2013年9月21日星期六

For relief from all that instruction

For relief from all that instruction, look for the block letters that spell out Cartoon Network, a fantasy land of wall-to-wall cartoons, most of them much older than their viewers.

All three of these cable channels cropped up in the past few years, part of an explosion based on the idea that every interest deserves a channel all its own, the less varied the better.

Some are as well-known as Court TV and others as obscure as the Golf Channel, which features tournaments, playing tips and interviews. And more are on the way.

Nickelodeon, which began as a channel of children's programming, has been so successful with its "Nick at Nite" block of aged sitcoms like Bewitched that in a couple of months it will start a channel called TV Land, showing only old series like Gunsmoke and Hill Street Blues.

Whatever their stated purpose and audience, though, all these channels tantalize with visions of escapism and vicarious living. Heading to outer space is one way to escape; so is nostalgia. And if watching someone make raspberry chocolate almond tart from scratch isn't living vicariously, it's hard to say what is.

The effect of watching these channels for too long would be numbing, but only fanatics would do that. Seen in smaller doses, they are strangely hypnotic. Peeking at an all-nostalgia, all-science-fiction or all-food channel is like stumbling into a suburb of The Twilight Zone where everyone in town has the same face.

There is a reason for the proliferation and success of these narrow channels: they are cheap, at least by television standards. And this makes them big business. The Cartoon Network is owned by Ted Turner and was created to use what Turner Broadcasting has in its vaults: the Hanna-Barbera and MGM cartoon libraries and pre-1948 Warner Brothers cartoons, among other things.

That means the channel has everything from classics like Bugs Bunny to oddities that are amusing for five minutes, like James Bond Jr., a short-lived show featuring animated teen-agers with the worst fake-English accents ever.

Its most popular series include those old standbys The Jetsons and The Flintstones, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a third of its audience is made up of adults, presumably reliving their pasts.

In fact, specialized channels rely so heavily on old shows that they could be lumped together and called the Retread Network. And most often the shows are popular not because they're great but because they're so comfortable and comforting, a quality that even lesser shows can share.

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