Posted Wednesday:
Tonight at 10 ET, TV Land presents the premiere of a new reality dating show called The Cougar, starring a 40-year-old single mother of four who works her way through a gaggle of guys in their 20s, searching for true love.
On TV Land? As Seth Meyers might ask, "Really?!?"
If the question is "When, exactly, did TV Land fall out of love with television, and completely lose its mission statement and its way?" -- well, the answer is tonight, with The Cougar...
The Cougar is no more appropriate a show for TV Land than it would be for Animal Planet. There, at least, the title would fit in, even if the content would not.
TV Land was created to cherish and celebrate quality TV -- to keep video memories and legacies alive and have fun with how much fun TV can be. It wasn't created to add to the pile of instantly forgettable TV flotsam and jetsam.
Perhaps it's more irony than coincidence that at the very same time on satellite TV tonight, DirecTV 101 Network is presenting old and never-before-televised episodes of Smith, a 2006 TV series canceled prematurely by CBS.
DirecTV is the network that has helped keep NBC's Friday Night Lights alive with a co-production deal, and has begun to collect and present other underappreciated quality TV series from recent years: Wonderland, Eyes, and so on. Clearly, DirecTV is banking on quality as a lure for viewers, just as Trio used to.
Why is DirecTV going where TV Land no longer cares to tread?
It's astounding how little TV is doing to preserve and present its own glorious history. TV Land barely counts these days -- in prime time, it's pretty much Andy Griffith and Bill Cosby, period (great talents, and great shows, but not to the exclusion of all else) -- and Nick at Nite's idea of vintage quality TV is George Lopez. No kidding.
Well, if anyone out there in TV land -- the larger cable and satellite universe, not just that network -- wants to take TV seriously, here's a free suggestion:
Do it right.
Think along the lines of Masterpiece Theatre, with a well-informed host to present each program, or Inside the Actors Studio, with a guest who can shed light on the shows by providing personal memories and anecdotes.
Ideally, run the programs unedited and uninterrupted, the way Turner Classic Movies does with its films. And run them without speeding them up or chopping them up, as Nick at Nite, TBS and TV Land do ad infinitum, and ad nauseum. Or, if you must retain ads within as well as between offerings, do so in their original act-break placements, and expand time slots so you don't have to trim content from the programs.
Present the shows in imaginative ways. Showcase, for example, an entire evening's content from a given year, including a network newscast. Or showcase recently unearthed TV treasures -- for example, why hasn't the original, just-rediscovered Studio One production of 12 Angry Men, starring Robert Cummings, been shown yet on television, for the first time in half a century?
Where, oh where, are such hard-to-find TV series as The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, with Blair Brown and David Strathairn? Where are He & She and Ernie Kovacs? The Defenders and Hal Holbrook's The Senator?
From public TV, where are The Great American Dream Machine, American Short Story and American Playhouse?
Where's That Was the Week That Was? Or East Side, West Side, with George C. Scott? And where are the classic TV movies and miniseries, such as Duel, Trilogy of Terror and Danger UXB?
You, I;'m sure, haver your own wish lists, and I'd love to hear them.
But for now, regarding vintage television on TV as we now know it, where is the quality? Where is the taste? Where is the perspective?
Who cares? Who needs it?
Here comes The Cougar!