When every house projected a rusting antenna like a ferny gypsy moth...

Top: The cast of the The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978). Bottom: The cast of The Love Boat (1977-1987). These two shows overlapped by a season, but looking back I see them as far apart as Nixon and Obama or WWII and Vietnam.

As adults we see connections at short distances that are opaque to children. A year in the mind of a child may as well be a lifetime.

There is probably no better example to my generation than TV: for me, the gap between The Bob Newhart Show and The Love Boat is as wide and deep as that between Flappers and Hippies, or Watergate and Travelgate, even though they actually overlapped for a broadcast season.[1]

But they might as well have been a generation apart. I associate The Bob Newhart Show with early bedtimes and fluoride pills and Vernondale Elementary PTA meetings, and The Love Boat with pretty girls and Bethel Christian School and adult innuendo that was finally making sense (sort of).


To this day I will watch old episodes of The Bob Newhart Show, Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, etc, and at once am transported to an age when bedtime was 8pm and the opening strains of grownup shows meant I would immediately be hearing "Go brush your teeth."

Those were days when you had one big TV in the living room and maybe another on a TV cart that you wheeled from room to room, and every house projected a rusting antenna like a ferny gypsy moth and neighborhood skylines were cosmic pin cushions.

[2013-07-25]

c0

[1]
A TV season in those days was 30+ first-run episodes from fall to spring, after which they went into what we called "summer reruns," which ended the following fall with the new season and new shows. Today you're lucky to get 12 new episodes before they repeat, and the word "season" has become meaningless for reality shows.

c0