Unfortunately I started watching tv in the early 60s after the gov had pretty much homogenized and pasteurized much of the content. Probably the busiest spin off industry in broadcast tv in those days was the network nanny censors. They probably had more power than all the producers combined.

Like the contemporary Apple corp. that created multi-million dollar spin off industries orbiting around their products, TV electronics corporations also created much orbiting business around the tv’s. TV trays, Swanson TV dinners, the evolution (not) of remote control devices, etc. In fact these items created a mass migration from the dinner table to a TV dinner on a tv tray wherever the tv was located.

Several times I was allowed to visit Grandma several hundred miles away in Detroit when I was a tween. The highlight for me was her super comfy couch bed, bigger TV that didn’t always have to get whacked like our old Philco at home to bring it back to life, plus about double or triple the channels with shows like Bozo the Clown and Jack Lalanne & his dogs, and other cartoon/kids shows. I know, weird. Today if I had tweens there is no way in hell I’d put them on some 6 wheeled Greyhound Crazy bus around this country, no way!

My dad who was a protestant minister used to love shows like The Alfred Hitchcock hour, Paladin and some other stuff. Later in life he became glued to ‘Law & Order’ -anything-. Yet another wonder of the local universe.

Yeah, the tv era is now pretty much gone, no more glued to the tube religiously watching the evening news. Today, everything is online, everything. I guess we’ve moved from tv dinners in front of the boob tube to gen-‘anys’ roaming around on foot and in/dodging car traffic staring at plastic slabs, almost never looking up to see where they are going. I used to wonder back in the late 60s and early 70s, when I noticed bumper stickers on cars that read, ‘kill your tv!”. I don’t wonder about that anymore.