBC or Fox may even become brave enough to show us a musical we DON'T already know by cult-heart.

So now, in searching for that feeling of stage experience on our screens, we've full-circled all the way back to...stage experiences on our screens.

It's too rooted in our TV DNA-memories for us to completely come to grips with as modern audiences:  We want to see entertainers, but we don't want to simply applaud them without getting some credit for it too.  We want celebrities, but celebrities like US, not the psychotic overprivileged ones that act like jerks in the gossip headlines.  We want to see song and dance, but we don't know why anyone would simply sing or dance without a good reason.  We want old-school entertainment, just so long as it's not, y'know, that kind of old.

Although as an Activist, I always hope to see something done, it may simply be that nothing CAN be done for the Variety Show today--There's no ground for it to grow upon anymore.  We want purpose to our vaudeville now, and without the aim of competition and audition, or the need for corporate synergy, there's no missing space left for the genre to fill.  A dozen new automobiles have replaced the reliable old workhorse.

So although competition shows, live-musicals and awards now fill out the top-rated shows, we can search for that empty hole in our cultural memories, but in the end, it seems we may have to say farewell to the innocence of Variety Without Purpose.  

May tomorrow be a perfect day, may it find love and laughter along the way, and may God keep it in His tender care, until He brings us together again.

The TV Activist, Pt. 2 - I'm Your Binge-Pusherman

Admit it:  When you were kids, it was the one thing you couldn't get that you dreamed of having more than you ever needed for the rest of your life.  
To be able to buy out the toy store.  To have your own basement video arcade.  To be able to stay up till midnight, even on a school night.  To have Richie Rich's pile of cash, when your allowance didn't go far enough.  To have a fleet of sports cars instead of a bike.  Or, like Vern in "Stand By Me", to be able to eat cherry-flavored Pez as the one food anyone ever needed.
And if Mom said that you could only have one or two Oreo cookies with your milk after school since dinner was at 6, you dreamed of the moment you could sit in the corner with the entire package and no milk.  That meant adulthood, and that meant independence.  No more of this "under the same roof" stuff.

When Netflix brought on its Instant digital-subscription service in 2010--inspiring Amazon to follow suit, and Hulu to Plus itself and realize no one was watching video on their desktop--we were introduced to a new independence:  TV episodes you could select off the rack.  No more commercials.  Start and stop times by the remote that let you take bathroom breaks, and let you start over if you rushed back at 8:01.  Why, it was even better than the Tivo.
Most of us had already been watching ad-free multi-episodes off of vintage or season DVD boxsets, but now to have the whole run of the series in front of us for the taking...Back then, Netflix was still connected with StarzPlay, and here I'd had those entire runs of Maverick and Have Gun Will Travel to choose from.  Watching one half-hour a night for a week was now possible, or even two if I dared.  Even if TVLand didn't show them anymore, the streaming services did, so there.
Now, I'm not that extreme a binge-watcher, when I look up reruns on the Big Three...Well, I'm just not.  Attention-span, y'know, I like variety.  I usually line up a half hour of this, and a bit of disk-movie of that, and by then I probably have to get a snack or hit the toilet, and forget what I was in the mood to watch next.

With more and more titles disappearing from Netflix in 2016, I'm more conscious of not gobbling up and finishing anything that I'm not sure will be replaced any time soon--There's still those two other Star Trek series and those last five seasons of Cheers left on my queue (never paid much attention to the Sam & Rebecca arc when it was on, so this'll be all new), and that's good enough of an emergency survival ration alongside the PBS documentaries and those in-between seasons of X-Files for the next few years in case nothing else new or good ever shows up for weeknight viewing.  Waste not, want not.

But to the binge-watcher, wastefully gobbling an entire season like a 4th of July hot-dog eating contest is not only a manly test of endurance and dedication, but a proof of loyalty and enthusiasm as well.  Look up the newest eagerly-awaited season or debut series on Netflix, check the reviews two or three days after it hits, and see how many reviews say "I just binge-watched the series, and it was great!"  To the fan, the entire 13-episode series had to be experienced in two days.  Not 13 weeks.  DAYS.  The entire season arc, from start to finish, had to be completed instantly, in its entirety, before it could be talked about.

Tell a binge-series fan that it might be bad, or wrong, or greedy or childish, and you will see them react as if you criticized their religion:  No one would want to angrily defend their right to couch-potato their favorite TV series, but to criticize the idea of binge-watching was not just behind the times, it was a personal slight on their own modern connected lifestyle that freed them from their parents' generation--It was yet more persecution of the Poor Misunderstood Millennial by the old fogeys who had inflicted the damage they were escaping in the first place.  As if it seemed to be attacking the VERY FOUNDATION of the Internet generation's brave new TV world of selective choices without commercials or airtimes.  Suggest the old-school idea of watching one episode a week, and June Cleaver might just as well be back vacuuming the house in pearls while John Ritter tripped over the couch to laughtracks.

Now that the cookie-jar has been opened, that seems to be the main fallacy that most of us still haven't seem to have grasped in the new age of a la carte subscription-streaming viewing--In our entertainment viewing, we genuinely seem to have lost the ability to conceptualize the difference between having all of something available, and consuming all of something available.  Or between being able to consume some of it or all of it.  
Streaming television brought us freedom, but it's our fault that we still see only the child's idea of "freedom", not the adult's. 

Marketers now recognize the trend, although they're not sure whether to parody it as mindless indulgence, or accept it as what the In Crowd does.  One company that poked some fun at how much they benefitted from the trendy new personal compulsion to destroy one's sleep and social life was the obvious one:  Visine Eye Drops.

The words have literally now become synonymous in our culture:  "To watch" a series is now "To binge-watch" it, and vice versa.  Television can be consumed in no other way...I mean, whaddya, nuts?
If a new season brings three or four new "edgy" Original Programming series to Amazon and Netflix, the hype machine is ready to give us the word.  If it's already been on the air and escaped our notice, it'll be--and I quote--"The hit show you SHOULD be making your next binge-watch!"  Because, like the addict, after the last rush is gone, there must always be The Next.
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/11-tv-shows-from-2014-you-should-bingewatch-right-now/
http://www.thewrap.com/tv-shows-you-should-binge-watch-right-now-from-oitnb-to-better-call-saul-photos/
Now, over the years of old-school network viewing, I've been told many presumptuous and personally-intruding things by network publicists, announcers and commercials about what they'd like me to do in regards to my viewing habits:  I've been told to "don't miss" a show and "join them later" for it, I've been told to "not touch that dial" in order to watch the next show, a while ago I was told to "NB-See Us this fall", and in the occasional rerun, I've even been told to "tune in tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel".  And I've taken it all in the spirit of good hyperbolic fun.  
But I can't think of a time any publicist has ever actually crossed the line and judgmentally told me how I SHOULD be managing my time and living my viewing lifestyle, for their benefit more than mine.  And on no other appeal than that everyone else was doing it.  But then, I was an adult, you see, without my parents, and if all my friends jumped off the roof, I was now free to do so, too.

I challenge the reader to name one single product that has ever actually seriously advertised or endorsed overdosing on the product to unrealistic extremes--The makers of sleeping pills certainly don't.  The makers of Lay's potato chips were only joking when they bet us we couldn't eat just one.  The newest variety of Snickers candy-bar isn't advertised as "The one bar you HAVE to gorge yourself on twelve of!" and even Budweiser beer disclaimers us to "Drink responsibly", knowing that every fraternity college student will gladly do so.

There are two theories for why "You should" has now become "You must", or at least "Well, duh, you already do, don't you?" in the media.  
- One, is the same theory that makes studios believe we're so in love with our cellphones, we'll watch all our movies there, and so in love with social media, we'll rush to tell all our friends about it, and throw the last baby out if the bathwater happens to be a bit soiled:  They don't really have a clue.  

Entertainment executives and marketers aren't really what you would call technologically current:  They may play with a few apps on their Android smartphones, and feel they're in touch with the trendy young anonymous public, but they can't quite put it into normal social context about WHY the public does it.  All they see is that something happened to create a Trend while they were unawares that took off like wildfire, and they don't want to be burned--Since they're not sufficiently qualified to explain the trend, and they're too outnumbered to outwit it, they must be, like the Simpsons quote, "ready to welcome their New Overlords".  

If the execs see that the public has tossed over the free networks for the new world of subscription binge-watching, well, heck, THEY love it too!  C'mon, fellow trend-setting kids, let's all sit around and...binge-watch something on Hulu!  It's the new trend that will put everyone else out of business, so you won't catch us being behind!--Uh, will you?  And then we can discuss it with all our friends on Facebook, and get them to join our Saturday-night binge-watching parties, so we can demographically measure how many there are of you...Er, us!
And nothing kills a trend faster than the public trying to calm down the sudden forcible and overly-friendly mainstream invasion of what had once been their own private indulgence, and reality-check them "Hey, it's okay--We don't really love it that much, 'kay?"

- The other, is the main force that drives most movie and TV entertainment in the 21st century:  It works out to the studio/network's corporate advantage as well.
If you still watch broadcast TV--and that's an understandable "if"--you may notice we've lost a few things since the 90's.  We've lost opening theme songs, as shows now open with a title logo and credits over the opening dialogue.  We've lost end themes, as shows now push scrolling names silently to the side or bottom while they air the promo ads that used to appear between shows.  Oh, and that's the other thing, we've lost any commercial break between the end of one program and the beginning of another.

The idea was to remove anything that would even distract us to change the channel, before the next show would hook us like an elusive rainbow trout.  Because broadcast TV has sponsors, and sponsors need viewers--Network needs viewers watching, and they need viewers hooked. Network TV was grooming us for binge-watching ten years before such a thing had been invented or even imagined.
Cable networks were already imagining it, as they also found that ratings-boosted "blocks" of their most house-marketable shows, by airing two or three episodes of Duck Dynasty or Deadliest Catch back-to-back to appeal to their largest section of franchise fans, also ate up big convenient chunks of the daily schedule that might have otherwise had to be filled by expensive movies or other licensed shows.  Look over most cable TV listings today, like TVLand, TLC or USA Network, and you'll see an average channel's day consist of six different cult-hit series--Air three popular episodes in a row, and it frees up your schedule from that nasty problem of having to make any OTHER shows.
Netflix, in 2010, thought it had a clever way to make viewers watch their TV-episode reruns--Fans complained about fast-forwarding through every opening-credits, so the service added a feature that would "squash" the end-credits TV style, while it showed a ten-second countdown that would automatically jump past the credits and straight into the action of the next episode, without having to click a button.  And so a habit was born:  One episode stuffed onto your plate immediately after the last, and only ten seconds to refuse the waiter.
That's how the trend first started, folks, in case you ever wondered:  Not fandom stunts.  Not compelling storylines.  Not the new freedom of selectable viewing.  Just people too in love with a new technological format, and too lazy to click one darned button.


But hey, if we're all having fun, it can't hurt anybody, right?  Well, that would depend on who or what you see as taking most of the damage.

Broadcast and cable networks no longer make series to satisfy their audience, to make them feel happy or resolved at the end credits--They now seek to do the very dictionary opposite:  They set out to create serial episodes with teasing, unresolved stories that don't make the viewer feel resolved, but tantalized to want the next episode, and the next after that.  Each episode is not a story, but only a chapter in a story leading for months up to "The shocking season finale!"...Which, of course, will be no finale, but the "shock" will be some unexpected jumped-shark twist--such as revealing a good character to be a bad one, or killing off various members of the cast like stray dogs at a shelter--which will entice the viewer into waiting six months for the next season, and demand the show escape cancellation by the network heads.  Other shows, like AMC's American Horror Story, having completed their closed season-story arc, have to start over from scratch with a completely new story, since there was nothing to tantalize that renewed-option contract with. And most viewers, of course, must punish themselves and wait the year building themselves to that fever pitch, especially if, with Netflix or Amazon-original series, they consumed the previous season in one gulp, faster than the producers could film new ones.

The new glut of serial-arcs believes it's following the ground broken by the linked storylines of "24"'s season-long cases, although the public had already been hooked on the Laura Palmer murder on "Twin Peaks" eleven years earlier...And even that believed it was parodying the small-town soap-opera world of Peyton Place.  Even our 70's prime-time soap opera addiction made a brief comeback when a TNT revival of "Dallas" in 2012 brought JR Ewing back to the new world where liking grim, humorless, amoral ensemble serials was acceptable again.  (And who apparently survived his ambiguous gunfight with his "angel" at the end of the 70's series.)
A hundred and seventy-five years ago, Charles Dickens wrote his novels as serials, and fans reportedly gathered at the docks waiting for the last chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop, shouting out "Did Little Nell survive?"...Change that to Jon Snow from "Game of Thrones", and you have the average TV-fandom magazine article today.  Only it's not always the public writing it.

As we move into the fall season, some network execs, such as at ABC and TNT have expressed their idea to move back to "closed-ended" episodes, saying that the current crop of open-ended serials have saturated the market, made series hard to distinguish themselves, and left viewers...unsatisfied. 
But for the most part, the networks have now discovered you have a weakness, and that you can be exploited by it, even if you have to willingly destroy body and soul to pursue satisfaction for it.  If you can, there is a word for what that makes you:  An "addict".
And if their plan is to profit by it to keep their industry alive, that brings up a very obvious word for what that makes them.

The TV Activist, Pt. 1: The Day the TV Guide

No, I haven't suddenly gotten bored with the topic.  It's occasionally necessary to look at what happened to television over the same time period as what happened to movies over the last forty years, to put them both into context.  You just can't talk about one for very long without talking about the other.

TV and movies always seemed to be aware of their Shared Destinies, but back then we were more conscious of their being different animals.  We watched movies on TV, and they were more interesting than the shows, but the shows were on the rest of the time.  We knew which movies we wanted to go out to a theater and see, and which shows we wanted to stay home for every week; we were impressed by a show that looked like a movie, but we occasionally hated a movie for "looking like a TV show".  Each format served its own purpose in life.  
If we can look back at how we lost TV some time after the 80's or mid-90's, we might have a better enough parallel-example understanding of how we're losing movies now to be able to do something about it in time.

In the 70's and 80's, there was one magazine every house had to buy, and every social critic made us feel like moronic dirt because we had to read it.  It was the magazine with the largest circulation in the US.
It was not what might immediately look like interesting reading, and yet we would often pore over it at length, because it told us one of the most important things we needed to know every day:  What was on TV that week.  We had to, television stations managed their own programming, and we needed to be told ahead of time what shows and local movies were on when.
Every city had the magazine tailored for its own area--If you were in NY, you could buy an issue and take it back on the train to Boston, but it wouldn't do any good to read it there; the times, shows and channel numbers only meant something in the city and local stations where you bought it.



Because of TV Guide, it was in our heads to remember TV episodes as stories.  Not chapters of a serial arc, that never began and never finished until the season finale, and that never told you anything important but to string you out for the next one that would do the same (unless you maybe happened to be watching "Knots Landing"), but self-contained stories.  When we think of vintage reruns, we think of individual moments of the characters--We don't talk about "the series", we talk about, as Friends parodied, "The One Where" Lucy was on the chocolate line, or Radar announced the death of Col. Blake, or where Bob Hartley almost walked into an elevator shaft.  We knew one isolated hour or half-hour of TV programming, meant to fill out a series of 26 or 39, with the same familiarity that we knew a favorite book.
Debuting prime-time shows even had the guest casts listed, like a theater program.  Often we weren't just told what show would be on at 7:30, we were told which show:  Even the lowliest 9:30am local-station rerun of The Brady Bunch, we were told, was The One Where Marcia promised to bring Davey Jones to the prom.


The highest honor was to get a quarter-page Close Up, which called attention to a special event or episode that was must-viewing for that night, and would probably end up being TV history.

Sometimes, during Sweeps Week, so that the sponsors knew we were hyped enough to watch, the specific new episode would be enough of an event to merit a half-page network ad.

Wrapping the listings, on the slick pages, were the feature articles, usually one on the hit cover star interview or show of the week, but often going into what was then the big issue of the 70's:  TV's effect on our national culture, and its clashes with government, big business and news information.  The "important" articles were those pitched in the TV ads for the magazines on sale at newsstands now: 



As of current date, TV Guide is no longer the top circulating magazine in the US.  Leaving aside AARP's member magazines, Better Homes & Gardens is now the top circulating commercial magazine.  TV Guide, in its current format, is now 31st.
So, how did what was once the national calendar of our pop-culture, which united us as an entire nation of living rooms, become a splashy checkout-line sycophantic servant of entertainment publicists, to cultivate fandoms to keep hot-trending "binge" shows from cancellation? 
To draw some historical cutoff line, we must look back at a moment in time known as the J. Fred Muggs Awards.

TV Guide, which was becoming the main critical journalistic source analyzing the influence of the FCC and national networks, from '80-'81 tried spinning off Panorama, a short-lived conventional-format "prestige" magazine of articles and commentary on the growing national media culture (including the unpredictable rise of cable, VCR and home computers) and TV industry.  For its first and only year-end wrap-up, the magazine featured the "first annual" J. Fred Muggs Awards--named after Dave Garroway's chimp co-host on the 50's NBC Today Show--"looking back at the people and moments in 1980 TV that made monkeys of themselves":   Panorama Jan1981.pdf 

A tad similar to Esquire Magazine's annual "Dubious Achievements", the wrapup featured humor-bites of the most embarrassing TV trends, moments, fails and quotes of the year, with humorously snarky headers.

Though well-written, the magazine's editorial ambitions turned out to be a little too prestigious for its readers, Panorama folded, and the JFMA was moved to a favorite running year-end feature of the standard TV Guide, the magazine that America did read.

In 1998, the magazine's ownership passed from Annenberg/Triangle, the founding owners, to News Corp., and then to United Video Satellite which was absorbed into Gemstar, a cable/electronics company that wanted to use the magazine in connection with VCRPlus+, a six-digit auto-programming code already being built standard into most new VCR's.  Although new revisions had shortened and condensed the TV listings (doing away with most of the weekday daytime-programming for a week-long grid), for a while this made the magazine more indispensable, since the magazine now delivered the shows, as long as you got your programming codes next to the listing.  But what was lost in the process was the controversy--The featured articles criticizing the FCC, censorship, networks and big-money sports were now replaced by pop-culture baby-boom lists of TV nostalgia and current hits.

For their first year-end crowd-dive into popularity, the new management took the JFMA label and turned it into a straight-up Esquire Dubious Achievements knockoff joking about the easy news and political-headline jokes that year.
Fans were....OUTRAGED.  It was heresy.  Letters poured into the editor asking what business did TV Guide have to do with the same old headline jokes as every other magazine, when nobody was there to "Muggsy" the real TV jokes that year?  Were the writers even interested in TV anymore?  What the new editors weren't interested in was reader outrage--It's our magazine now, the editor responded, and we thought this was funnier and a hipper reader draw on newsstands!

Finally, on July 26, 2005, the axe fell:  TV Guide was "restructuring" itself away from the couch-friend book format to a slick-paper large size magazine, focusing on entertainment articles, fandom and celebrity news.  The magazine would still feature TV listings, but only as a few pages of national-grid network/cable programming, as most were already getting their local listings from the cable provider.  (Which made sense:  Now that no local stations were showing "My Friend Irma" or "That Tennessee Beat" at 11pm or reruns of The Avengers, there was less and less need to describe individual movies or isolate local programming for every geographical area.)  
At one point in TV ads proclaiming the new format, one cheery female reader mentions the national-grid reduction, and says  "Now I don't have to go through all those boring TV listings to find the entertainment news I'm looking for!"
Er, ahem...(fiddles ear with finger)...Not sure I heard that correctly, care to run that one by us again?  I suppose the Wall Street Journal would be easier financial reading without all those boring pages of pages of stock prices?

United's other interest in acquiring TV Guide had been as owner of the Prevue Channel, which provided the program-scroll TV-listings channels for cable services--And previously, in February '99, had rebranded Prevue's top-half-of-the-screen entertainment as the new TV Guide Channel, focusing mostly on...celebrity interviews, fandom, and baby-boomer rerun-nostalgia countdown lists.

In the end, the real tragedy here?:  We have people to blame, but we don't ultimately know whose fault it really IS.  It's not all ours, but to see the new covers, we're reminded it's not all theirs.
With reruns and movies disappearing off of TV in the early 00's, replaced more and more by corporate network, syndication and cable, was it really just marketers thinking we "weren't as interested" in the shows as in the marketable stars?  Was it just cable channels giving us long interactive scrolls of the program listings for free?  Or was it just that there weren't as many listings on TV to write about anymore?

The lesson here is for movie fans as well as TV fans:  
When we stopped being told that TV was important to our culture, it stopped being important to our culture.  When our coast-to-coast living-room nation stopped believing we "had" to watch every Tuesday night, we stopped watching.  When we reduced TV to gushing binge-trend cults of fangirl audiences and celebrities, that became all the industry sold us.  
Like the saying you hear around election time, in the end, we got the TV we DESERVED.

It's a lesson to keep in mind when we give up just a little bit of loyalty for just a little bit of technological convenience.