In this age of streaming video and movies-on-demand, one of the things I miss is the planning and anticipation that went into the simple act of television viewing when I was a kid.
Now, what I am discussing here is not the near PhD-level of knowledge that was required to program the average VCR back in the day. That kind of planning was something altogether different. The anticipation of watching a movie you had recorded was replaced by the anxiety of whether or not you had actually successfully set up your machine to record it. Oh, the pain of discovering that you’d taped Channel 11 instead of Channel 4 and were now watching Bowling for Dollars instead of Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster! God knows, when watching City Slickers, I felt Phil’s frustration and inadequacy.
No, what I am talking about is the simple joy of tracking down a particular episode or movie, discovering it was playing on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time, and having to put yourself in the best position to catch it when it aired. To do this you had to be willing to do a little work.
There were quite a few ways to see the television schedule as a whole and from that make your viewing choices. Daily newspapers carried a list of that day’s programs. Outside of a particular show’s broadcast time and channel, however, there was rarely any information given from which one could make an informed decision. I mean, sure, at 9 o’clock Channel 44 is showing a something called The Fool Killer, but what kind of movie is that?
(Actually, The Fool Killer is a great slice of Southern Gothic Americana starring Anthony Perkins…but that’s not important right now.)
For those less adventurous tv viewers who needed a little more information, there was the weekly tv schedule insert that came with the Sunday edition of their local newspaper. It was, along with the comics and the sports sections, always a part of my own personal “Holy Three” of Sunday reading. Most Sunday tv supplements offered a brief explanation of the movie in question along with the name of an actor or two. If you were lucky, your city’s newspaper had a “critic” on staff who would write reviews of upcoming shows or features on various actors or other show biz types.
If you were a fancy-pants, then your family subscribed to that ne plus ultra of home delivered television criticism: TV Guide. With the Guide, one got everything in one bundle: detailed daily tv schedules for the week (including morning, afternoon, Prime Time, and late night), in depth articles and interviews, and ads for movies-of-the-week and series that fairly popped off the page, grabbed you by the front of your shirt, and demanded you to watch.
My own family did just fine with the Sunday newspaper TV section, but my Nana Lewis subscribed to TV Guide. Let me tell you, I looked forward to our weekly Sunday visits to her Ambridge, PA, apartment not just because it was huge and allowed me space to run around or because she made the best roasted chicken I’ve ever had (she left the skin on, and it got so crispy and juicy and…yum!), but because I could spend time perusing the latest issue of the Guide. While the rest of the family sat around digesting their dinners and watching 60 Minutes (yawn!), I’d crawl behind my grandmother’s easy chair and go through the magazine page by page. Some of the ads were so scary, I was barely able to look at them let alone plan on watching whatever they were promoting.
All of the broadcast schedules could be neatly contained in the aforementioned media. In most television markets in the 1970s, there were only three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC (FOX didn’t come around until the late-1980s) — a public broadcasting station (home to Sesame Street, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and Mystery!), and maybe, if you were lucky, a smattering of independents (in Pittsburgh, we had WPGH-TV 53, which later became our FOX affiliate, and WPTT-TV 22). That was it. It wasn’t until cable television became more widely available that the channels that the average tv viewer had to parse jumped from half-a-dozen to nearly 80 by the end of the 1980s. Having access to a magazine like TV Guide became paramount to being able to keep track of everything that was available to watch.
In 1981, my family joined the ever-growing millions of American households that were jumping on the cable tv bandwagon. There was a FOMO aspect to it, but also, I’m sure, there was a social status to being able to afford the additional charges to watch what was essentially a free service. Sure, anyone could watch what was on network tv on a given night, but cable viewers, for around $15/month, had a score or more of other options available to them.
We didn’t stop at the basic cable package, however. For an additional monthly fee that was almost as much as the price of cable itself, we gained access to the channel that rewired my tv-obsessed brain: Home Box Office (HBO). Suddenly, I was able to watch movies the way god intended — uncut and uncensored. (Although, unbeknownst to me, due to the difference in the aspect ratios between a square tv set and a rectangular movie screen, I was still seeing them pan-and-scanned.) Not only did we gain access to a whole new world of tv viewing, we also received a new way of planning and anticipating that viewing: the monthly HBO viewer’s guide.
That little twenty-page booklet was a game-changer. Not only could I see what each movie was about, who was in it, and what it was rated, I could also see why it had earned the rating it had received. At the end of each movie’s description was a brief series of categories meant to give viewers the tools with which to judge what was appropriate to watch. For a burgeoning horror movie freak like me, however, these categories were just neon signs screaming “…EAT AT JOE’S…EAT AT JOE’S…EAT AT JOE’S…” Anything labeled “Adult situations, adult language, graphic violence, strong sexual content, and nudity” got a big mental checkmark placed next to it. (I couldn’t put a physical checkmark in guide for fear of alerting my parents to my viewing habits!)
So, what’s all this talk of TV Guide and HBO got to do with anything? Well, I’d like to invite you to take a little journey with me back to those days of riffling the pages of the HBO Guide and looking for interesting movies to watch and discuss. Back in the day, HBO cast its broadcasting net a little wider and took more of a chance on little-known flicks. It was through HBO that I learned what a “sleeper” was in movie terms, those movies that suddenly gain a lot of attention without being given much promotion. (Eddie and the Cruisers was probably the first movie I heard described as a “sleeper” that I can remember watching.) We can expect to see quite a few movies that have since fallen out of favor or never really received their due (or a video release). Maybe we can make a few of them belated “sleeper” hits!
I’d like to make this a monthly series of blog posts. (I’d really like to say “weekly,” but long-time readers of this blog will understand why I ain’t promising that!) The first month I’d like to look at is the November, 1981, guide. This would be the first month that my family subscribed to HBO, and it includes the very first movie I remember watching on the service — Don Knotts and Tim Conway in The Private Eyes. Here is a link to that month’s guide (thank you Internet Archive), so you can peruse it at your leisure.
I don’t plan on going at this series — which I am calling “The HBO Homebrewer” — in a linear way, and I don’t plan on sticking to the years that my family had HBO — which was mainly the early- to mid-1980s. We will jump around in time, like Billy Pilgrim (who knows, maybe we’ll end up watching Slaughterhouse-Five at some point, too!), going where the interesting films and programs are. Look for new posts the first weekend of each month.
Until then…I’ll save you space on the couch!
