Television – Page 16 – Auxiliary Memory

The New Normal (NBC)–Now and Then

The New Normal – I love the title of this NBC show that premiered back in September, it says so much. Makes you ask, “What was the old normal?” Is there such a thing as normalness? Having grown up back in the 1950s during the Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best normalcy, I can remember a long parade of new television seasons where Hollywood tried to capture the new normalness of the American family every Fall for a half century.

(Some of the more famous shows about the American family from the last 50 years were My Three Sons, Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, All in the Family, The Waltons, An American Family, Good Times, Little House on the Prairie, The Jeffersons, Eight is Enough, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Our House, Married with Children, Full House, My Two Dads, thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, Roseanne, Life Goes On, Family Matters, The Simpsons, Home Improvement, My So Called Life, South Park, That 70’s Show, The Sopranos, Family Guy, Freaks and Geeks, Malcolm in the Middle, Grounded for Life, Two and a Half Men, Weeds, Big Love, Jon & Kate Plus 8, Breaking Bad, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Modern Family, Parenthood)

But were Ward, June, Wally and the Beav ever a normal family? ABC, CBS and NBC painted America as if everyone were WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon protestants) in the 1950s, and even though my family was just as waspy, George, Virginia, Becky and Jimmy looked and acted like nothing we watched on TV. America wasn’t lacking in people of color or various sexual orientations back in that black-and-white TV era, television just didn’t report on their normal day-to-day lives. Some of those old gay couples getting married today were together back during the old normal.

My parents were on the ass end of middle class, drank enough to be called alcoholics, fought and smashed things like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and my and I sister ran wilder than any switch or belt could control. Although television didn’t chronicle my family or anyone I knew, I think it did influence American society, and may have even shaped us. TV showed us there was no such thing as normal. Have you ever seen your family on TV?

Conservatives might swear to God that television news is biased to the left, and shows like The New Normal and Glee are propaganda for the liberal lifestyle, but television news reporting and fictional shows have always trailed the changes in society – they have never led the way. Television has always been the fantasy of how we want to live. I think America has always wanted television to chronicle the countless types of people that we are, and the accidental byproduct of all this voyeurism was that we have adapted to diversity. Real life strangers would flair up your xenophobia, but put that same subculture or ethnic group on TV and they became endearing.

Real life and television life seems to have some kind of reverb going, with television echoing changes in society and stimulating society with its feedback. The New Normal is about two gay men, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha) hiring Goldie (Georgia King) to be the surrogate mother of their baby. This arrangement is far from new in the real world, or even on TV, but it’s taken for granted normalcy is a way to convince all those Americans who haven’t gotten the memo, that this is the new normal.

I find The New Normal just as comforting and pleasant as Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet back in 1958. These happy families, both then and now, make me feel good and wish all families were just as happy. Like Modern Family, to which The New Normal is often compared, these and other feel-good liberal shows are designed to make us feel better about life in America in 2012, they are our Sunday School classes about how to be good people. Our economic lives might suck, but at least we’re evolving as accepting and empathetic beings.

Sadly, this doesn’t work with everyone in our polarized society. We’re still fighting the war between extreme religious belief and the Enlightenment. I wonder what Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau would make of our modern times, and what philosophical issues would they make out of our television shows?

That’s the thing, I don’t think television initiates social change, but soothes us to accept it. Many Americans don’t like gays or gay marriage, but as a whole, those attitudes are changing. Last October, GLAAD released a report showing the 2012 television had the highest percentage of gay LGBT characters ever. Not only are there more gay characters on TV, gay characters are finding more fans, and even the hateful grumpy people who protest their outrage are becoming fewer.

Television makes us comfortable with new ideas. Television is an agent of integration, and I don’t mean that in just the racial integration sense, but in the integration of all change that’s going on in society. Television is the spoon that stirs the American melting pot.

Television has been programming my social awareness since the 1950s, and it’s fascinating to contemplate all the changes the TV has made to America in the last fifty years. If we had a time machine and could go back to 1962 and convince NBC to show The New Normal to America back then, how would it have been received? Of course the show would be seen as a kind of science fictional view of the future. There’s more new to The New Normal than two gay guys living together, and besides they did have gay people in 1962 so it wouldn’t have been a totally new concept, but they didn’t have surrogate mothers, or iPhones, video games, an African-American president, global warming, etc. Change is relentless.

Remember, 1962 was before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The pill had just been released a few years earlier and it still hadn’t made it’s social impact. If you watch The New Normal it has an whole spectrum of liberal ideals integrated into the show that would have been overwhelming to the “normal” people of 1962 to digest. On the other hand civil rights and feminism had already begun by 1962, so maybe the viewers of 1962 would connect the dots between then and now. And even though America was a technological giant in 1962, I just don’t think those 1962 TV viewers had any clue as what computers would do to our society.

Today we have hindsight to see how far we’ve come. All too often we judge the citizens of the past by the morality and political correctness of today, but let’s reverse the tables. How will people fifty years from now look back on us in 2012 and will they judge us harshly? I’m sure in 2062 there will be a sitcom that’s the equivalent of The New Normal, and if we could see that show today, how would we react?

Liberal education marches on. Will we ever reach an end and be perfectly enlightened? I’m sure the seeds of future liberal standards of political correctness exist in our day-to-day life now. Our treatment of the environment and animals will horrify our descendants. Our polarized politics and fundamental religions will make the people of 2062 scratch their heads in amazement wondering how we could have been so irrational. Our wasting of natural resources will be judged criminal. But those are the easy issues. What are the harder ethical issues we can’t discern with our quaint old-fashioned minds?

What will be the next new normal?

JWH – 12/10/12

When I Was a Remote Control

If the remote control had been invented before 1951 I’m not sure my parents would have had me and my sister Becky. As toddlers, my parents taught us how to change the channels on our Sears black and white TV, so they could laze on the couch smoking their Camels and Winstons and drink Seagram 7 and Canada Dry ginger ale while we twirled the knob to locate Topper or Have Gun Will Travel.

Kids born today come out of the womb with giant IQs, able to handle hundreds of stations and dozens of gadgets. I wonder if my four-year old self from 1955 could have competed with a 2012 four year old at all? If my parents were still alive, I wonder if they’d long for the days when things were simple without all these goddamn gadgets. Life was easier with a Kid Channel Flipper, or the Rug Rat Reciting TV Guide. Oh yeah, that was another childhood duty – to memorize the TV schedule and let my folks know when their favorite shows were on. It’s also why my parent’s generation had so many kids. We baby boomers were conceived to manage TV technology for the Greatest Generation, or the radio generation.

Today, anyone with a finger can change the channel, and onscreen guides have made the Rug Rat Reciting TV Guide go the way of the Bad Child Switch Fetcher. If political correctness had been invented before 1951 and my parents told that kid herding couldn’t involve belts and switches, they’d definitely been willing to get off their Brooks Brothers covered butts and do their own TV knob twirling.

I’ve seen some real cultural and social changes in my lifetime due to fantastic inventions like the TV clicker and screen guide. Young people really have no idea how hard life was back in the 1950s. Toddlers today are whizzes at iPads, but could they have dialed a rotary phone? OK, I admit they could – modern tot nerds would beat wee baby boomers at any kind of pre-school smack down. We never had any of those fancy Sesame Street advantages, but we did have to work harder for less rewards, which us boomers like to brag is character building.

TV was dinosaur primitive back then, with small low-rez screens that frequently got out of adjustment so you had to fine tune the vertical and horizontal hold knobs just right to see a steady, but grainy black and white picture. And that picture had visible scan lines. There was an array of other knob-less adjustment dials inconveniently located on the back of the set that required a screw driver to twist and mirror to see the results. If you were too lazy to get the dressing mirror off the back of the closet door you could try to talk someone into describing the picture while subtly adjusting the settings from verbal clues. What a lost art!

Also, TVs had vacuum tubes instead of solid state devices, and when a tube blew you had to get dad to drive you to the 7 Eleven. While he waited drinking his Schlitz in the Pontiac, you dashed inside to run the tube tester and hopeful find the arcane coded replacement in the test cabinet. All this just to see some show call Huckleberry Hound that was so moronic you’d poke your eyes to avoid seeing it today but your seven year old self thought state of Eisenhower era pop art brilliance.

But back to the future – or our present. Even though today’s TV pictures are rock solid, hi-rez, and huge, the show selection takes more brain power to select than that famous wild hair guy figuring out general relativity.

Now this brings us to the greatest invention in television history: Netflix streaming. It’s not perfect, but it’s almost as easy as Samantha’s twitch of her cute magical nose. If they could only combine Siri with the Netflix interface, and we could sit in our recliners like Captain Picard and tell the HDTV what show we wanted and then say the words, “Make it so” we’d all reach video nirvana.

Recently I had to anxiously wait for Netflix to send me Blu-ray discs of Season 3 of Glee after watching Season 1 and Season 2 via their streaming service. Don’t get me wrong, a Blu-ray picture and sound is Breaking Bad better than the current state of Netflix best streaming resolution, but the convenience of clicking to Glee on the Roku is Friday Night Lights goodness.

What a philosophical conundrum! Fantastic picture versus fat-ass lazy highness. Well, you know which one we’ll always choose, don’t you?

Music on iTunes iPhones is 5 transistor* radio crappy, but it’s what people prefer over the pain-in-the-ass fetch the CD and put it in the player hard work.

Streaming video and music is going to kill off the CD, DVD and BD disc. So it goes, as Mr. Vonnegut used to say. Vinyl, formerly known as the LP, is making a technological comeback, even through it requires the physical effort of storing albums, cleaning them, and playing them on mechanical players. I’m sure it’s a passing fad.

If you pay attention to technology there are two consistent trends. First, the evolution towards fewer moving parts. Second, the evolution of ease of use. We’re all heading to a future of moronic simplicity and slothfulness.

I love the CD and Blu-ray disc for their wonderful high resolution music and video, but they are goners. Resting on my big motionless butt enjoying the brilliance of streaming music and video will always overcome the theoretical desire for high fidelity and high definition.

My wife and I never had children. We never needed them. We grew up with the remote control. If you charted this essay on a graph, it would show the decline of civilization. Well, like I said before, so it goes. If you don’t believe we’re actually devolving with all this technological evolution, just picture this: The Victorians had to play their own musical instruments if they wanted to hear music. Even cavemen could drum like crazy man. Imagine what Spotify would have done to the British Empire.

Stream with the flow. Make it so.

JWH – 10/22/12

* When I was a kid, the cutting edge technology of portable sound was the transistor radio. They came with a single mono earplug, and you listened to AM radio. Of course 1961-1968 AM radio was the peak of musical genius in the 20th century. These transistor radios were about the size of a iPhone (which by the way have millions of transistors) and a tinny sound. 50 years later, I think portable sound still sounds tiny and tinny. Listening to The Beatles on an iPhones makes them sound like they are five inches tall.

I Need A New TV Show!

I just finished 70 episodes of Glee and I need a new TV show to feed my TV addiction. I’m not a super binger like those described by John Jurgensen in “Binge Viewing: TV’s Lost Weekends.” This Wall Street Journal article reported on heavy weight TV bingers like Chad Rohrbacher who watched 22 straight hours of Breaking Bad in one sitting. I’m a fly weight when it comes to binge TV watch, just watching 2-3 episodes at a time. At the end of the day, I love to have one or two episodes of a fabulous TV show to watch before I go to bed. And if they’re really fantastic I might stay up past my bedtime to watch a third.

Having a TV series that covers several TV seasons is like having a very long novel to read before falling asleep. I recently read Anna Karenina, which clocked in at 42 hours on audio. That’s about three seasons of Big Love or The Sopranos.

Before I watched all of Glee I watched all of Breaking Bad. I go months without a TV show fix because I can’t always find a series insanely great enough to trigger the addictive response. I really hate when I don’t have a TV show to look forward to each day. I’m in one of those dry periods now, and I need a new TV show! I ache with TV withdrawal.

That’s kind of sick when you think about it – I should use these long periods on the wagon to go cold turkey and break this habit, but I don’t want to. I should work on my novel. I should write on my blog. I should finish the essays I’m writing. But instead, I want to veg out with another epic TV series. I know this is the worst kind of escapism – I’m turning off reality and switching on virtual reality. But this kind of TV is fiction at its very best, and I’m a life-long fiction junky.

Here’s my problem. I need GREAT television to feed my addiction. Merely good, is not good enough. I thought after Friday Night Lights, Downtown Abbey and Breaking Bad that I’d never find television that good again. Then I discovered Glee. Now, it’s not that Glee is better than those shows, but the shear creative innovation that went into Glee made it stand out. I was hooked on it’s extreme novelty. Now, I’m going through Glee withdrawal.

It seems every TV series I consume must be better than all the ones before it. And sadly, re-watching old favorites don’t ease the cravings. Neither do shows that are self-contained in each episode. I need long story arcs. I need my nightly soap opera.

From the WSJ article, Jurgensen describes the social change that’s going on.

Binge viewing is transforming the way people watch television and changing the economics of the industry. The passive couch potato of the broadcast era turned into the channel surfer, flipping through hundreds of cable channels. Now, technologies such as on-demand video and digital video recorders are giving rise to the binge viewer, who devours shows in quick succession—episode after episode, season after season, perhaps for $7.99 a month, the cost of a basic Netflix membership. In the past, such sessions required buying stacks of costly DVDs ($66.99 for seasons one through four of “Mad Men”) or special broadcast marathons.

Having a great TV show to look forward to each week was the standard way I watched TV for almost fifty years. Then came DVD box sets and that changed everything. Thinking of TV as whole seasons was a game changer.

Now with Netflix, where you can pick a show like Glee and have 66 episodes waiting to be seen one after another. That’s another quantum leap in TV watching. Is it good or bad? I don’t know. I don’t care. I love it. It’s better than binge eating, it’s even better than drugs, may even be better than sex.

I think the first TV show I watched from first episode to last in a binge fashion was Northern Exposure, when it was first syndicated. I printed an episode guide off the Internet and watched its entire 110 episodes. After that I watched seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starting with season one and catching so I could watch season seven live. Battlestar Galactica was another show I caught up with before watching the last season live. That also happened with Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights. I watched the final season not on cable, but on Amazon, buying the new episodes a day late. I prefer to have shows I binge on to be finished, or have many successful seasons.

So, if you know of a great TV show to recommend, please let me know. Here’s are the ones I’ve already discovered – in no particular order.

Breaking Bad
Glee
Friday Night Lights
Big Love
Sopranos
ER
Dexter
Weeds
Californication
Six Feet Under
Deadwood
Mad Men
Hell on Wheels
Dead Like Me
Most Masterpiece Theater shows
Battlestar Galactica
Lost
United States of Tara
Nurse Jackie
True Blood
Rescue Me

JWH – 10/21/12

Why Does Hulu Plus Show Commercials?

I used regular Hulu.com off and on for over a year before subscribing to Hulu Plus. I was used to the commercials and accepted them. I don’t expect to get anything for free. However, when I started paying $7.99 a month I assumed the commercials would disappear. That didn’t happen. Why? Here’s what they wrote at the Hulu site:

“We include advertisements in Hulu Plus in order to reduce the monthly subscription price of the service. Premium content — especially from the current TV season — is not only expensive to make and license, but we also want to compensate our content partners fairly for the valuable entertainment they provide.”

I imagined that Hulu Plus would be like a premium cable channel and be commercial free. That’s turned out to be a false assumption on my part. But is my assumption that ads are natural for free content, but paid content should be ad free not valid? I’m watching the same shows, so why am I paying $7.99 a month? What am I getting that makes the plus in Hulu Plus?

To get the free Hulu I have to watch it through a computer. Until my HTPC died, I had a computer to watch web content on my big screen TV. I also used this computer to record shows. It was like a home built DVR. Until I replace it, I’ll have to reply on a Roku box to see web content on TV, but the Roku doesn’t offer free Hulu, just Hulu Plus. So essentially I’m paying $7.99 to stream through the Roku.

I had assumed and hoped when I sprang for Hulu Plus the commercials would go away. Boy was I wrong. Now that I’m using Hulu more, the commercials stand out. They are getting annoying, especially since they seem to show the same ones over and over.

I love streaming Netflix because a hour TV show is only about 42 minutes. On Hulu Plus they aren’t back to a full hour, but I’m losing sleep because I’m staying up later every night because of the commercials. Commercials that I hate to watch.

Hulu Plus is a marginal service for me. I gave up cable years ago. I love watching TV shows on DVD and Netflix streaming, but if I want to watch anything current I have to watch it live over broadcast TV, pay Amazon $1.99-2.99 an episode, or get it from Hulu Plus. So my $7.99 pays for a five week window to watch current shows. If I miss Revolution on Monday nights at 9pm, I can still watch it for five weeks. I can do it for free on the computer and pay for my supper by watching commercials.

Or I can pay $7.99 a month, AND WATCH COMMERCIALS, if I want to use my Roku box connected to my TV. I won’t shout that’s unfair, because that’s how Hulu plays the game. I’ve just got decide if I want to pay twice for the convenience.

It is true Hulu Plus has more shows, and for some shows, complete runs instead of the most most recent five episodes.

I’ve read that Hulu Plus streams at 720p instead of 480p, and that is indeed worth some money.

This still doesn’t answer why Hulu Plus, a premium service, has commercials. That bugs me.

I’ll use it for a month or two, and see if I get addicted to it, but I tend to think I’m going to cancel my subscription. I really hate paying for commercials.

Hulu Plus should be free if we have to watch commercials. It’s only delayed broadcast TV, and unlike DVR TV shows, we can’t skip over the commercials.

JWH – 10/9/12

The Dangers of Building Your Own HTPC and Living Without Cable TV

As I reported earlier in FYI: DIY-FIY (Do-It-Yourself, Fix-It-Youself), my HTPC started crashing intermittently, the worse kind of electronic failure to troubleshoot. I tried everything to fix it. Eventually I decided it must be something wrong with the motherboard, so I bought a new motherboard and new CPU, one of those new AMD A6-3500 CPU/GPU combos. For a few weeks it worked beautifully, much better than the old machine, but then it started acting up. This time something different, it just wouldn’t boot. In the rebuild I used a new, but old hard drive for the boot drive so I could save my recordings off the old boot drive, and use it as a second drive. The only parts from the original machine was the case, 2nd power supply and the original memory. I had two theories. One, the used hard drive was bad, or two, the original memory was my problem all along and it had gotten worse.

Now all of this is very aggravating. I had gotten used to having a home theater PC connected to my den television and now I’m making do with off the air broadcasts, Netflix discs and streaming, and a Roku box. This still provides more TV than I have time to watch, but it doesn’t let me record shows. However, this time around I have a backup DVR.

I bought a HD HomeRun Dual network TV tuner. It was a snap to install. Just plug in the over-the-air antenna, Ethernet cable and power cable and run a small install program on each of my PCs. Now I can bring up Windows Media Center on any computer in my house and watch live TV, or record TV from two tuners. Very slick. So I can still record shows while my HTPC is broken but now I have to watch them on this computer. This also simplifies my HTPC setup because it no longer has a TV tuner card in it. And because I bought the new A6 with Radeon HD 6530D graphics it doesn’t have a video card either. The new HTPC worked much better and drew less power. Great until it started crashing.

I was so happy when I got the HTPC going again. I thought I’d have years of worry free service, but dang, I must have jinxed myself, because the new HTPC is completely dead now.

The other day I ordered some new memory and just tried it out, but it wasn’t the fix. I’m now hoping it’s the old hard drive, and not other bad motherboard. So sometime in the future I’ll have to take everything apart again and start troubleshooting all over again. Another troubling idea is the HTPC is being damaged by electrical spikes. But this is a long shot. However, the 2nd hard drive went out just before the machine started crashing. I’ve bought a UPS to protect it in the future. It already had a good APC surge protector.

But I’m putting off fixing the HTPC off for awhile. I want to get some other things done this weekend.

This is a real lesson in building your own computers. Normally you buy a computer and it comes with a 1 year warranty. You can even buy extended warranties. If something goes wrong you take it back and someone else fixes the machine or gives you another one. When you build your own machine and it stops working you’re the one that’s got to fix it.

More than that, this whole affair of giving up cable TV has taught me a number of things. Comcast got me addicted to DVRs, so giving up cable means learning to live with live TV or building your own DVRs. I’ve starting to wonder if DRVs are worth all the trouble. I love the simplicity of only having 5 channels I care about, instead of over 200. But even then, how much do I even care about those 5 channels? The absolute gem is PBS.

When my HTPC died I had 200 documentaries I had recorded from PBS that I wanted to watch. This is very revealing. Why hadn’t I just watched those shows when they aired? TV documentaries are like the books I buy but don’t read. I keep thinking I’m going to watch those shows or read those books, but my to-be-watch and to-be-read lists just get longer and longer.

Last night my friend Janis was over and we were just going through the Netflix menu on my Roku. I’ve got 196 shows in my queue waiting to be watched, and we found dozens of foreign movies we wanted to watch in the suggestion lists. There is no shortage of TV to watch. Then why do I want to hoard TV shows on a DVR? Isn’t this like going to a restaurant and buying a meal with the intention of eating sometime in the future?

I have a hang-up about controlling time. My DVR infected me with a time control disease. I think hoarding books is a time control disease.

I am tempted to simplify my TV watching yet again and give up the DRV and HTPC. I’d miss playing Rdio and Rhapsody through the den stereo, but I’ve also rediscovered the greatness of just listening to a CD again. CDs sound so much better than streaming music and MP3s. I’ve been going retro in the last several weeks. I’ve been buying DVDs of old westerns and watching one every night before I go to bed. It shows I can live without cable TV, or even HTPC TV, or even broadcast TV or even Netflix.

Which makes me ask: Does it matter what’s on TV?

JWH – 7/21/12