Reruns By Linda Stowe
When I was a kid, the only curse of the summer was that it was rerun season. Of course, that was before cable, when there were only three TV networks, and the networks went off the air at midnight. Fall meant the return of our favorite TV shows with new episodes to keep us engaged until the following year. TV was a big deal when I was a kid.
Much has changed about our television options, including the fact that we can watch TV without actually having a television. And the reruns? They have their own channels now. Nothing gets wasted, except maybe our time.
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Polly here.
I like TV. There’s a lot of great things on TV. It can be informative, a learning tool, a place for acquiring news, or a source of entertainment and release.
But Linda is right. It has changed immensely since I was a kid.
The biggest thing I’ve noticed? Even though we only had three channels and a limited number of viewing hours, there was always something great to watch.
Oftentimes, it was a huge dilemma whether to watch the show on CBS or the one on NBC. Sometimes we’d flip back and forth, which meant getting up and turning the knob on the TV.
And if we missed a show? We missed it. We didn’t have recording devices or ways to play it again.
These days, we have thousands of channels available on several different platforms. We can watch on a TV. We can watch on a phone. Things are on around the clock.
But the thing is, so many times, it is hard to find something we want to watch. It takes a lot of time to sift through it all. And with me, I’ll often start a program only to decide ten minutes in that it isn’t worth my time. So then, I search for something else.
I wonder, with so many options, why it is so difficult to find a satisfying show to watch. Too many choices? Are we more discerning? Or has our world become a sensory overload, and we are more difficult to satisfy.
Oh, for the days of What’s My Line, The Carol Burnett Show, and Captain Kangaroo.
Reruns By Linda Stowe
