Let's hear it for the remote control

Low budgets. Tin-eared writers. Moronic viewers and the advertisers who are trying to sell products that only a moron would be interested in. You can argue for days about what the crucial ingredients for bad cable TV are, but as far as I’m concerned, it all starts with the remote control. Before the remote, more channels meant more hassles. Every time you wanted to see what else was on, you had to get up off the couch, cross the room, twist a dial. With only three channels, this was manageable. With a dozen, you might as well go jogging. So in the early days of TV – i.e., everything before the 1980s, only really fit people spent much time watching TV. And even they had the stamina to support only a dozen channels or so.

I knew a guy who was a bigshot in the TV industry at this time, and he was always happy. And why not? A limited number of channels meant the networks and stations that existed made tons of money, because there were only so many places to advertise. Plus, there was only a limited number of hours to fill each day – there were more than enough qualified actors, writers, directors, and other personnel to create the programming that was needed, and more than enough money to pay for it. Now, I’m not saying that TV was great in the pre-remote days. Mostly it was mediocre or worse, but in a blandly competent kind of way. Rarely was it so weirdly awful that it actually became riveting.

The remote changed that.

For this, we can thank E.F. McDonald, the founder of Zenith and the man who paid the engineers who invented the first remotes. When he told his engineers to create such a device, he didn’t think he was paving the way for reality shows about tanning booths though. He wanted to improve the quality of TV. He hated commercials, and it was his belief that advertiser-supported TV could never match the quality of the movies, where viewers actually paid for the content they watched.

McDonald figured that if he created a device that would allow viewers to bypass TV commercials, the advertiser-supported model of TV would collapse. In its place, a new system, wherein viewers paid for the TV they watched, would take its place. Unfortunately for McDonald, the world wasn’t quite ready yet for sitcoms where middle-aged women took their tops of – that would have to wait until the HBO era….
In the 1940s, he was still a few decades ahead of his time. But he had a dream, and under his command, Zenith released its first remote control in 1950, the “Lazy Bones.” It didn’t work very well – and actually caused a lot of broken legs. (A wire connected it to the console.) But even as Zenith introduced new and improved models over the next few years, McDonald never realized his dream of destroying advertiser-supported programming.

In the 1980s, however, remotes had gotten good enough to make navigating from channel to channel fast and easy, and cable TV took off. All of the sudden, your TV was sort of like a magazine newsrack, with dozens, no hundreds, of different of channels to choose from. For awhile this improved TV marginally – there was more news, more sports, etc. But the overall quality of the programming was still pretty good, which is to say, boring. At a certain point, though, there were more and more channels battling for advertisers, there was more and more programming hours to fill, and there were fewer and fewer viewers to support the whole thing because of this new little diversion called the Internet.

And that’s why, today, we all know what Hulk Hogan’s kids look like. And why it’s never been a better time to be a professional fitness class extra or a two-timing transexual. And why as long as the human race continues to exist, there will always be at least three networks airing Friends reruns at least twice a day. Even to create mediocre TV, it takes a fair amount of money, and the money isn’t there anymore. So now TV consists of watching leathery upscale housewives go shopping, or reruns.
But it’s not just that the remote fractured the audience to the point where no one can afford to make anything except entertainingly horrible TV anymore. When TV executives realized that people like seeing what’s on more than they like watching a particular show for an extended period of time, they realized they had to come up with programming so extreme it would arrest the viewer’s attention – momentarily at least.

If it weren’t for the remote control, you would probably be able to count on one hand the number of times you’d seen people eating bugs for money. Tom Green would be still living at his parents’ house in Canada. Weighing six hundred pounds or breeding kids like puppies would not be considered a viable path to show business.

A lot of people who don’t understand the virtues of bad cable think the remote ruined not only television, but culture itself. If you ask me, though, bad cable saved us. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when pretty much every prime-time TV show feature cops or private detectives shooting it out with criminals, the world was an extremely violent place. By the time a child was ten years old, he had witnessed thousands of television murders and had the sort of comprehensive knowledge about the best ways to rob a bank or fence the booty from a jewelry store heist that it once took years in the slammer to obtain. TV was breeding thousands of ruthless, well-educated criminals who were in turn ruining society, the best efforts of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers be damned.

Then, in the 1990s, the expanding cable universe made it financially unviable to produce traditional-style TV shows. This led to The Real World, which in turn spawned an entire genre of shows about people who sit around complaining all the time, sometimes while competing for huge cash prizes on deserted islands, other times not.

Instead of teaching us to be to be wild, gun-toting criminals who liked to engage in reckless car chases in the more industrial parts of the city, TV was now inspiring us to be scheming narcissists trying to convert our talent for eating animal entrails into a star-making turn on Fear Factor. And just like that, the rate of violent crime in America, which had pretty much been rising since the advent of the TV age, suddenly started to drop. And it has continued dropping ever since, until now we live in the most peaceful times since the early 1950s, aka before TV existed. Thanks to the calming influence of bad cable, the worst thing we have to fear when walking the streets at night is running into a Kardashian sister. I for one am grateful for this, and express my thanks by watching cable TV at least 20 hours a week.