I grew up on TV Guide. Sure, I read traditional kids' magazines such as Highlights, Boys' Life and Zoobooks, but my periodical passion for as long as I can remember was the TV Guide. One of my most distinctive memories of visiting my dad at his office (he worked as a TV news director) was seeing his rows of TV Guides lined up neatly on a shelf. When The Simpsons first started airing, I was obsessed with seeing every single episode, and I remember meticulously going through my dad's old TV Guides to see if I had indeed caught all of them.
Throughout junior high and high school, as my dedication to TV grew, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the TV Guide each week, snatching it up right out of the mailbox and practically reading it from cover to cover, including the articles, reviews, and of course, the listings, which were the only way to know what was happening on your favorite shows in the days before widespread Internet usage.
The most exciting time for reading the TV Guide was right before the fall season began, with the oversized fall preview issue that offered up information on all of the new shows premiering in the coming month, as well as changes and developments on returning shows. The fall preview got so big, actually, that they eventually had to split it into two issues, one to cover the new shows and one to cover the returning shows. My freshman year of college, when I no longer had my parents' TV Guide subscription to mooch off of, I went to the newsstand and bought the fall preview issue so I wouldn't be out of the loop.
After that, though, I found out all I needed to know online (often from TV Guide's own website, www.tvguide.com), and the magazine itself retreated into the land of fond memories. Even so, every time I would go home or visit a friend's house, if there was a TV Guide lying around, I'd read it, cover to cover if I had the time. I felt a twinge of sadness when I realized that even my parents had stopped subscribing.
Then, a few months ago, I came across an offer online for a free year's subscription to TV Guide. I didn't give it much thought, other than that it would be fun to read TV Guide again after a few years away. But when the first issue arrived in the mail, I found myself almost as excited as I used to be when TV Guide would show up, even if I no longer looked at the listings to see what was happening on my favorite shows. Now a more critical reader than when I was a kid, I still found myself appreciating both the magazine's straightforward and unpretentious reporting, as well as its concise and insightful criticism. Although TV Guide is known as a cheerleader for the television industry, critics Matt Roush and Susan Stewart aren't afraid to take on shows they don't approve of, and the venerable Cheers & Jeers section often attacks TV's sacred cows.
Not long after I returned to reading TV Guide, I read about the magazine's sinking fortunes and its intended revamp. With more and more people getting listings from the Web and onscreen programming guides, and getting articles on TV personalities from celebrity magazines such as Us Weekly, TV Guide was in danger of becoming both irrelevant and unprofitable. Thus, the publication's parent company, Gemstar-TV Guide International, announced plans to radically change TV Guide's format, expanding it from its well-known digest size to full-magazine size, dropping the localized listings in favor of a national format, and reversing the ratio of articles to listings.
The first issue of the new TV Guide arrived in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago, following a final digest-sized issue that played like a final episode of one of the shows the Guide has covered for so long. The last digest-sized issue featured nine collector's covers (an annoying habit the magazine had picked up in recent years), each featuring current TV stars recreating iconic past Guide covers. There was an article about TV Guide collectors, a look back at the magazine's history in photos and quotes, a reflective essay by Matt Roush and a series of exchanges between the modern cover subjects and their past counterparts. It was, for all intents and purposes, a farewell.
Then the next issue showed up and though it still had Roush and Stewart and Cheers & Jeers, it wasn't the same. Changing the percentage of articles from 25 percent to 75 percent means a lot more filler, and while there still isn't any crass celebrity gossip, everything from the features about must-have fashion items and photo-driven stories on hot young stars to the fonts in the headlines remind me of Us or In Touch. By the second issue, even Roush had been reduced to a charticle, although his opinions still shone through, even in the gimmicky format.
The passing of TV Guide, as inevitable as it may have been, marks the end of an era, not only of exhaustive printed TV listings, but also of the kind of sophisticated commentary on the medium that often made its way into the magazine's pages. I don't expect TV Guide to completely give up criticism and analysis, but it's clear that the focus is now far more on superficial fluff than it has ever been. A general-interest TV magazine just isn't practical anymore, I know, but it's still sad to see it go. Just as I now get my listings information from the Internet, I'll have to rely on it, too, for intelligent critiques, and when my free subscription to TV Guide runs out, I doubt I'll miss it. As far as I'm concerned, it's already gone.