Old-ass TV

We watched the final episode of "The Riches" tonight. Not the best show, and no tragedy that it was canceled. But still a courageous show--maybe none other has quite reached the squirmy, cringy level of "fuck! abort mission! abort!" tension that it did. Unfortunately, some of that tension came at the expense of its main characters' rationality ("I will now lie and put us all in unreasonable danger in order to keep things exciting"), but I suppose I don't know how stupidly I might act if someone dangled a $13M purse in front of me, either. However, it is a bit unusual (paragraphically worthily so) to see a show dropped mid-stream like that, 7 episodes into its 2nd season. Maybe that's how they still do it in network world, with no warning. "Fuck this, we're going with reruns of 'Wizards of Waverly Place' or whatever it is that kids watch these days."

(Aside: Granted, there is no such thing as good taste in television programs. But you would be apalled by the crap that my nieces watch. I have racked up a few millennia in purgatory just learning what "Wizards of Waverly Place" refers to. If you, fortunate soul, feel out of the loop right now, stay there. I have never been less ironic.)

But that's not old-ass tv. What I was thinking of when I titled this post, which I now raise as a palliative for the images I've conjured to my own mind, is the 1950-or-so Burns & Allen show, of which I watched my second episode tonight. I'm slightly fascinated by first-generation television, the stuff that is still tightly knit with radio and vaudeville entertainment. It's not great programming by today's standards, and I have no idea what I would have thought of it had I been born 50 years earlier. Nothing remotely like that exists now, is my point. I'm thinking of these facets:

• a stage set which relies on an audience's imagination, which interposes an unseeable, slightly implausible hallway between front door and living room, an invisible fourth wall into the living room which the narrator is free to cross whenever no other character is watching
• a narrator who monologizes about the action, who hops through that imaginary wall to come answer the door, play straight man to some joke, and then cross back from the porch to his downstage perch
• the smallness, almost triteness, of the jokes, which really I just take as an interesting window onto past culture (like the in-script advertising, but a little more general than a mere indication of past television business models)

That's what occurs to me worth mentioning, anyway.

We also watched some of the 6th season of "Weeds." Agreed that "Riches" might have done better to follow this show's willingness to move the characters around every season or two, half a step ahead of the firestorm. There really wasn't that much to plumb in the plot they'd opened up in the first season of "The Riches," no need to stay locked in to the set of characters that they had. Or maybe if that daughter had taken off her clothes as often as MLP does, we'd have a few more seasons left to go. Oh right, network TV.