We’ll be assessing the impact of the pandemic on our lifestyles for many years. Two of the most obvious changes involve working from home and how we were, and are, entertained.
This household involves retired people so we are always “working” from home. Nancy’s “work” was carefully scheduling well-planned trips to the grocery store, usually as I recall early on Tuesday mornings because the shelves were re-stocked overnight and it was important to get first shot at the necessities—-which sometimes were not on the strictly grocery shelves.
Can’t do without toilet paper, you know. We long ago threw away our old catalogs from Sears, Penney’s and Montgomery Ward (did you know that the company name was actually the middle and last names of the founder, Aaron Montgomery Ward?) and we didn’t save the cobs from the sweet corn we enjoyed in the summer months. There hadn’t been a Montgomery Ward catalog since 1985 so that supply would have been used up or discarded years before the pandemic.
Excuse the wandering. One does that in old age.
Anyway, we—as many of you—became binge-watchers. Our Roku device allowed us to watch all of the episodes of a series in a string of evenings. No more waiting for next week’s episode of Downton Abbey or Doc Martin or Gray’s Anatomy or Foyle’s War.
Everybody we know thinks Yellowstone is great. We’ve tried about three times and can’t get into it. Longmire, however, now that’s a good show!
The Crown has been good. Outlander is especially good for one member of the house who has read books. Finding Your Roots is interesting. And we enjoyed all of the episodes of Boston Legal.
Earlier this year we finally got up to date with Grey’s Anatomy. Then the writers and actors went on strike and we haven’t been able to learn if Meredith Grey will find love in Boston and whether Owen Hunt finds happiness with anybody.
The pandemic wasn’t good for the cable television industry because it increased awareness by consumers that we don’t need to keep making increasingly higher monthly rates for dozens of shopping and God channels we have no interest in watching.
Thirty years ago, or so, the Missourinet gave me the summer off to develop a Missouri cable TV channel that would have been a cross between C-SPAN, CNN, and ESPN. The idea was to let Missourians watch the legislature work, develop Missouri-interest programs (we had ideas for telecasting from various summer festivals, featuring concerts here and there, even do documentaries on various topics), pick up evening newscasts from the TV markets and broadcast them throughout the night, and cover state high school sports playoffs and re-play Missouri football games the next day—stuff like that.
When we pitched the idea to the Missouri Cable Television Association—whose executive director supported our idea—and said we could do it for the cost of one big bag of M&Ms with peanuts per customer per month, the operators of the cable systems looked at us as if we were telephone poles.
I went to the National Cable Television Association’s summer convention to learn more about the industry and my most vivid recollection is the association president talking about the coming of ala carte viewing and how the industry needed to be prepared for the day.
Well, it’s here.
“Cutting the cord,” gained momentum during the pandemic as more and more people discovered the joys of binge-watching. And while it’s great for you and me, it’s increasingly problematic for the people who provide us with that entertainment.
It used to be that we knew what shows were on what networks on which nights. Today we don’t have the foggiest notion what’s on the regular networks other than Monday Night Football is still on Mondays and the late-night shows start at about 10:30 if we’re awake for them. Oh, and Sixty Minutes is still on Sunday nights at a regular time unless football pushes it back.
And we still went to movie theatres. And sat next to people, or in front of them or behnd them.
Nancy got irritated with me because I wouldn’t explain what was going on in some movies—The English Patient was especially puzzling. I had seen it earlier when on a business trip to the nation’s capital so I knew the answer to all her questions was at the end. But I didn’t want to explain anything because it would irritate people around us.
Been to a movie theatre lately. Who’s there to irritate?
We, and probably most of you, don’t wait for weekly episodes of a lot of series TV. We just wait for the producers to drop the entire season on one of our ROKU channels and we binge watch the whole season in a few nights.
And we really enjoy some of the short series programs that seem mostly to be on channels from the United Kingdom. But more and more of the streaming channels are producing their own products. “The Queen’s Gambit,” for example—a seven-episode series on Netflix in 2020 that became the channel’s top program in 63 countries, netted eleven Primetime Emmy Awards, one of which was the award for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and marked the first time a show on a streaming service won that award. It also racked up Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards.
Netflix became a change agent in all of our lives. A recent New York Times article explained what happened.
But we’re tired of writing this entry so you’ll have to wait for the next one to see where we’re going.
Sorry, binge-blogging isn’t offered here. At least, not today.