PBS, are you paying attention? More "History of TV"

This is the fifth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's increasingly desperate audition for PBS casting agents looking to populate a new series about "experts" on "Television." It began here quite a while back and none of this will make sense unless you read all of it (actually, none of this will make sense even if you do read all of it).

Chapter Five: It's Just One Damn Golden Age After Another

Emerging from the spiritual, political and sociological morass of the 1970s, Ronald Reagan declared the '80s "Mourning in America," and indeed it was, with TV programs such as "Dukes of Hazzard," "T.J. Hooker," "ALF," "Misfits of Science" and "Manimal."

But the '80s also ushered in yet another "Golden Age of Television" with fare such as "St. Elsewhere," "Hill Street Blues," "Cheers," "The Cosby Show," "The Simpsons," "Roseanne" and "Newhart," an age that continued well into the '90s with acclaimed series like "Seinfeld," "Friends," "NYPD Blue," "Northern Exposure," "The X-Files," "Frasier," "L.A. Law," "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Practice," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Pinky & the Brain," "M.A.N.T.I.S.," "Homeboys in Outer Space and "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer."

New networks such as Fox were created to handle the overflow of excellent series, while newer networks like The WB and UPN were created to handle the crap programming. (In 2006, when producers grew weary of creating lousy programming, The WB and UPN were forced to consolidate their holdings into one network, The CW, short for "Crap Warehouse.")

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with Huey Lewis and the News' "Hip to Be Square," segueing into Nirvana's "Rape Me," playing in the background): "I defy anyone to find a period with such sustained excellence in the history of television. You could tune in anytime on the primetime dial and find absolute brilliance. This was a time when even Roseanne was funny, for heaven's sake!

"What had happened was, in the early '80s, the network executives had been called on the carpet by the Bilderberg Group, that secret cartel of global leaders who surreptitiously run the planet. They were brought blindfolded to Sandefjord, Norway, and essentially told, 'Look. The traditional methods of distracting Americans with shiny pictures and sloppy scripting will not stand. Your American viewers are getting far too clever for that sort of thing. If they aren't provided more sophisticated entertainment, they'll abandon you in droves. And if they abandon you in droves, they just might start paying attention to the world around them. And if they do that, they might discover our secret plan to rule the world, and we simply cannot have that.'

"Well. This was a wakeup call for the networks - well, more specifically, it was a threat, but let's just call it a wake-up call - and just the thing to inspire them to create such delightful fare as 'Cheers' and other shows that encouraged alcoholism."

But all that didn't really matter so much, because TV was in the midst of eating its young: Cable Television had arrived, and nothing would ever be the same again. Bear in mind that things very rarely stay the same, so that's not quite the portentous declaration it's supposed to serve as. But, honest: Nothing would ever be the same again.

Coming soon: Nothing is ever the same again.