Mike Berry column: TV — and our lives — have changed over the years
Some of you younger readers (by “younger” I mean “under 50”) might not be aware that there was a time when we only had three choices when we turned on the TV: ABC, NBC or CBS.
That meant WQAD Channel 8 in Moline, WOC (as KWQC was known back then) Channel 6 in Davenport and WHBF Channel 4 in Rock Island.
(At our house we had six channels, since my dad put up something called a UHF antenna which enabled us to pick up the three Peoria stations. But they were basically just duplicates of the Quad Cities stations.)
There was no such thing as a remote, of course, unless you count the youngest kid in the family, who had to get up, walk across the room and turn the channel knob on the (probably black and white) TV.
As you might imagine, it was a dramatic change in our lives when cable TV came around in the early 1970s. Now we could get public television from as far away as Chicago, and — most importantly — WGN-TV out of Chicago, which carried Cubs games.
Through the years, cable TV started offering more and more channels (and charging more and more money, of course).
And then came flat-screen TVs, high definition, remote controls and the Internet.
Companies like Comcast, Mediacom and Frontier began offering TV and Internet together. Since there no longer was a need to go to the expense of setting up broadcast operations and creating local stations, a whole host of new TV channels sprouted. I remember fondly that ESPN came to Kewanee just as that year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament was getting started.
Pretty soon, you could watch more than 100 channels, provided you wanted to pay extra for all of them. No matter what cable package you chose, you were bound to get some channels you never watched.
And now we’re in the era of streaming. You can watch practically any kind of entertainment you can think of — again, provided you want to pay extra for it. There’s Disney Plus, HBO Max, Netflix, Paramount Plus and on and on and on. All will send a tidy little charge to your credit card every month.
I myself have Hulu, which is cheap and has some really good stuff. Old stuff, that is; I haven’t watched a current TV show for a long time.
Right now I’ve been watching reruns of a couple of my favorite TV shows of all time: “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue.” Both were produced by a guy named Stephen Bochco, and they’re both gritty, realistic cop dramas.
When I’m through with them, I’ll start on “ER” and “St. Elsewhere,” which were my source for up-do-date expert medical advice back in the day.
Being retired, I now have plenty of time to watch all this, especially in the evenings after supper.
Until 8 o’clock, of course; that’s when Rachel Maddow comes on.
This article originally appeared on Star Courier: Mike Berry column: TV — and our lives — have changed over the years
