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Lost Mad Men Playing Game of Thrones

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June 6, 2012 by Eric Blumberg

The Lost Mad Men Playing the Game of Thrones

Television is not dead. The world’s favorite media is simply receiving hospice care. That gargantuan Sony lurking in the background is expected to remain with us but more like a toaster than its true calling, an eye on the Earth.

Although I spent much of my adulthood broadcast on radio, the electronic hearth was always my most cherished media child. Radio was my career, books made their mark in high school and college, and movies lost their glitter when they started converting perfectly good theatres into perfectly disgusting cineplexes. Television, for me though, far outshone its warm and the cool siblings.

Gathering around the tube, we watched Ed Sullivan on Sunday night with the Chinese acrobats spinning plates like dervishes because their freedom depended on it. How about the Andy Griffith Show, and Hazel with Shirley Booth? Then there was the best night on TV ever: Saturday night on CBS. All in the Family, M*A*S*H, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the Bob Newhart Show, and the Carol Burnett Show. Are you kidding?

We pine for those halcyon days, not so much for nostalgia sake, but because of what we’ve got now. Heartwarming, it’s not.

This whole presentation you’re viewing now is the result of a rocky voyage through the straits of technology. We even hit the rocks, once. Yep, it sure is fast. When we watched TV, it took all of thirty seconds for the thing to come on. Today, thirty seconds can be a lifetime.

The problem is that today’s standards are built on pure science, with nary a bit of inherent emotion. Today is too cut and dry.

In the day, feelings oozed out of the shows we watched. We were connected by some fantastical umbilical cord directly to the lives of our characters. Television was the warm medium, satisfying like a cup of cocoa with little marshmallows on top. Now media, even TV, is cold and technical. It’s not intuitive; it’s step-by-step.

Now we have Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and not too long ago, Lost. These are now the medium’s touchstones. I remember how Hill Street Blues changed everything by bringing afternoon soap opera cliffhangers to prime time. Programming was fairly neat and tidy using the time-worn, 30- and 60-minute wrap-it-up formula. It all had a beginning and an end. Television has morphed, however, into a never ending battle of bad and worse. Not only has that happened, but now when one truncated season ends, we have to wait under the Twelfth of Never too see those characters we love to hate, again.

Television has become the Ice Age rising out of global warming. Maybe as we get hotter, our HDTV miracle has become, not a toaster, but an icebox. Gather round children, it going to be a bit nippy in the new Vast Wasteland.


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