Rerun Revival

By James Poniewozik

When All In The Family's Carroll O'Connor died last month, it was a great loss for TV. And a great gain. In the brutal summer of Fear Factor, America was actually talking about TV, the medium it loves to hate itself for loving. O'Connor's Archie Bunker, the consensus went, helped America make sense of a period of social turmoil in a way no news report ever could. In a way, O'Connor's media wake even outstripped that for Jack Lemmon, who died less than a week later, though TV actors usually land far lower on St. Peter's It List. Lemmon was praised as a master actor; but O'Connor was hailed as a national emblem, as history.

O'Connor's death resonated with so many largely because All in the Family, and his bigot nonpareil Archie, had a second life in reruns for decades. But TV rarely basks in this kind of glow, for two contradictory reasons. On the one hand, it's too accessible. Its masterpieces and its misfires are readily apparent to anyone with a remote; the same people who complain that "there's so much garbage on TV" can remain blissfully unexposed to the chaff that makes up most of the books published, movies screened and records released in a year. And on the other hand, it's too ephemeral. Until recently, TV was divided between a canon of usual-suspects classics--Lucy, Lassie, Archie--and everything else, which lived on only in tape vaults, electromagnetic waves dissipating into deep space, and the audience's selective memory.

That situation is starting to change. And with it, just maybe, so is TV's status as an art form. Suddenly TV's past is everywhere. The all-reruns TV Land, the offshoot of Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite franchise, has increased tenfold in the past five years by offering shows like The Donna Reed Show and The Love Boat, while the fast-growing Game Show Network revives the leisure-suited splendor of Match Game and Tattle Tales. Thanks to cable's ravenous maw for content, more diverse and complex shows are entering the rerun canon. Cartoon Network (which, like TIME, is owned by AOL Time Warner) not only spun off the Boomerang channel of old cartoons for nostalgic adults (Get it? Boomerang?) but also inspired a heated was-Bugs-Bunny-racist debate last month when it excised anti-Japanese World War II-era shorts from a Bugs marathon. One-season wonders like My So-Called Life and Action have found second lives on MTV and FX. Video stores shelve Ally McBeal next to All of Me. Critics can debate endlessly whether we are in a Golden Age of TV, but this is definitely the golden, silver and brass age of reruns.

The way an art form is distributed often changes both the art form and our perception of it. Serialization shaped the form and the audience of the 19th century novel. The spread of VCRs let a mass market explore film history; DVDs, with their director's cuts, multiple camera angles and interviews, are further transforming us into film historians. Just so, the kind of old TV available to us shapes our image of TV itself.

For instance, when we think of TV history, we usually think of sitcoms, sci-fi series and Dragnet-style cop shows, largely because shows that don't have involved, ongoing plots have traditionally done better in syndication and thus became "classics." But series with complex, ongoing story lines that let characters evolve over the years have provided much of the best TV since at least Hill Street Blues. Only recently, thanks to the growth of niche cable channels, has there been room for shows like thirtysomething (Bravo), the talky, baby boom-relationship drama, or Roc (TV Land), the gritty comedy about urban African Americans. A&E and Bravo offer a virtual graduate seminar in quirky drama, from Twin Peaks to L.A. Law to Northern Exposure.

And unlike yesterday's local stations running Mayberry RFD, cable networks offer not just content but context. TV Land offers trivia nuggets and behind-the-scenes stories as well as "retromercials," the vintage commercials it airs every hour. A few days after Lemmon died, Game Show Network aired a marathon of his little-seen 1950s appearances on What's My Line? Amid the garish capitalist thunderdomes of today's prime-time game shows, seeing an urbane Lemmon and publisher Bennett Cerf trade quips in tuxes was a mini-lesson in changed American mores. "There was a real New York sophistication and wit in game shows then," says GSN president Rich Cronin. Likewise, watching the network's reruns of the post-sexual revolution yet pre-feminist Newlywed Game--the Stepfordized housewives talking about mixing their husbands' after-work cocktails, the jokes about "making whoopee"--is like watching a new version of The Ice Storm every afternoon.

At the same time, just as the VCR turned moviegoers into home cineasts, video and DVD releases of old TV shows promise to create a generation of videasts. And it's not just a handful of hits that benefit. Rhino Home Video, for instance, offers cult classics ranging from Chris Elliott's slacker sitcom Get a Life to the trippy '60s kids' show H.R. Pufnstuf (the DVD versions offer videophile gimmicks like being able to turn off Life's laugh track). This is a material world: if you convert an evanescent work into something tangible, shelvable, revisitable and Christmas-giftable, we respect it better. Says Robert Thompson, professor and head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University (and curator of a collection of MTM Enterprises videos): "The video and DVD revolution is making it finally possible to take [TV] seriously, because the texts are out there."

Ironically, as much as TV has been blamed for driving families apart, classic TV is becoming something, like books or records, that parents can hand down to their kids. For moms and dads tired of vetting the Jackasses and Limp Bizkits of the world, reruns are a haven in the big scary media environment. For kids, they are another manifestation of today's palimpsest pop culture, in which everything is ripe for sampling and nothing stays dead. They have seen the movies morph Charlie's Angels from jiggle joint to empowerment parable; now they can see the reruns, back on TV Land, big sisters once removed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dark Angel. Says Ron Simon, a curator at New York City's Museum of Television and Radio who teaches in the film department at Columbia University in New York City: "Most of my students make little distinction between film and television. That whole hierarchy has disappeared among the young."

It may fade even further when and if TV takes the next step, toward video on demand. Today media companies dream of using the technology to sell new shows like The Sopranos; tomorrow they could use it to make every TV into an a la carte TV museum. (If they don't, someone else might: already hackers are swapping digitized video files, raising the prospect of Napsterized TV.) The flip side is that we may lose the common experience of having watched a few agreed-on classics: as TV becomes more like books, we may find that access to the complete Keats or the complete Alex P. Keaton doesn't mean everyone will check it out. In the days of the three-channel universe, TV professor Thompson could count on students' having seen the same set of familiar shows like Andy Griffith. Now, he says, "I find myself having to put episodes of That Girl on reserve at the library." Anna Karenina, meet Marlo Thomas.