The not-so-hidden motive for selling TV shows on DVD was finally made plain by this week’s release of WKRP in Cincinnati: It’s all a ploy to separate nostalgia-blinkered television junkies (like yours truly) from our hard-earned dosh. Big surprise.
The friendly folks at Fox Home Entertainment chose to put the inaugural season of that hopelessly dated, radio-station-set ’70s sitcom on disc with major changes to its musical soundtrack. Seems including the songs originally broadcast in the show—such tender numbers as Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Hot Blooded” by Foreigner among them—would’ve cost a bundle to re-license (reportedly hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per episode), and at $30 for the entire 22-episode set, there was simply no way to justify the cost. So replacement tunes were substituted in some scenes, while other scenes were deleted altogether.
Fans are incensed, and I feel their pain, but it’s unreasonable to expect Fox to spend massive amounts of money on a product that’ll likely sell fewer than a quarter of a million copies. Still, the decision is no less craven for the logic of its frugality: The company stands to make money on the truncated set. (Fox pulled a similarly avaricious stunt a couple of months ago when it released only the first half of the second season of ’60s ABC Western mainstay The Big Valley at roughly twice the price of its earlier, complete Season 1 set.)
Distributors like Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, et al, wouldn’t be releasing these shows if they didn’t pull in a profit, of course, and I’m inclined to agree with the Fox rep (ew) who, a propos of the WKRP caper, said that getting the show with a professionally mangled soundtrack is better than not getting it at all. (Not being much of an admirer of that particular show, I’ll take their word for it.) More intriguing is the question of why people are getting worked up over decades-old TV shows in the first place. Are WKRP in Cincinnati and The Big Valley, or any filmed or taped entertainment designed to help sell detergent and diapers and cars and (back in the day) cigarettes, art or something?
Well, yeah—a mutant form, anyway. And ironically, packaging them in full- and multiseason DVD sets reveals to what degree.
By bridging momentum-killing weekly and seasonal breaks and eradicating distracting advertisements—by literally taking the commercial out of commercial television, insofar as that’s possible—these sets allow us to become experts in the long-term creative flux of shows we once thought we knew backward and forward. Watched in the sequence of your choice (production, broadcast or random) and in bulk, even the most ossified icons and half-forgotten evergreens reveal a narrative dexterity and aesthetic rigor never guessed at during their piecemeal heydays. Barring that, they make fascinating sociological artifacts, and peel the TV-watching experience down to its compulsive core.
Take my own TV-on-DVD obsession, Dallas, which I’d hate to see messed with for the sake of moving more units, but whatever. Warner Bros.’ collections of the show’s pilot miniseries and first five seasons (soon to be six, but inexplicably packaged as seven) underscore just how inventive and flexible even this venerable prime time soap was before it clicked with audiences.
Dallas has largely become the stuff of punchlines thanks to high-camp knockoffs like Dynasty and now Desperate Housewives, to say nothing of its own goofy excesses (unless Bobby Ewing’s infamous shower-stall resurrection has since been reassessed as a Dadaist coup). Removed from its era, though, and viewed sequentially and in large doses, it reveals an uncanny understanding that groups of needy, self-infatuated egomaniacs aren’t immune to the pleasures of warmth, intimacy and nonremunerative alliances, much less the class-transcending pressures and fractures of modern life.
Such inconsistency is what anchors genuine drama—a lesson the network hacks currently addicted to cheap-jack “reality” fare could stand to learn—and Dallas sweetens the pot with a surprising pulp-Marxist perspective on the pathology of wealth that today’s show-runners wouldn’t touch. (Given the intervening Bush II nightmare, the Dallas collections also prove that soulless, power-mad Texas nincompoops are only fun when they’re make-believe.)
An early ’70s antithesis can be found in yet another Warners DVD series, The Waltons, of which the fifth season will be released next month. (Who keeps buying these things?) As it turns out, Earl Hamner’s well-regarded, aggressively folksy reverie on his Depression-era Appalachian upbringing is a frequently smug, often laughably anachronistic paean to bourgeois virtues. The show succeeds well enough at capturing a gauzy version of rural life under the New Deal, and its lack of snarky condescension and abundance of nonironic warmth seem as foreign today as Dallas’ emotionally complex shitheels. Indeed, it’s hard to remember a time when openly promoting liberalism the way The Waltons does wasn’t considered grossly unfashionable or even downright dangerous.
Nevertheless, Hamner’s series more often evokes American culture under the lingering influence of 1960s utopianism. In the episodes, the illogically huge Walton brood is visited by a succession of outsiders who—though slick, educated, worldly, shiftless and/or wealthy—inevitably prove themselves to be morally inferior to the big-hearted, plain-living, cloyingly self-actualized bumpkin collective.
It’s a tempting scenario, but the downside to such giddy, ultrahumane simplicity is that The Waltons generally sidesteps the risk, sacrifice, and panicky uncertainty of 1930s America, and the family’s nominal deprivation smacks of designer asceticism rather than true hardship. The series’ glossing over the sociopolitical realities of the time is as irritating (and as weirdly riveting) as the shallow, petulant intensity of its top-billed star, Richard Thomas—particularly 30-odd years on, when many of the government-spawned entitlements it takes for granted are being plundered by the self-professed simple folk currently occupying the White House.
In a sense, though, The Waltons and Dallas (and probably WKRP in Cincinnati, too) neatly encapsulate what makes television such an irresistible medium in the first place: an apparently limitless capacity for indulgence in improbable (impossible?) fantasies. The TV-on-DVD phenomenon simply intensifies the effect, as it does the compulsion, into hypernostalgia. Who, after all, doesn’t dream of a life sheltered by a caring, preternaturally progressive extended family, with plenty of lush, undeveloped real estate on which to roam? Or of being the invincible scion of a family of swaggering, charmingly corrupt cowboys who happen to be filthy rich? Or of having a job where every zany event can be punctuated by a classic-rock standard without having to pony up to some sleazy copyright oligarch?
One thing’s for certain: Nobody in these cathode-ray idylls ever spends their nights plastered to a TV set, feeding disc after disc into a DVD player and wondering whether the soundtrack’s been stepped on. That’s what real life is for.