Uncle Miltie is gone, and so is quality television
By Carl Heintze
Milton Berle's recent death has led me to speculate on what's happened in my lifetime to television.
What's happened, it seems to me, is mostly bad.
I decided this after remembering seeing Uncle Miltie in the early days of the medium, dimly visible in black and white on a flickering screen and yet still very funny--someone worth watching.
It was a time when there was a lot worth watching on television: It wasn't merely the novelty of having a performer or two in your living room at least once a week. It was the material they used--entertaining and informative.
It was things like Your Show of Shows with Sid Cesear and Imogene Coca, Omnibus and Playhouse 90, Edward R. Morrow, Jackie Gleason, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Wide Wide World and The Wide World of Sports.
None of these survived to the present. Not only do we no longer have television plays and documentaries worth watching, even much of public television has descended into hours of Antiques Roadshow and the constant amazement of antiques' owners at the prices their treasures supposedly will fetch at auction.
For comedy we must exist on such things as Friends and mindless sex sitcoms pitched at audiences somewhere south of 20 and just above the imbecile level. As if that wasn't bad enough, so-called reality shows, which aren't real at all, have been clogging the channels, all of them based on spite and malice.
Other realities seem mostly confined to sports broadcasts and the news. Monday Night Football staggers on, no longer with the late Howard Cosell, who could at least make it unpredictable. Perhaps John Madden will revive it. Television does sports well because sports is partly unpredictable. The viewer wants to find out the final score.
The rest of what television has to offer, aside from news--which in itself has become entertainment of a sort--really isn't worth watching. And, oddly enough, the effort to make news entertaining and newscasts entertainment has tended to make the news unreal. The war in Afghanistan or Kosovo is terrible for those caught in it, but for the rest of the world, it is something that shows up in the evening on the color screen. It blends in with the unreality of reality shows until it, too, is no longer real.
There's a reason for this, I suppose. In fact, there are probably several reasons. Despite the fact that television has become progressively more technologically advanced, there is simply too much of it. If one subscribes to a cable service or a satellite dish, there are literally hundreds of programs from which to choose.
Many of them are relics from the past. I Love Lucy, for instance, is still running somewhere, as is M*A*S*H, because both were consistently funny. Years after they were made they still are.
But television in its proliferation has become an enormous maw into which talent is poured and into which it disappears, never to be seen again. It is simply not possible to create A Show of Shows once a week forever, as all those immortalized by Neal Simon's Laughter on the 34th Floor realized.
And even Masterpiece Theater eventually runs out of literary classics to redo. Small wonder that producers have taken a fancy to "reality" shows. It's impossible to find enough writers to fill the demand for something worth watching. Instead, producers have taken to using real people in fake and forced situations as entertainment.
Someone once said television is not a medium anyway, it's an appliance. And we tend to treat it that way, turning it off and on like an electric range or a floor lamp to fill the empty spaces in our evenings. Pay-Per-View television is an effort to get beyond this, and it might work if its material was better. But it's not.
It's good to remember that the same thing happened to movies in the days before everyone went to Blockbuster to rent their DVDs and videotapes.
Like television, the film industry was a factory that churned out movies to fill the demand.
A few were good, some were mediocre and a lot were bad. We called the bad ones "B pictures" to indicate they were something less than eye-catching, but someone watched them anyway.
Television has descended to this level. A few programs now and then are worth watching, but most aren't. And so we study the news, making it a kind of entertainment. Besieged by commercials that grow ever more frantic for our attention, we turn the sound off and often we fall asleep under the stultifying influence of shows that don't go anywhere, shows that are slick without being memorable and flashy without being funny.
We miss you Uncle Miltie. We miss you a lot.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Willow Glen Resident. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
