How TV went from bad to great
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- Опубліковано 1 жов 2024
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*I screwed up the X Axis on the chart at 13:42 - it should go to 2023. I'm sorry.
More info and sources at bottom.
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Sources:
Well, thanks again to Gord - he proved to be more of a "source" than I anticipated. I originally just wanted to know some fun stories about running TV Shows on DVD (which he had), but I opted to include his insights instead. Very helpful. Thanks!
Source for TV size stat:
www.cioall.com/...
Newton Minow's speech:
www.americanrh...
Nice article about Lieberfarb:
www.nytimes.co...
Books are all affiliate links.
Book about Syndicated TV that set nice context (and gave me my early examples).
amzn.to/43n9Ilb
DVD Demystified helped me get my grounding.
amzn.to/3vlgV8Q
The Big Picture - book about Hollywood shifts (I mainly mined for Lieberfarb and DVD stuff).
amzn.to/3TiQd96
Darknet - nice book about the early days of Hollywood adjusting to the internet. Includes Lieberfarb looking like a genius.
amzn.to/3TAalVn
McLuhan - I thought this would be a big part of the video but then I read the book. It's academic dribble, totally outdated, minimally insightful. A bunch of gibberish. FIGHT ME IF YOU DISAGREE I'LL DEFEND MYSELF!
amzn.to/3TDuCt5
Obviously lots of Newspaper articles scatted in here too. Email me if you need one.
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My brain read that as Philed Wards.
@@MarshallLevini can't deny it
@@drsteevoI'm gay too
It was an absolute pleasure to chat with Phil for this video. I’m glad I gave him some usable material 😂
Omg I remember using your site! 😄
Real OG of the Internet
I remember getting into NewsRadio (1995-1999) a bit late into its run and wanting to catch up on the earlier seasons... Sure there were 2 reruns a day on whatever channel had it syndicated, but I wanted to mainline it faster. ;)
And so I found your site while searching for info about when the DVD sets from seasons 1 through 5 would be released. What a great resource, you did some great pre-youtube, pre-social media work with it, kudos Gord!
I used your site too
king
In Pompeii, there's preserved graffiti, rude crude and socially unacceptable things like you'd see in bathroom stalls today. There's a burnt dinner, stuck to the pot, in a trash collection area, or at least I think that was from Pompeii? I myself personally have thrown out a dish when I burnt the food so badly the dish was ruined too.
My point here is... Technology changes, time changes. But people? I firmly believe that humanity, as a whole, is largely the same as it ever was. And it's comforting, in a way.
The Pompeii graffiti is awesome, and still legitimately very funny even by today's comedy standards.
I get this same feeling when I see old film recolored, particularly the Lumiere series of candid films shot in various locations around the world. Contrary to the popular image of the turn of the 20th century as a dour, humorless, black-and-white place (because we usually only see dour, humorless, black-and-white photographs from that era), the recolored films show a vibrant, colorful, rich world full of characters as interesting, funny, and weird as we are today. You see a bunch of people in business suits having a snowball fight in the middle of the day, you see dockworkers in Istanbul goofing off and mugging for the camera, you see the crowded horse traffic in Paris that feels both distantly ancient yet also immediately familiar to the bumper-to-bumper congestion of modern cities. It's a brilliant way to humanize history into something we can personally identify with. Exactly as you said- times change, but people are still people.
We can back even further, to the dawn of written language, 4000 years ago. The Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets are full of the same sorts of stuff we humans still talk about, from taxes, to broken deals, to shopping lists. There's even a 3,500 year old "Yo Mama" joke/riddle, and 4,000 year old, "A dog walks into a bar" joke.
It's very humbling to realize that, all over the world, for thousands of years, we humans have been very much the same.
That's a great point. Ea Nasir is infamous for having the world's oldest surviving bad yelp review for his faulty copper, and all. 😂
This is one of my favorite things about learning about history! It makes me feel so much more hopeful and grateful for the human race; to know that even though millennia may pass, all of the joy, sorrow, curiosity, and boredom that I feel are the same feelings that folks have been experiencing for eons.
There's literally penises used as arrows to show you the directions to the brothel. I was there in August. 😅😅
DVD audio commentary was so cool! Directors, actors, cinematographers, I wish we got more of that now
i miss that too
What's to "miss"? Buy your shows on physical media like I do. @@PhilEdwardsInc
Literally on 99% of Dvd's, Blu's and 4k's. You only miss out on them if you're a streamer zombie.
This is why I signed up for Phil’s Patreon! He provides commentary on the episodes he posts, and they’re so good.
Thankfully you still get this for a lot of anime releases.👍🏼
The first UA-camr to use an Apple vision pro for something useful 👏
it has been returned
Amen!
🤣@@PhilEdwardsInc
@@PhilEdwardsIncI thought you'd keep it as a business expense 😄
@@sd-ch2cq gosh i could but that's too much to justify! (plus it ...didn't do some things the way that might have convinced me to incinerate money)
Please never stop making these videos. You undoubtably make the best video journalism content on the internet (in my opinion). You keep you content engaging, fun, self aware, and are never too over the top. It just feels authentic.
You should also check out Johnny Harris
@@jwcanes 🤓☝️I actually included “over the top” because of Johnny Harris. I’ll occasionally watch his videos but they’re getting pumped out like hot cakes right now and just feel too try hard I guess? I know it’s not a great diss but his content is starting to feel really formulaic even though is obviously high quality.
@@tryknight1426 Nobody opens a map like Johnny.
Twin Peaks doesn't get enough credit for helping the idea of contemporary television as a cinematic experience in its own right. Being able to accomplish that AND make fun of the very format you're working in is just wonderful.
hard to believe it's from 1990
I think the big miniseries of the previous decade have the bigger claim. Rich Man Poor Man, North and South, Shogun, The Thorn Birds, these were big deals.
@@TheActualCathalor the Granddaddy of them all, Roots
@@TheActualCathalLonesome Dove!
I can't wait to look back 10 years on this time and see in which specific ways we are currently corny, naive, and dumb. And how cool, superior, and smart we think we are then.
Honestly I think we all know what will be looked in the future as dumb and corny deep inside but we don't care because it is fun and socially acceptable
Basically all of so called prestige TV.
It'll be the political content. That's what dates the fastest.
The fact The West Wing isn't referenced here as one of the great TV shows is a giveaway sign of this.
We are currently very corny and dumb. It's obvious right now.
I feel like a great missed opportunity was the Tivo or DVR. For me and many others, that's when I got to actually enjoy and catch up to (in almost real time) prestige TV. I could watch Lost on a Friday night or 24 on a Sunday, which allowed me to actually watch shows with overarching plot lines and not feel like it was too late for me to catch up to everyone else.
TV is at the point (it almost got there with full cable packages years ago) where you have to create a sort of artificial scarcity in your own mind in order to not go crazy. If I actually sat down to watch the shear amount of "good" shows on these platforms that my friends tell me to, I'd surely become a lard pile and nothing else would ever get done.
Yes and no. People might recommend you a lot of shows, but that doesn't mean they are good, or that they are for you. In other words, you don't have to and probably shouldn't watch them.
@@philipgwyn8091I would argue the same applied with cable.
anecdotally, Farscape was the first show I was aware of where season long story arcs were integral to the experience.
and of course, it was screwed over by the network who kept moving its time slot. Back then, if you missed an episode or three, it was difficult to catch up.
prior to that, there were in-season story arcs but usually just 2 or 3 episodes for a single narrative.
That's a show I haven't thought about in years.
That is also the reason Firefly failed. It was aired out of order so it made no sense until you could get the box set.
@@grindcoreninja6527 The CGI parts look a little dated, but overall the show holds up a lot better than a lot of it's contemporaries.
@@Shampyon Is it on Hulu? I haven't been feeling well and I might just go to sleep while watching it.
Babylon 5. Just sayin'
I think it would be interesting to compare old TV of the 60s and 70s to other countries, such as the UK and France, to see what things could have been like with a different business model. TV has almost taken the opposite trajectory in places like this, going from high quality, state funded art that is still very well regarded, to cheap crap, now that things have become more commercial and deregulated
Do you have any idea why the opposite happened?
As one of your subscribers who graduated from high school in 1996, I remember going to Circuit City to buy a DVD player and a Sony portable cd player.
My grandfather had a TV repair shop, and he loved the fact that you could record TV shows to DVD's. When he died, I had so many TV parts it was so surreal.
Sorry for your loss. It's so sad that job like TV repairman are dead now. They make TVs so cheaply and low quality now, that there's no point in repairing them. It's cheaper to just throw it away, and get a new one. And most of them, you can't repair them, even if you wanted to. If you tell a kid today that there were people who owned stores where all they did was repair TVs, they would look at you like you had two heads.
@joeybaseball7352 Thank you. My grandfather was an awesome man.
As far as technology is concerned, that's just a product of time itself. I'm just happy to be alive to witness it
@@joeybaseball7352 you and @jenniferbates2811 might be interested to know that the TV through which I am typing these very words has been repaired thanks to the wonders of UA-cam. About five minutes outside of warranty, this big arse Samsung I bought started to wash out; black was gradually displaying as grey. I'm not a handy man, but I Googled it, found some Mexican video where the guy repaired a completely different Samsung TV that displayed the same symptoms, then bought the equivalent part for my TV from eBay. Sure, there wasn't really a 'repair' in the traditional sense, but a simple 'replace', but I was proud that I got the TV going again, and it's been fine ever since. Must be about 10 years now. Jennifer, if your granddad was here, I'd hope he'd approve.
The TIVO replaced the VCR.
@@Embargoman Not for everyone, but it's funny to see how much technology we've witnessed
It helps that TV (Studios, Producers, Writers, etc…) started to take the medium seriously in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Sure, shows like Hill Street Blues paved the way in the 80’s, but even it had a wink or camp with exaggerated characters and situations. Compare that to ER, The West Wing, CSI, Northern Exposure, or even Frasier, shows that respected their audiences and took the medium seriously.
St. Elsewhere. Just going to leave this here.
I keep thinking a lot about LA Law
To me, the noticeable shift in quality happened when actors who would normally have only wanted to be in movies started appearing more and more on TV. That was the real start of the 2nd golden age, and while Mad Men and Breaking Bad made it official, shows like Sopranos and Oz on HBO paved the way beforehand.
And yep, Twin Peaks and X-Files and LA Law and Northern Exposure and all that in the early 90s as well in turn paved the way for the HBO shows.
Please you have no idea what you're talking about. TV shows in the 20th century were better written than now. All that changed in that late 90s / early 00s period is the rise of HBO and its competitors (Showtime, etc) that tried to offer more risque, R-rated material at home. Stuff like Sopranos. That's not better or worse than traditional tv. Just different.
@@UnchainedEruption Never had HBO so can’t speak to that sector. But I was around in the late 60’s and 70’s and insipid shows like Gilligan’s Island, The Munster’s, Bewitched, Green Acres, The Brady Bunch, etc were hardly fine poster-children of the period (some exceptions: anything by Norman Lear, Mash, Carol Burnett Show). Even the Dramas of the 70’s were pretty hackneyed and mostly appreciated for their nostalgia. Then the 80’s brought us the evening soap operas (Dallas, Knots’ Landing, Falcon Crest, etc) Insert eye rolls here. 🙄🙄🙄
Sure, there were occasional standouts. But as some have described TV in the mid-to- late 20th Century, it was a “wasteland”.
We can thank Twin Peaks for a big contribution to quality television
log lady deserves a nobel
And Band of Brothers
This video absolutely gave me the nostalgic feels. In the early 2000's I absolutely remember using my university's high-speed internet to download episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one at a time. It took weeks, and several of us, but we got them all, and well before streaming entire tv shows was possible.
in a similar vein i remember getting west wing on dvd at the library!
You're right about a lot, but I think you missed the patient zero for content. Movies of the Week showed execs that Event TV didn't have to be live events or variety shows. Then in the 80s the mini-series became a big driver for cinema quality progamming shown over a couple weeks. They were also some of the first TV content to make the jump to VHS. I think a lot of 80s kids will have core memories of Roots sitting in a 2-3 tape box on the video store shelf. Not all of them were good, but they did drive the way studios made content and what eventually became Golden Age tv.
definitely a good roots argument i missed!
On top of that, I _definitely_ remember seeing a complete VHS set of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ for rent at a video store in the early-mid 90s. Before the big TV-on-DVD boom, the only long-running shows that got this kind of release were those with big-enough cult fanbases like Star Trek.
EDIT: And yah, I remember the occasional post-Roots miniseries rerun -- especially on cable in the 2000s (after Dad got HBO and Showtime). Some were shown more-or-less as-is on various channels (like _Shaka Zulu_ ), while others got edited into a 4- or 5-hour premium-channel movie (like _Goliath Awaits_ ).
Yeah, Lonesome Dove (on CBS, wow... my memories were faulty, thought it was an HBO miniseries ;D) was another one of those high-quality miniseries that helped pave the way to good TV on HBO and AMC and others and eventually streaming,
This also hits something I've been thinking about recently: it feels like old TV was a bunch of reruns all the time. So you have a few common tropes because it's the same shows. If you want to hit that syndication you do what others do.
If you asked me when did The Brady Bunch air I would have assumed the 90s since I grew up with it but the last episode came out in the 70s. All those Hannah Barbarra cartoons, same thing.
Carrying on my point: Old Gilligan's Island and I Dream of Genie were beside new Home Improvement.
This video made me look up a bunch of shows I thought I grew up on and most of them stopped airing before I was born. 🤣
Now shows can take more risks because they don't really care about syndication and getting picked up by a channel. They actually need a niche audience who wants to rewatch the episodes over and over and will sign up for the streaming platform that lets them.
yes this sounds similar to my tv diet
In the late 1980s MTV had a quiz show called "Remote Control" where college students answered trivia questions about TV shows. And so many of these questions were about shows like Gilligan's Island which was 20+ years old at that time.
@@bertcielen8709I've always said that MTV in 1908 was crazy. ;)
@@teamcoltra 1980??
Old television shows were great, too. Also, the episodes were standalone for many of them, so you did not have to watch the entire thing in order and at once, which is so time consuming and is why I do not watch much newer television. My favorite show is the 1960s spy series The Avengers. There was also Columbo, Kojak, Matlock, Perry Mason, The Saint, Coronation Street, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Emmerdale, The Prisoner, Danger Man, The Bill, The Professionals, The Sweeney, Only Fools And Horses, Fawlty Towers, Are You Being Served, Yes Minister, and so much more.
I agree with you that when a show is episodic it makes for an easier watch for a viewer. But I love shows with a story to tell, and the one advantage to streaming is that you can now watch every episode and in order. I think I prefer shows that has a mix of both styles, where it's episodic but there's an episode or a string of episodes that go further to tell a story and add a little complexity but if you missed those episodes you're largely still okay.
One of my favorite shows ever in Xena the Princess Warrior. I watched it in order and a lot of the episodes are good as stand alone but when you do watch it in order the storytelling about these characters and their world becomes much more impactful. It's great.
Yeah, and most shows today are far dumber than many of the ones you mentioned. But Phil has a narrative to sell.
Of course over 40 years some shows will be good, your list proves nothing, especially as half of them aren't actually "good" without nostalgia glasses. Breaking Bad stomps all over all of them it's not even close, it's a work of art on a completely different level.
@@DanLyndon
Have you ever thought that you are the stupid one?
I dunno, I kind of lament the move to highly serialized television over mainly standalone episodes that were self contained. I find it very difficult to watch or enjoy modern shows of the past 20 years or so for this reason. I’m probably in the minority though. Aesthetically I just don’t like the gritty, dark, single-camera look of modern television vs the bright, multi-camera look and feel of the past.
Hey that Admiral TV set is fully loaded for $499
I mean you've got a piece of furniture in two colour's, a 16" tube, for total whopping screen area of 155 sq inches, storage for your 33's 45s & 78 records, 360° rotating aerial and most importantly the Dynamagic AM/FM Radio.
Admiral was the sponsor of Sid Caesar’s first TV show. It was cancelled because the popularity of television was outpacing Admiral’s production capacity, causing them to end their sponsorship.
Maybe they should have scaled back on all the features.
That's funny, I'm a big West Wing fan and someone on the subreddit the other day justified a continuity error as the showrunners not expecting streaming binge-watching. I took that at face value, but the show was absolutely being released season-by-season on DVD at that point...
The West Wing lost a lot when Sorkin and Schlamme left, and the network tried to "fair and balance" it.
Apologize to Alf. Alf is an amazing sitcom. And he's a funny guy. I don't like the whole cat eating thing. Because I love cats. But I like Alf.
no disrespect intended to mr. shumway
@@PhilEdwardsIncif i didn’t enjoy your videos so much, i would’ve turned this off the moment i saw alf being disrespected.
@@mjisthegoat88all love to gordon
I feel like this can be expanded on. Because you talked about binge-watching. And how that gave you a sense of _freedom_ and allowed you to basically create your own network, where you decide what syndicated shows to air, and when you want to air them, just for an audience of you. And you bring up the perfect point of how network were forced to air a show once a week, based on their weekly timeslot, and based on the ads that bought commercial time. But now, all that _freedom_ of binge-watching, is being taken away. The whole point of binge watching, and streaming, was that there were no constraints of radiational TV. There were no set timeslots. There were ads. And you could drop all the episodes at once, and watch at your leisure. Not anymore. Now streamers are shoehorning TV constraints into streaming. And there's literally no reason for this, other than greed. Now instead of dropping all the episodes at once, they're releasing them one-by-one, on a weekly basis, and at a certain timeslot. Why? There are no timeslots on streaming. Why are the creating timeslots? So you stay subscribed longer. But that defeats the entire purpose of streaming. That's just cable. And now there's ads. Netflix promised that they would never ever put ads on their service. Now they have ads. Why? The whole point of streaming was that there was no ads. Greed. I can go on and on, about password sharing crackdown, removing programs, deleting completely finished movies, churn, etc. And for the churners, they're coming after you next. There are people who only subscribe when stranger things is on. Then they cancel. The next thing they're gonna have is long term subscription contracts, with early termination fees. Sound familiar? People tell me all the time, they would never do that. Yeah, and netflix said they would never ever ever put ads on their service. And that same person, who you mentioned in this video, Ted Serandos, was the same guy who went back on his word. So it's not even like there was a leadership change.
it does seem like we're getting a shift in the opposite direction...
There are also downsides with releasing a whole season at once. There were big cultural issues when huge hit TV series all dropped, and people had to construct social contracts around no spoilers etc. One episode a week is much better for gossip conversation and watercooler talk for a group of separate people to enjoy the experience of working through a series together! And it also keeps a show in the cultural eye for longer, rather than just being dropped and buried underneath 'content'.
Wait, did you just low-key dis Marshall McLuhan??
high key!
I started to skip your ad but then realized the quality to sub ratio is criminal keep up the great content!
I’m usually a silent viewer but at this point I think I’ve gone years without commenting on one of your videos and I just wanna say you’re one of the the most informative and entertaining UA-camrs I watch on a regular basis. I always know I’m going to learn something new every time I watch one of your videos. Looking forward to your future content!
ah thanks!
Great? It's all poorly re- scripted junk with lots of makeup and "pretty" people. There's no resemblance to reality in tv shows, or at least rarely.
Creative use of VR for tying everything together and for story telling.
thanks VAM!
Indeed, it really brings home how much _smaller_ TVs were back then, in a way I'd kinda forgotten!
Growing up in the 90s, even my family's "big" home-theater TV -- that our main VCR and a surround-sound stereo were connected to -- was "only" a 30-something inch CRT (I forget the exact size). Dad didn't see the point in spending more for a still-standard-def bigscreen; instead he waited until rear-projection _HDTV_ prices dropped far enough out of the stratosphere in the early and mid 2000s.
Love your videos Phil! First seamless Apple Vision pro usage i have seen where it makes sense!
"And as the best of these shows, Better Call Saul, proves."
Yup, yes, this man is truly aligned with that is right and true.
The real ones don't even mention Breaking bad, they go to Better Call Saul, which is made even better through Breaking Bad's existence.
This is extremely subjective though. The thinking that long serialized storytelling is better than its episodic counterpart is really just an opinion.
Episodic storytelling was designed to respond to a specific media environment (to allow for reruns), but so is episodic storytelling, which encourages that episodes flow into one another without giving the satisfaction of some résolution, which can hurt the pacing.
There’s a growing part of audiences that are getting tired of TV feeling like 10 hours movie and would like more episodic things. As with everything, variety tends to be a good thing, and sometimes, even for a single show, taking a bit from both approaches (like with X-Files) can be the answer.
Also, a lot of modern «prestige» TV comes with a specific style/feel that is really a matter of taste rather than objective quality, and I feel like a lot of production adopt this codes to feel appear qualitative even when they don’t have anything interesting to say.
I’m personally not a fan of this style and I much prefer shows like The Good Place which disregard those quality signifiers (in that case, preferring to adopt the style of a less respected kind of TV, sitcoms) but still tell story with a lot to say.
A big difference is that television can appeal to small pockets of the population - narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. The segmentation has led to some great shows. It has also resulted in a glut of “reality TV.” Thus, you can have “Better Call Saul” which is free from FCC limits and was watched by 2.2 million people per episode (on average). That rating is 5-6 times less than what the Brady Bunch would garner in its Friday time slot five decades ago. Thus, the question becomes whether the economics are there to support these shows. That is still to be decided.
The Brady Bunch predates cable. There were three channels to watch, and maybe a local one if you were lucky. Less competition.
@@vylbird8014 Agreed. Hence my “broadcasting vs. narrowcasting” statement. My point though was related to the economics. We think of these shows as quality. However, because of segmentation of the market, their audiences are much smaller and whether or not that such shows can be economically viable in an ever-changing marketplace. The audience size note was with respect to economics - not quality.
I would also argue that the VCR, and later the DVR played a role in this as well. Being able to make your own recordings of TV episodes allowed you to watch shows at your own pace, similar to what DVD would offer later. It was a bit more involved of a process though, you'd have to figure out when the episode you wanted to watch was playing, and then program your VCR ahead of time to record it. Still, it allowed you to watch a show at a time that worked for you rather than being restricted by what was scheduled. Before the VCR, that just wasn't possible. And then of course, with DVR, that process became much more simplified and automated. You could easily program your DVR to record every episode of a show as soon as it aired. I remember back in the day people would talk about watching shows like the Sopranos and Breaking Bad that way.
I think the shift also has to do with who has the money to commission/buy shows now. Even after the DVD boxset was well-established as a cultural phenomenon, there were still a lot of shows written in episodic format for syndication/to suit a TV network because a production's most reliable chunk of money comes from the network. It's only later on when streamers become the biggest buyers of TV shows that continuous becomes the norm and episodic would be a pleasant break...
I always think about the Battlestar Galactica episode of Portlandia when binging comes up. The scream at there not being any more episodes is comedy gold.
yep, I was surprised he didn't mention Battlestar as one of the DVD bingeworthy shows. ;)
After the retirement of Tom Scott you have filled that short and sweet informative video void.
My childhood self is very offended that you included clips of "A.L.F." and "I Dream of Jeanie" in with the "bad" shows! 😅
alf ate my cat :(
@@PhilEdwardsInc 😹 R.I.P. Phil's cat!
I found the leprechauns pot of gold!
🪙
I will not stand for this slander on classic television. TV was great back then, and it's terrible today. I will take classic TV over modern TV any day of year. All my favorite shows are 20+ years old. I don't have a single show, except for The Masked Singer, that I like that's
IMHO this video plays fast and loose with history.
For instance: TV shows had also been available on VHS before DVD appeared, e.g. Twin Peaks, The X-Files, various Star Trek shows, The Prisoner, Doctor Who, Farscape, etc.
Also, special features (commentaries, etc.) weren't invented for DVD, those were already available on LaserDiscs.
And plenty of shows had season-long story arcs, e.g. Twin Peaks, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, 'Allo 'Allo, (later seasons of) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Homicide: Life on the Street, Seinfeld,... Even older shows like Barney Miller or Hill Street Blues or St. Elsewhere or I Love Lucy!
So network TV already had sown the seeds of this revolution, long before DVD arrived. And DVD box sets didn't become a phenomenon until after the "second golden age of TV" had already started in the late 1990s, with cable channels like HBO and Showtime and FX etc. gaining in popularity and ordering their own exclusive content: Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica.
Plus there's the rise of HDTV (and its associated regulation in the USA) and the rapid evolution of TV technology.
Yes, the popularity of DVD box sets did play a part, but it was merely an accelerant in a process that had started started long before. You could even argue that DVD box sets appeared precisely because there already was a lot of available "content" (awful word) and a demand for it.
yeah the earlier vhs and dvd releases were mostly best ofs- they had to discover the full season pref and tech!
You're right. But that's like saying the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. Yes, we know. But the iPhone brought smartphones to the mainstream. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player. The Lisa wasn't the first PC. The Apple 1 wasn't the first computer.
@@joeybaseball7352 The first box set of a TV series was The X-Files in September 2000. By that time The Sopranos were already on the air, as well as The West Wing, Freaks and Geeks, Oz, Futurama, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Sex and the City,... And those are just shows from the end of the 1990s.
@@bertcielen8709 I actually had season 1 of a sitcom called Everybody Loves Raymond on VHS. by the time I got it, it had also been released on DVD. ButI just wanted it for the novelty. I also liked the show.
The thumbnail transitioning perfectly into the autoplay is so sick and under appreciated
I can feel I'm being coolsmartified
let it flow through you
Yes, many shows of the past seem silly and lame now. I was a "Happy Days" junkie growing up, but now I can only watch the first two seasons without feeling cringe. However, there were many shows that have stood the test of time, going all the back to 1959 with "The Twilight Zone". The 70's produced many comedies that are still funny today. Yes, "All in the Family" was very topical, but it is still one of the funniest comedies of all time. Other shows like "MASH" & "The Odd Couple" were smartly written and didn't rely on silly slapstick, ala Three's Company, for it's humor. The 90's of course brought us the brilliant "Seinfeld" and "Frasier".
To that final point, TikTok immediately reminded me of YTMND if it had been live action. It's largely about short looping videos and memes. There's a bit more depth and a LOT more diversity in both perspective and interests, but the fundamentals are very similar. And yeah, it's mostly silly, but cat videos and political comedy are ideal for that bite-sized format.
Or just the new version of Vine. YTMND became youtube poops. ;)
Twitter bought Vine and killed it. All the TikTok legislation right now would be moot if only Vine were still a thing. Don't get me wrong, it irritated me when it first became a thing as I preferred longer form content here on youtube, but I grew to appreciate some of the Vine creators over time... many of them are here on youtube to this day making a mix of short and long form content like Drew Gooden.
I wondered why I used to sit so close to the TV when I was playing the Sega Mega drive (or Genesis if you want to get American about this) but of course it makes sense. The TV was small, low, low res and of course the wires attached to the controllers were short as well!
You make a good point about how technology forms what we see on the screen today. On the other hand, I think you vastly underplay the business side of the industry. In the network days, the success of a program depended on the number of viewers it could draw. In the 70s, this lead to the networks to lower the common denominator in a frantic race to the bottom. Even with the advent of the DVD and, now, online streaming, this hasn't changed. We now have beautifully shot shows, which may use visual clues that weren't available to past TV, but they which still feature dumb, unsympathetic characters who behave nastily to other stupid people that can't be sympathized with. Yes, there are great shows, but it is becoming increasingly hard to sort them out of the vast crowd of the mediocre and the bad.
Alas, Sturgeon's Law applies to video as well as science fiction. SF critic Theodore Sturgeon wrote, when taken to task for producing so many bad reviews, "90% of science fiction is bad but, then, 90% of everything is bad."
Well, in the beginning, there was nothing. Then there was a word, and that word was “David”. He made Twin Peaks, and while it was good, it was poorly understood and under appreciated.
For a while, that was it.
Then, as the Bible analogy fell apart, the next round of Davids came along with The Sopranos and The Wire to show all these fools how this shit is done.
Lynch, Chase, and Simon. The key to the golden age of television is named “David”.
forget not the david of milch
The Sacred Name of David!
X Files:
underlying theme across all episodes, interesting characters and relationships, typically stand-alone content in each episode
Indeed, even many of the monster-of-the-week episodes still touched on the bigger arc in a B-plot.
"The one where Phil expenses a VR headset" (affectionate)
it has been returned.
I ain't judging 😂
Make it shorter. “The One with the VR Headset”.
Apple REALLY need to add image stabilization to recordings made on the Apple Vision Pro. It is almost unwatchable with all the small head movements.
I think the same tech is influencing trends in movies. Why go out to a movie theater when my TV is a fairly sizable 4K screen with good sound quality?
I'm only going out to a movie if it's an experience that's closer to an amusement park ride than "cinema." Sorry Marty S. a movie theater simply isn't the best viewing experience for a 3.5 hour long movie where some old guys talk about a hit they did decades ago. Not gaining anything from going to a theater for that and I'm losing the ability to pause the movie to get a snack or go to the bathroom.
But the kind of movie where the kids dress up in costumes to go see might be worthwhile. Or something like Avatar where it's best to see in 3D on a big screen. ie. Amusement Park Rides. What's considered cinema by Martin Scorsese is usually best watched at home.
Tech has changed, the business has changed.
Great show, I love when you make me think about something through a new lens
Interesting to complain about TV spokesperson's reading the sponsorships right before reading your own sponsorship. 🙂
Yesterday, I was literally wondering why hasn't Phil uploaded in 2 weeks, but good to know you now did
I actually prefer the older shows. Most of the new stuff that comes out is just about shock value. Nudity, violence, special effects. Its why breaking bad was a good show. Pure writing. Everything they make nowadays is basically a Novella. A lot of good shows turn into situational based romantic dramas after one season. Basically like a newage Brady bunch.
On the other hand, keep Sturgeon's Law in mind ("90% of _everything_ is crap"). Every era, genre, and style has its few best works, its many run-of-the-mill works, its so-bad-it's-good works that are worth chuckling at, and its bad-to-terrible works that are best avoided.
That sponsor transition was smooooooth.
Also, coolsmartification. Awesome.
It would be interesting tracing the evolution of the broadcast serial from radio shows (the hilarious sound effects, the sloooow pace) to broadcast TV to streaming. I do miss the incredible amount of material you could produce for a show on a broadcast budget, sometimes (twenty plus episode seasons instead of the six to twelve that's common today), but you can't deny the incredible polish and story-telling focus of the modern serial.
Audio only serials have even started popping up here and there... there are actually fantasy adventure podcast serials you can listen to in the car or at home. And I think that's awesome.
Those shows back then are the same as modern day TikToks, they are stupid, but that is because the makers have no control over what will happen to their content.
Cop Rock! God that’s so goofy 😂. They had to know it was bad when they were filming it… right…? 🤪
omg Phil. 🤣 That persona is 1000% creepy and weird. Please no. 😉
he is in digital heaven now
lol. Good riddance. We want the genuine article anyway!@@PhilEdwardsInc
God bless you Phil Edwards for adding the sponsor progress bar. Was that always there or is that new this video?
first sponsor!
@@PhilEdwardsInc oh my. I guess they are basically everywhere that I didn't even notice. Either way, thanks for the progress bar!
i always appreciate em as a viewer even if i don't skip, so thanks for letting me know it's helpful!@@dodaexploda
@@PhilEdwardsInc no problemo. Yeah, they are super helpful. If I ever get to that spot I'll be adding them also. And you're quite welcome.
Movies are still much better than TV. TV also is not as good as it was 15-20 years ago.
HBO was having a golden era. Band of Brothers comes to mind.
UA-cam was an idiot box too. People sharing videos of their cats and dumb home movies. But now we have inventive game shows, intelligent video essays, interesting talk shows, thoughtful documentaries and so much more.
And now sorry form content has all the dumb clips and videos
A missing piece here is computers. Not for streaming, but for driving the need to improve display technologies and bringing down their cost. You could connect a Commodore 64 to a TV, but it limited what was possible. As computers advanced they needed better monitors...
TV has been taking the plunge back recently. The Mad Men days are over.
Enjoyed the video and comments. Two things
I agree with putting ALF in the bad TV category. Some people might find deconstructionism to be edgy and artistic, but who are we kidding. It's a deconstruction of ET and muppets. children's stuff
I would have thought there would be a mention of LOST. It wasn't the first of its kind, but it was the show that broke the strangle of 'reality' tv during the 00's and popularized the long form serials that everyone makes since then.
that is totally my fault for concision - Gord thoughtfully brought up LOST and even told a funny anecdote about how ABC flew a bunch of people to Hawaii for the DVD debut. It was funny because Gord had to do catchup, so he watched LOST on the plane to Hawaii, slightly freaking out his seatmate.
4:50 “Colour TV’s weren’t mainstream until the mid 60s” … Yeah.. in Merica.
Not so for the rest of the world.
The first colour TV in Australia did not come out until March 1975. And wasn’t mainstream until the early 80s.
Britain had color TV in the late 60s. Zimbabwe started color TV after independence.
I remember Chuck Jones of Loony Tunes talk about how most cartoons (barring his own, ofc) were just illustrated radio shows. The primary medium at play wasn't the animation in these cartoons (I'm thinking he was referring to like Hanna-Barbara cartoons, which developed more advancements in cartoon budgeting than unfettered artistic merit). I wonder if the reason was that Loony Tunes were shown in theaters while Mr. Magoo was shown on, well, a radio with a small screen for reference.
I like that i thought that and then phil proceeded to talk about how old TV's were programmed the same as radios, because like they were radios. i think technologically, with not only VCR's, but the sort of projection TV's we saw in the 90's and 00's were the tip of that spear, I'd wager.
I thought "Idiotbox" referred to people being passive consumers for hours and doing nothing while staring at a box (television).
Amazing documentary, thanks a lot! 💜
The background music is a bit too loud though, if you ask me. Especially during the softer interview sections
👍
Some things in the world just work the way they are, they are very likely in their ultimate form.
Shoes have changed over the years, but so far we’ve pretty much reached the ultimate form of shoes. You can decorate them in different ways, you can make them less shoe like, but it’s hard to imagine a shoe that would be better as a shoe than the shoes we make today.
Pants have changed over the centuries, different fasteners different standards were with a waste is, different styles certainly. Styles of pants will continue to change, but it’s hard to imagine an innovation of pants that jumps from where we are to something that is different from current pants as going from a loincloth to pants was at that time.
Books, as in a permanently fixed text on a substrate has probably gone as far as it can go. Now the e-book and e ink have taken the idea of books to a new level. But the book itself has so far reached its pinnacle as far as holding something in your hand that has no power that can convey information.
One wonders television/movies has also reached its pinnacle. That is the say, televisions have gotten flatter and flatter, larger and larger, clearer and clearer. They’ve moved from Broadcast media to physical media to streaming media. It’s hard to imagine what we consider television and movies to make any great leap. In other words, watching a story told with 2-D images from a technological standpoint seems to have reached its pinnacle as well.
Something like Apple vision or quest or AR or VR technologies are not better forms of television. Maybe there are some advantages, but it is no longer TV. Having a virtual screen might be beneficial on some level, but not if you have to wear a huge thing on your face.
In other words, the drawbacks of AR and VR are not gonna be made up for by having an ultra wide screen television experience. It has to provide something more. There are some folks who do get excited playing VR games with a heavy headset. But most people aren’t really interested in that. Just doesn’t provide something that makes the drawbacks worthwhile, with their cost, weight, dizziness, blurriness, Etc.
For VR, the ultimate endpoint is not having to have a headset at all, and probably having some kind of digital shunt that goes directly into your brain so that you can experience things without limitation.
Short of that, it seems to me that the application for this kind of technology is AR. And some of the things that the Apple vision does bears this out. The coolest thing that I’ve seen so far is the ability of Apple vision to consistently accurately pin things into the real world Without having to place codes on the walls. So for example adding a timer to a pot on your stove seems like a potentially useful application, and indicative of other things we haven’t thought of yet.
The problem so far is that Apple vision is still quite large, and very expensive.
However, once apple vision is essentially a set of slightly heavy sunglasses, this AR functionality will in fact change the media landscape.
That said, it’s not going to replace television. I’m not sure it’s even going to replace storytelling. There is something about that rectangular window into another world that exactly just fits what we need from storytelling. AR is a different animal entirely, and is more kin to an escape room or some other physical world entertainment .
And even if you do watch a television program on a 90 inch virtual screen instead of a headset, you haven’t really changed anything. It’s still television on a 2-D screen. It might be cool, but it isn’t new.
ha you sound a little like this guy i follow on twitter/newsletter - lindyman. you might like him if you haven't heard of him already
I watched the entire sponsorship ad, but I appreciate the progress bar you included
👍
One thing they can't do with new tv technology is make old tv look as good as it did on those CRT sets. You get weird interpolation, color banding, digital artifacts, etc. Also, having to upgrade your tv is annoying.
yes i went down a rabbit hole on crt gaming a while ago and got somewhat convinced!
Ok so how does that explain the Simpsons? Oh wait maybe it does…
Growing up in the 80s/90s in the UK - my experience was quite different to the US centric story here. We DID have prestige drama courtesy of the comparatively well funded BBC eg the seminal Colin Firth ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or the famous ‘Brideshead Revisited’. Back then US shows were seen very much as the poor cousin to the UK shows.
I was recently thinking about how shows used to have to be planned around ad breaks and other programming as you mentioned when i recently rewatched Naruto. When "streaming" the show as we would do nowadays, you can still tell where the ad breaks were supposed to go
Heck, I'm still tempted to _take_ short breaks in such shows, to not throw off the pacing. 🙂
All the shade at McLuhan but your conclusion was basically "The medium is the message". 😂 Love your stuff!
I stand by the shade!!
Watching bad TV reminds you why some folks 'never watch TV'. Yeah I get it.
I think another reason TV has to be good nowadays is that TV shows have a lot of competition now (UA-cam for example). Before hand, TVs were the only form of digital media.
Heck, TV wasn't even _digital_ for most until the '90s and 2000s. Starting around 1994, subscription satellite services were the first to broadcast all-digital, to get the receiver down to the small-size dish used by Dish Network or Sky to this day. Digital over-the-air broadcasts started in the late '90s with the first HDTV channels, and cable services started going to digital cable boxes around then too. FInally, analog TV broadcasting started being shut off altogether in the late 2000s, to free up radio spectrum for other uses like cell phone data.
i got trashed in comments on another video for saying 24 was one of the shows that made tv good (and the reason something like Lost could exist). i count myself vindicated for the show being mentioned here. nice video, ridiculous about of research and well done for finding a way to write off the vision Pro as an expense.
you are vindicated not by me alone, but also by gord!
I like your new style, it’s like a more energetic Knowing Better. Glad to see you finding your style.
Can't wait for next year's Smashmouth Lecture!
"In a way, aren't we all all stars..."
As soon as you said White Lotus was a "great" show, you lost me. Shows today have too.much CGI and garbage action. They also won't invest in anything risky like they did years ago.
there's no cgi in it at least!
Yeah, it only has horrible acting. Sleepy time storylines. Its Dallas but with rich bad people.... Oooooooooo.
Older shows had WAY better action scenes. The storylines may have been predictable but the action was usually real and top notch. They cannot recreate action like that anymore because stunts and insurance is too expensive.
Tons of older shows had great action like:
Stingray
Knight Rider
Miami Vice
VIPER
Hardcastle And McCormick
Quantum Leap
Magnum PI
ER
The list goes on. If I am wrong, the they wouldn't remake these shows. Many of today's shows are just over the top drama, days of our lives shows about broken homes and drugs.... dumb and boring..... The characters are usually cast because of nepotism as well....
And don't forget the reason why TV is so much better now; more money. The DVD/Netflix revolution brought a lot more cash into the game to fund much better production values. Great vid! I grew up in the 60's/early 70's laying on the floor watching tv close enough to get an almost cinema like experience. "You're gonna fry your brain being so close to that damn idiot box!", Mom on any given day!
Owning just ONE entire season of any average tv show (remember, 26 episodes on average) on VHS was basically something 1% of the fans would do. The majority would try to tape them from broadcasts in order. But while Laserdisc never got past its hifi niche, dvd took the template of stamping a disc to manufacture it (the CD brought that 3 years AFTER the laserdisc). Boom. Now it was much cheaper to own a show on dvd and each season wouldn’t occupy an entire closet of tapes.
indeed. i remember seeing those full season vhs collections in the library sometimes - it was massive!
@@PhilEdwardsIncAnd I remember seeing an endcap shelf full of a complete VHS set of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ at a video store in the 90s. It was the _only_ long-running show I ever saw that for as a kid. ...Which kinda makes sense; before DVD, few shows had a big-enough devoted fanbase to make such a set worth releasing (by the studio) or renting (by the store).
Reminds me of when I was in middle school. I'd come home and watch Cheers and Magnum P.I. Tough to talk to kids in the mid-2000s about Norm Peterson hiding from his wife
"I thought it was kinda dumb" while citing a source, lol
it actually made me sort of mad, because when i was looking it up beforehand i was running into all these articles that were like, "the prescient genius of 'understanding media.'" and then i read it and was like, this is super-dated gibberish.
sometimes a good quote comes from a bad source
@@PhilEdwardsInc was it at least interesting from a "this is how the past saw things" perspective?
@@PhilEdwardsInc Putting Marshall McLuhan on blast is a pretty bold hot take. When someone is thinking decades ahead sometimes it doesn't read like poetry. He was trying to explain his ideas about the future using the language of the day. I imagine Ada Lovelace probably sounds dated as well but that doesn't mean she wasn't a genius who predicted how computers would work.
@@yondie491yes for sure
Nice work as always, Phil. And thank you for bringing back fond memories of Mom engrossed in her favorite shampoo operas.
The titles of some of those random show options hit a little close to home. Curious.
I am a Boomer, I remember (and loved) shows such as "I Dream of Jeannie". I stopped watching TV entirely around 2010 because there was nothing interesting. They tried to bring people like me back by creating reboots, such as Night Court. But these are too few and far between. IMO, life is too full of drama already - I'm not going to seek it out in the name of "entertainment."
It is worth mentioning that Kent State University developed LCD technology which created the boom for the bigger, thinner and eventually cheaper TV sets which we see today
didn't know that!
I feel like my data was mined to make this video specifically for me.
What was the song that comes in around 6:05? It's a real jam!
coolsmartification a PETV production (tm)
Wow. I’m in my late sixties and lived through all this, but you’ve given it a through line that explains what I never really realized as it was happening. Btw, we WERE corny, naive and dumb even it it wasn’t all our fault. (Side comment: I remember being so stressed that my parents wouldn’t pony up for a color tv until way after everyone else. Kids have an eye for revolutionary tech! Reminder: take to the grandkids’ advice.) One of yr best, Phil! Thanks!
haha this is true! i remember having a similar jealousy of the projector-style tvs that were huge (and i never had)
Please so something on ‘syndicated’ content. How did it start etc
yeah it's interesting the book i linked brings up how it really started with newspaper wire services and went to radio
I agree with most of your points, but when I was a kid this magic thing happened: VHS and VCRs players. The thing about them that I loved the most was the ability to RECORD from the TV. So I recorded a lot of episodes of Star Trek, films and documentaries. And I confess that, decades before torrents and Pirate Bay, well.... I copied a LOT of films by plugging two VCRs and making "backup copies". I memorized movies (Raiders of the Lost Ark I know every line). But... yes, all of this was happening in a time of small screen TVs (compared to today), 4:3 formats and bad sound. Today I think we are suffering from too much...everything. Too many series, too many (bad) movies, too much imagens. We have gigantic TVs, but the last NETFLIX MOVIE: THE MOVIE is the same old badly written, poorly directed thing.
I want to watch President Dog so bad now!
Next, show how movies goes from great to trash? ;)
That Better Call Saul did not win an Emmy is headscratching.
agreed