To Stream, Perchance to Dream?

A Boomer’s thoroughgoing take on TV’s transformation over the decades—from The Howdy Doody Show, I Love Lucy, and The $64,000 Question through to The Sopranos, Madmen, Game of Thrones, etc.

By Florence Blecher

May 9, 2025

I’m pretty good with electronics. I actually get respect from the Apple Care tech advisers—and my older brother sometimes even turns to me for help. Yet somehow streaming devices and the cable box frighten me. Okay—maybe not frighten, but certainly intimidate. Inputting all the endless passwords for this and/or that feels confusing and overwhelming. Which remote does what for which device, and in what order, and do I really need THREE remotes? What if I mess it all up, or it messes itself up overnight, and I get the horrifying Blank Pink Screen of Dead-End Death and Dysfunction? Or is it time to … cut the cord?

Looking back…

The first television set that I remember (back in the Bronx, in maybe 1952) had a screen measuring about five inches by five inches—slightly smaller than two cell phones lying next to each other. It sat, another piece of furniture, in its large, dark, vertical wooden box in a corner of my parents’ dinette, where our family ate our meals. The living room was for guests, and the sun parlor was always too cold to gather comfortably. What’s more, back then the basement was yet to be really “finished”. So the four of us assembled around that tiny screen, straining to see.

Black-and-white, of course. Three channels at first—ABC/American Broadcasting Company, a.k.a. channel 7, CBS/Columbia Broadcasting System, channel 2; and (complete with chimes) NBC/National Broadcasting Company, channel 4. When the hour grew late and broadcasts grew limited, the screen displayed a Native American in full headdress, surrounded by circles, squares, and other test patterns intended to gauge broadcast-display quality.

Slowly (or maybe it was quickly?), channels 9 and 11 appeared—broadcasting local children’s shows or old movies to fill lots of newly created empty air. And there was educational television—channel 13/WNDT. That was the full extent of television throughout my childhood. Sesame Street didn’t arrive until 1969, when I was away at college.

Advances included the advent of “living” color—Bonanza blazing across the screen on NBC, complete with the network’s paintbrush peacock. (That was before the rainbow appeared.) Not to mention larger screens and furniture consoles. And then came … the Clicker. Finally—remote control. Before that, children got up to change the channel under parental direction, but now He Who Controlled the Clicker was close to God.

Of Depth and Smoothness: In a Realm of Screens, ITMO Art & Science Center exhibition. Photo by Coline Haslé/Unsplash.
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TV of my childhood was an event—decades later to become “Must See TV”—with “water cooler” discussions of what happened on this week’s episode of some show or other or some cliffhanger at the end of the season. Everyone was on the same wavelength, watching the same channels, the same shows, more or less. (Home taping was as yet unknown.) Dragnet, Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip, Amos ’n’ Andy, Our Miss Brooks, I Remember Mama, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, Topper, Sergeant Bilko, The Adventures of Superman, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Lawrence Welk Show, The Dinah Shore Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Tonight Show (starring, among others, Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien—more recently—and Jimmy Fallon, currently), Your Show of Shows, Ralph Edwards’s This Is Your Life, Lassie, Sea Hunt, Mr. Ed, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, The Howdy Doody Show, Captain Kangaroo, The Mickey Mouse Club, The Magic Cottage, The Soupy Sales Show, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, The Roy Rogers Show, Gunsmoke, The Hallmark Hall of Fame, Playhouse 90, Studio One, The Twilight Zone, Truth or Consequences, What’s My Line?, You Bet Your Life, The $64,000 Question (HUGE), Young Doctor Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, Today, Meet the Press, Face the Nation. (Readers, did I miss anything? I didn’t, right?) The list is endless, with a select few shows surviving to the present day. That was the Golden Age of Television, whether we realized it then or not—the postwar age of “cultural riches,” and we had TV Guide to tell us what, where, and when.

It was all there, all mixed together. Each evening (and daytime) had its beloved shows; old reliables, new hits, new misses. Shows stayed, shows vanished—from screen and from memory. In prime time, different networks had different types, flavors, orientations, and themes. But the only real choices we had were among the three networks and educational TV (ah, Julia Child instructing America in The Joy of French Cooking). If you didn’t like Westerns, perhaps you’d care for a cop show or a variety show or a sitcom? Maybe a doctor, lawyer, or detective show? Let’s not forget game shows and the ladies’ afternoon soaps. Horse opera? Soap opera? The nightly news—somber, serious, and objective—Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley—overseen by the Fairness Doctrine (the legal standard, backed by Congress in 1954 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1969, calling for broadcasters to devote some of their time to controversial issues affecting the public).

And then screens became portable, solid-state—and tubes became passé.

Nam June Paik, Video Flag 1985-96. Photo by Jill/Flickr.
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Even though cable TV first became available in some parts of the United States as far back as 1948, it wasn’t widely offered until the early 1980s. Almost no one in this country paid for TV beyond purchasing the device, the console, the box, the set, and maybe rabbit ears or some skeletal antenna on the roof. We were all commonly, communally anchored to that box to “feed” us. We didn’t pay; it was the advertisers/underwriters who paid for our time, our eyes, our purchasing power.

Until we did. The early ’80s brought us the specialized, individualized, compartmentalized, focused, burgeoning world of cable television. And with that, our personal worlds seemed to expand. Once over-the-air reception became problematic with the growth of our cities (not to mention the visual blight from those unsightly rooftop antennas and the static produced by those rabbit ears), if we had any hope of viewing all that was new, we were FORCED TO SUBSCRIBE—and we still had TV Guide to lead us.

When everything exploded, I (having made the cross-country move from New York to L.A.) freelanced as a production secretary, a writer’s secretary, an associate producer, a production assistant, an executive secretary, a second assistant director, a line producer—whatever job I could get—at Tandem/TAT/Norman Lear, Viacom/CBS, PBS, Universal, Fox, and at independents with unsold projects.

I was also pitching a project based on a European children’s book, trying to find the right niche for it. I remember going to a conference—whose name or sponsoring organization I no longer remember—where all these new networks were touting The Future. It was truly the dawn of a new day, a new approach, a circus of possibilities, of potential, of exponential expansion—and the world seemingly went wild all at once.

While it had once been all about the shows, now the networks were pivotal—even as the shows continued exerting their own allure. HBO/Home Box Office, Showtime, ESPN/Entertainment & Sports Programming Network, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, TV Land, Cooking Channel, Food Network, HGTV/Home & Garden Television, Lifetime, AMC/American Movie Classics, TCM/Turner Classic Movies, SYFY, Nickelodeon, Disney, FX/Fox extended, BET/Black Entertainment Television, OWN/Oprah Winfrey Network, Bravo, Hallmark, Bloomberg, C-SPAN/Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, CNN/Cable News Network, CNBC/Consumer News & Business Channel, MSNBC/Microsoft NBC, FOX News, HSN/Home Shopping Network, QVC/Quality Value Convenience, TNT/Turner Network Television, USA Network, Animal Planet, History Channel, Travel Channel, TLC/The Learning Channel, non-English speaking channels like Univision and Telemundo, public access (a whole other story), and more and more and more. And they begat even more. It wasn’t merely shows. It was networks expanding, seeking specialized audiences.

Now we could each tune in, separately, to our special, individual curiosities, our unique passions: sports, home improvement, old Westerns, old sitcoms, old movies, old sci-fi, old action-adventure, porn, comedy, drama, satire, commentary, shopping, news, history, reruns, and new—pretty much whatever genre we sought. We had moved well beyond the Three + The One + The Others. We still had The Box, plus now a second box, the cable box, or maybe a satellite dish, and, of course, the remotes. A TV in every room, in any room. A TV practically everywhere—even on our wrists. (Seiko introduced one such device already in 1982.) And all the while TV Guide kept everything straight.

Product began to be made for, was geared to, all those networks to fill all that new empty air space—the gaping 24/7 void. Some you could even watch to suit your personal schedule by subscription, not just at the whim of programmers at the network—You were the programmer. You had the power. And some networks—specifically the extra paid-for networks—no longer had those horrible, endless commercial interruptions. You paid a premium for that network subscription, so advertising dollars weren’t needed to sustain them. You were buying your freedom instead of someone buying you, your eyes, and your wallet. You bought the package or the tier, and you got it all. And screens grew larger and crisper, and our homes became movie theaters.

Another new crop of now-classics sprang from those early days of cable television—a Second Golden Age. There was new freedom without network standards and practices—a.k.a. censorship. Language, sex, violence, and brutality were beamed at us, just as in real life. We reveled in all of it. We gorged on The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, and so many more. Experiments, and formats, were tried. Some succeeded; some flopped.

But somebody—at the studios, the networks—had to find a way to further optimize their profit margin, to make even more money on it, on us all. We had been willing to pay for those focused genres either as part of a cable package or via individual provider subscriptions. How to further profit was the next mountain to climb. Merger after merger, acquisition after acquisition was tested. Some were good marriages that fostered product and profit, and some—such as Time-Warner-Charter, Comcast-NBC-Universal, CBS-Viacom-Paramount, ABC-Disney, Metromedia-Fox, and more—were busts. Some the general public welcomed, some continued to evolve, while others seemed to lose their way. Still others found saviors—champions like Steven Spielberg and friends, rescuing TCM/Turner Classic Movies from extinction.

Now there were additional players in the game: the cable or satellite companies—AT&T U-verse, Cable ONE, Charter, Comcast, Cox, DIRECTV, DISH TV, Frontier, Hughesnet, Spectrum (formerly Time Warner and RoadRunner before that—and Adelphia even further back), Starry, Viasat, Xfinity, et al. Singly and together, they overcame the technical problems of over-the-airwaves reception and were conduits for all those new and old networks. Where did they fit in the puzzle for profits?

Smart TV streaming. Photo by Nicolas J Leclercq/Unsplash
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The exponential growth of the internet flickered in the background, then exploded onto the foreground, opening hitherto unforeseen possibilities. Enter STREAMING—the internet’s little sister. Streaming further multiplied the already endless and endlessly focused possibilities, even further expanding the demand for content. Streaming providers quickly became and/or bought movie/TV production studios, along with their vast libraries, to fill the 24/7 void, as had many of the cable companies before them. But there was a difference. Most of the new programming was on-demand, residing in each network’s library, not necessarily on a schedule, waiting to be summoned by the subscriber. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, BritBox, Discovery+, Disney, Frndly TV, Fubo, Hallmark, Hulu+, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, Philo, Sling, Starz, YouTube TV, et al. Some of these players were familiar; many others were newcomers. Since streaming is, by nature, on-demand, it’s completely at the whim of the subscriber, who no longer is just a sometime viewer but now a marathoner who can shut out the world beyond the screen. Forty-three episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel … 68 episodes of Bosch … 34 episodes of Ted Lasso …. 24 of The Morning Show … 20 of Only Murders in the Building … and growing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Watched on your 98-inch big-screen TV, your laptop, your tablet, your mobile, your iWatch. Mostly alone or by family unit. Everywhere and anywhere. You didn’t have to watch anything else when you had multiple days’ worth of your uni-focused series, new or old. There needn’t be a world beyond—a shared world, a common world, a real, often ugly, unpleasant, sometimes hurtful outside world. The world was now just your selected focus, suiting your taste only, your image. You didn’t need to miss anything in that world, where you could choose to shut out everything in the real world. Local, national, or worldwide networks no longer were even a part of many new streaming platforms. “No news is good news.” Isolationist, xenophobic, denialistic, escapist. Your own glittering world with blinders on. And funky old weekly TV Guide gave way to digital newsletters from IMDb (the Internet Movie Database), The New York Times, et al, because we could no longer fathom it all.

Plus, there are games and gaming. The world as animated fantasy. And not to overlook bundling—because too many options and separate subscriptions are overwhelming to manage and to pay for. But how to do that economically and intelligently? Not to mention Smart TVs.

So here we are, at least for this moment. Is it any wonder that there’s less and less of a lingua franca, what with almost everyone off in her or his individually carved-out, customized corner, crossing streets heads down, obliviously peering at their screens or talking with ostensibly absent others? Is it any wonder that tunnel vision is the norm, when only your world matters? Compounded by journalism and newspapers disappearing along with reading—yes, I still subscribe to two hard-copy print newspapers that I can hold in my hands at breakfast, but there’s less and less in them that’s actually worth reading, in my opinion. How do we restore a common vocabulary, a common experience, a common concern, a world concern, if we’re all in separate universes?

I suspect that the release of a new Frank Sinatra album never had nearly the impact in the 1940s that new Beyoncé or Taylor Swift albums do today. Even the Beatles couldn’t compete at this level. The worlds occupied by those personalities, singers, and the music they made still had commonality and balance, in spite of adult disdain—raising a question: Has today’s cult of celebrity and “influencers” become our only common-speak, common thread, at least for some of us.

Back to my streaming apprehensions, shared to differing degrees by some of my techno-dinosaur friends. Are we just Luddites? Technology is the pretext, the excuse. But back in a corner of my mind, I still want to be a member of society, a participant in the world, even when that world is awful and terrifying. At what cost comes all that variety, all that specialization, all that ego/individuality/denial? I know that one day I will fully succumb to Pandora’s box, the new box, and will swallow the poisoned apple whole, but maybe not just yet. Resist. Defy. Participate. Belong…but where?

Former New Yorker Florence Blecher now resides in Los Angeles with her three dogs. A retired architect and former TV production person, she is active in city planning matters and occasionally dabbles in writing.

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