I’d stopped watching what was once my favorite show of all time years ago, due to full boredom and pangs of regret at the (then) state of primetime programming. This year’s show open did manage to eclipse the level of stupidity that has now become its classic benchmark. Virtually everything nominated originated from Hulu, Netflix, Showtime, Peacock, or HBO Max alternate networks.
Ordinarily, Cedric the Entertainer is fine to watch, on Monday night’s laugh-tracked “The Neighborhood,” but he isn’t strong enough to carry the EMMYs. I gave my full attention to the program, but the only broadcast network mentioned was CBS among the nominees.
That and right before every station break, the voice, “Coming up next (a plea for you not to change the channel), so-and-so B-TV star whose name you don’t know,” followed by offstage emcee MC Lyte, saying “This is CBS!” No, it’s not the CBS I used to know and love. Not by a long shot.
Hoping to improve my attitude, I went retro and started YouTube-ing the days when I most adored TV shows, the best of comedy-variety-procedural-dramas across the board.
Do you remember the fun of upcoming season promo spots on all the major networks before each fall began? Especially during the 70s and 80s, the combination of catchy jingles and snippets of your favorite TV stars brought excitement and anticipation, just as they were designed and produced to do. You’d survived eight weeks of summer reruns and a few replacement shows, and now you were ready for renewal, almost in time for back to school.
The campaigns for each of the three primary networks had a theme and primary jingle but they would film three or four individual spots with previews of new shows, happy memories of returning shows, and truly the best of what was yet to come. The jingles were infectious, upbeat, and gave you a sense of genuine excitement for the coming season.
If you’d like to travel back in time with me perhaps you’ll remember and smile at what you see in these memory time capsules about what used to be some of the best reasons to stay at home for a program because we didn’t have access to VCRs back in the best days of the earliest shows.
CBS Is Easy on the Eyes (1973)
CBS—"We’re Looking Good,” #1 (1979)
“You and Me and ABC” — The 1980 ABC Season
NBC’s “NB See Us” (1980)
The welcome-back TV jingles preceding fall season debuts were played so often, whether three-minute, :30, or :15 clips to remind you that fall was guaranteed to turn your world around, if you’d just tune in faithfully.
The local affiliates could cut in their own material to blend in with the national ad, as they did here in Chicago and other cities during the Fall 1983 “CBS We’ve Got The Touch” campaign, a personal favorite.
In 2020, CBS underwent a giant rebranding, mostly to sweep out the memories of the unpleasant reign of…whatever…of former head honcho, Les Moonves. The powers that be hired an ad agency and came up with a more overreaching identity for the network that included all the content it produced for other networks to distribute, some CBS had full or part ownership in and others where they were willing to take a partial risk.
Behind the scenes, magic happens.Frankly, the general public doesn’t really care who owns whom, and today, there’s no reason to rush home for live programming (even TV ratings count live plus 3 consecutive days’ viewing in their ratings registry) thanks to various on demand and recorded media streams. But there’s also now less loyalty to a particular network and its family of shows that has impacted the more transient nature of viewing.
Enter then, a new CBS campaign for the 2021 Fall Season, “Feel This Fall,” and it lives up to my expectations. As Jason Lynch of “Adweek” noted, “decades ago, the broadcast networks used to assemble their biggest stars each summer to record elaborate jingle promos to tout their fall lineups. Some four decades later, here we are with CBS’s best offering:
This season, I’m only looking forward to the 19th season of “NCIS,” the debut season of “NCIS: Hawaii” and the return of “CSI: Las Vegas,” and “The Equalizer” as well as “Young Sheldon” and “Blue Bloods” as things I’ll try to watch without recording and I’ll be grateful for those CBS shows. The only other show I’m anticipating off “Big 3” programs is the second half of the first season of “Leverage: Redemption,” the brilliant reboot of “Leverage,” a superb creation by John Rogers and Chris Downey, originally starring Timothy Bottoms. The second half of the show reboot's first season is set to premiere on October 8 on IMDb TV.
Personally, this 2021 coming season is a far stretch from the 20–25 shows I used to wait for in the 1970s with delighted anticipation, but the 300 extra cable channels streaming, flowing, and going along still don’t make viewing fresh content any easier to find. Football and basketball will fill in the blanks nicely. And then this past July, the Hallmark Channel debuted all their upcoming Christmas movies to anticipate so, I’m doing just fine.
PBS is a longtime mainstay for so many viewers, but I’m definitely a record-and-watch-later candidate as I can’t guarantee I’ll be in front of the set at a fixed time these days, a gift from programming teams who now make Live + On Demand + Digital Streaming a real thing for the average household.
Yet, some of my friends do not have cable TV. They don’t have an alternative such as Roku, Amazon Fire, Google Chromecast, YouTube TV, that you can acquire to fight the statewide behemoth Suddenlink. Fortunately, fiber optics, and finally some competition, is in our local future.
There’s still time to search for something I missed the first go-round on the nostalgia channels as well as Amazon Prime Video and IMDB.com. If there’s nothing new I want to see, fortunately, there are retro networks such as Antenna TV, GET TV, COZI TV, the Decades Channel, and others to take me back to Baby Boomer happy days.
Thanks to all the nostalgia channels for keeping many of these programs alive for generations to come to see what it is that used to preoccupy our attention and conversation the next day at school and work. That was CBS. Here's to Fall 2021 bringing back the best in original programming for procedurals and comedies.
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