Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for January 03, 2021

Those were the days!

Arlo just wanted to see Elly May by the cement pond.

Back then you waited a week for any show you watched. At least until cable channels took over.

.. and you only got to see one episode each week.

.. and if you ‘missed’ it, it might be months — or years — before you’d have a chance to see it again.

Makes a good case for Netflix..or a book.

There were summer reruns but sometimes they would play those god awful summer replacement shows instead.

I remember almost thirty years ago Calvin and Hobbs worried about cable destroying a homogenous culture. As Calvin said “We can’t rely on monolithic networks to provide uniform national blandness anymore.”

….waiting for the mailman to delivery this weeks copy of TV Guide…..

I used to know exactly what day of the week it was by which shows were on that night. Now, even pvr aside, it seems like a smear. Maybe the cross network televisings.

…because The Beverly Hillbillies was evidently better and more entertaining than any current shows . I could wait several years for some of the junk that’s on now and then still not watch them.

I remember The Beverly Hillbillies. Did they ever get off that island?

Just a year? I’ve been waiting since the end of April 2019 for “The Orville”.

Back then you could go through a whole carton of Winston® between episodes!

and game shows and soap operas were daily, except not on weekends, the news was nightly, news programs were weekly, and there was no instant replay of sports. And people sent telegrams. You learned about music through AM radio, which was free.

Nobody REALLY misses the Beverly Hillbillies, My Mother the Car, Mr. Ed, My Favorite Martian, Car 54 Where Are You, etc. And the only thing people really miss about Gilligan’s Island are Mary Ann and Ginger…

I was just recently telling my wife how my mother and I would wait all week to watch the Beverly Hillbillies and the half hour would seem to fly by and then there was a whole week to wait until the next episode

The local channel showed reruns of Perry Mason at 8AM each morning. However, if you tuned in a little too early, you were regaled with the end of a Beverly Hillbilly episode. Ugly music.

Ah, the good ole days. And it always seems to be about qualities and freedoms you had. It seems weird that this will be the good ole days for today’s young people, but it will be. God help them.

During this pandemic, my wife and I have discovered these wonderful serial series shows on the Roku channels, such as Amazon and Netflix. Back in the 70s and 80s they were called “miniseries”, and ran about 7, two hour programs, like Roots or The Blue and the Gray. We like the ones set in the 18th and 19 centuries. My wife wants to binge them, but I prefer to watch one episode every day or two. I production sets, costumes, etc.. are amazing.

Say what you will about the old shows, but they were a lot more non violent then now. Except for the Man from U.N.C.L.E. And I have the entire series on DVD if anyone wants to borrow it.

I remember one of the biggest hold ups for DVD was Wonder Years. They had to figure how to pay royalties for all the music from the 60’s they used on each episode. Finally, the series was put on DVD and came out with a small high school locker to hold each year of the series.

Somehow, life goes on.

Waiting for the Beverly Hillbillies was normal in those days, I was used to it. Then things changed…. Amazon Prime put the latest season of “The Expanse” on as a weekly series. I have to admit that I now do like getting the whole story at once, but I don’t like it enough to wait until they are all out & watch it like that!

Always looked forward to Sunday night because Bonanza was going to be on, even though it meant school again on Monday.

Back in those days, a ‘season’ might have 25 episodes. This was down to 20 by the mid-90s, and now many shows have as few as 7 episodes in a season.

MeTV runs it every day during the week.

Experiencing that now – MeTV replaced Hillbillies with Gilligan’s Island at 6 am MST, and only show it Saturday at 5 am.

The corollary to that is you decide to watch an episode of a series a friend highly recommends and you just don’t like it. At some point in the future, you decide to check it out again. It’s always the episode you saw the one time you turned on the show.

Still not as bad as waiting an entire year to see The Wizard of Oz or Mary Martin’s Peter Pan “Special” presentation.

How I watch the Hillbillies whenever I want on Pluto TV!