Timeshifting: let's make TV weird again

Time is weird

It’s extremely rare that a piece of media overtakes the mindshare of a nation like Vince Gilligan’s creation did on all levels of society. Walk into Spencer’s Gifts at a mall anywhere in the country, and you’ll be bombarded by BrBa pint glasses, Walt and Jesse plush dolls, and Heisenberg T-shirts. Turn on NPR and there’s a good chance Teri Gross will be interviewing one of the show’s stars or producers. At this year’s Texas–OU football game, rabid fans wore Cafe Press’d shirts that aped the show’s periodic logo: “Breaking Ou” on the front and “Texas, bitch!” proudly silkscreened on the back. Rihanna updated her instagram daily to let us know how caught up she was before the finale.

As the show neared its demise, the fervor grew with epidemic speed — everyone I knew was in the process of catching up through Netflix, and then they torrented or DVRed files. Those who weren’t in the process were left out of hours of dinner-table conversation with their friends and families, except to get the backhanded compliment: “I’m so fucking jealous you get to watch it from the beginning!”

Like many others, I began my binge a few months before the final season aired — whole nights and weekends were completely lost to my couch and remote, and on that schedule events unfolded more or less in real time. When the last half of Season 5 began, it almost seemed disingenuous for AMC to make me wait a week between installments — I wanted to mainline, and it was only my continued interest in maintaining cultural ties to the rest of the contemporary world that kept me watching every week. I would have preferred to save all six episodes for one thrilling marathon on September 29th.

So why don't we make it weirder... Again?

September may have killed off a cultural touchstone, but it also left the viewing public with a quiver of new content to consume. Showtime bizarrely debuted the new season of Homeland in the exact time slot as the Breaking Bad finale, which tells me that they’re more concerned with timeshifted viewers than they are cable subscribers. Sons of Anarchy began its penultimate season on the 10th, Boardwalk Empire brought us back to Atlantic City on the 8th, and Downton Abbey came grimly back to life in the UK (and for the international pirate community) on the 22nd. With just these five shows on the September watch list, a TV consumer was left to revel in two loosely concurrent time periods spread across the globe: the early 1920s and the early 2010s.

In 1987 Hannah-Barbera orchestrated the best-known collision of televised period pieces. The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones was a landmark mashup that brought both flagging franchises back to the popular eye; when I was five years old it was actually my first exposure to the families, and it set off a lifelong fascination with and respect for both. It turned out Fred and George weren’t so different from one another after all, and the film did something subtle to inspire faith in the continuity of the human race over time, even if the depictions of both the future and the past were far from accurate.

What made the culture clash work was that both programs were about family. It’s a television tradition that’s been around since the dawn of broadcasting, a way for everyone to relate to the unfamiliar struggles of a dinosaur-riding caveman or a space-car-commuting citizen of the sky. And although notions of family change radically with every generation, we’re still addicted to the plight of blood today: Carrie’s caught between two father figures, “Sons” holds more titular weight than “Anarchy,” the Granthams look to heal the wounds of lineage while Nucky fails to plant a family tree of his own, and Flynn? Something tells me we’ll be hearing from that handsomely damaged stallion in more contexts than Better Call Saul.

I believe the children are our future

Although Hannah-Barbera had interdepartmental licensing on its side, we dwell in a media landscape that’s much more interconnected than it was in 1987. If cable networks want to truly demonstrate the power of middle-aged media over their dot-com progeny, they’ll do the one thing that elders always do best: bring families together when they seem to be falling apart. With the federal government just back from indefinite hiatus, TV executives have an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate the power of familial harmony by creating the most phenomenally entertaining Mad Lib the world has ever known. Since executives and writers are perennially busy, I’ll provide the framework for a holiday special they can feel free to use at will, as long as they remember me when I’m in the poorhouse because of my streaming addiction. It will be expensive to negotiate contractually, but will ultimately pay for itself through product placement and merchandising royalties.

Images courtesy of Frank Ockenfels/AMC, Igor Vinogradov, Gustavo Devito, and Windell Oskay, and Adrian Patino.