My family got their first TV in the early fifties, when we lived in a farmhouse in Kinderhook, N.Y. The only show I remember watching early on was Howdy Doody, which was on throughout the 50's. Generally I did not watch much TV when I was a kid because of the lack of good reception, the primitive quality of many of the shows (particularly as opposed to the radio shows I liked, just as they were about to die out), and the lack of privacy (the TV being in the living room). When I was in third grade we moved to Hudson, N.Y. where we received stations from Albany, about forty miles away. Reception was poor, even if one had a good aerial on the roof, which we did not, and there was always a problem with a rolling picture, sometimes not easily corrected with "horizontal hold." I was content with reading what books I could find (in a town without a library or a bookstore) and listening to the radio. I was a passionate listener to baseball games (as I still am) but did sometimes watch baseball's The Game of the Week on TV Saturday afternoons, with its excellent use of two cameras to show the entire field.
When I went away to school in 1962, when I was 15, I almost never watched TV, since it seemed that our dormitory TV was tuned usually to professional wrestling or My Favorite Martian (to this day I cannot stand the canned laughter of situation comedies) and the same thing was true in the TV room at my dorm when I started at Columbia in 1965. So I did not watch TV again until the mid-seventies, when I finally bought a TV so I could watch Simon Raven's excellent adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Pallisers; I had loved the novels and I thought the TV version was beautifully written and cast. The only other show I watched during this period was Norman Lear's brilliant Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. I would also watch an occasional movie on TV, though I hated the commercials and timed the movie content with a stopwatch (Leonard Maltin had published his first book that had the running times of classical movies) to make sure the movies were not cut; if a movie of 120 minutes was shown in a two-hour time slot I simply would not watch it. But mostly I saw movies at MoMA and at repertory houses such as The New Yorker (one can read about this on my other blog http://balletbaseballmoviesbooks.blogspot.com )
In 1994 I married and moved to Brooklyn with my wonderful wife Susan and there we got cable TV, mainly to watch AMC, at that time (and, alas, no longer) similar to the current Turner Classic Movies, with uninterrupted and uncut classical films. But it was also at that point that I began to explore some of the more creative talents in TV that I had been hearing about, particularly Steven Bochco (L.A. Law, NYPD Blue) and David E. Kelley (The Practice, Ally McBeal). But until our first child was born, in 1998, we mostly went to the movies.
After our son was born we watched a bit more TV because we were, by necessity, at home more often. The one show Susan and I both liked most recently was Jason Katim's Parenthood, which just completed an excellent six-year run and had its moving series finale this year. Most of the best shows these days are on cable TV; they are not tied down to a rigid 22-episode schedule and are at slightly less risk of becoming formulaic. The two network shows I watch currently are Secrets and Lies and The Good Wife. Secrets and Lies is less interesting for its murder mystery than for its insights into the behavior of the lower-middle class; it was created by Barbie Kligman and is helped immensely by the acting, directing and producing of Thirtysomething veteran Timothy Busfield. The Good Wife is a complex legal and personal drama created by Michele and Robert King.
Vincent Gilligan is one of the most creative people in television these days. He created Breaking Bad and the current Better Call Saul (something of a spinoff but rather different in mood) for AMC. I will be discussing these shows and others that I like, such as Mad Men, The Americans, Homeland, et al., as well as some I don't like.
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