"The History of Television" - in the homestretch now

This is the sixth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's delightfully educational series that'd serve smashingly as the inspiration for a multipart PBS documentary series. You won't want to miss a verbose word, so start at the beginning and good luck getting back to this point.

Chapter Six: Nothing is Ever the Same Again

(This section - whether on the TV documentary or in the coffee-table book of same - should be accompanied with all manner of computer-generated graphics and swirls and impressive sound effects, since the cable era was nothing if not about cool graphics and sound effects and not so much about content: "Swoooosh! America is over-impressed by 'SportsCenter'-style hyperbole!")

The overriding theory behind cable television was pure genius distilled to one simple thought: These idiots like their TV so much? Let's figure out a way to make them pay for it!

Some date the birth of cable to Dec. 6, 1957, when, on live TV, the United States was boldly propelled into the era of space-age communications when a Vanguard rocket containing America's first satellite exploded two seconds after ignition. (Not a fact you particularly need to know, nor even a terribly germane one, but one that is true and intended to remind us of the seemingly forgotten notion that this is in fact a history lesson.)

Fifteen years later, in 1972, HBO was launched on a cable system in Wilkes-Barre PA using microwave transmission. (Another true fact, though hardly a funny one.) In the intervening years, HBO has emerged as the industry leader in quality television content, so much so that the network rather snobbishly advertises itself: "It's not television. It's HBO."

HBO has created some of the most creatively ground-breaking series TV has ever seen, such as "Sex and the City," "The Larry Sanders Show," "The Wire," "Deadwood," "G-String Divas," "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "The Sopranos," the first TV series in the history of Television to never end. On the other hand, more recent HBO offerings - "Lucky Louie," "The Comeback," "Rome," "John From Cincinnati" - have either eluded or alienated audiences to the point that all the other networks have created a new ad campaign: "It's not HBO. It's television."

But HBO is a premium cable channel, which means you have to pay even more to receive it in your home. There are only a handful of premium cable channels, but scores upon scores of basic cable channels, with the number still growing, each vying for an ever-limited number of viewers. In fact, it is estimated that by the year 2027, there will be one cable network for every 14 "bloggers" in America, and three "bloggers" for every American.

Basic cable channels call attention to themselves by "narrow-casting" and "branding," opposed to the networks' strategies of "broadcasting" and "hoping for the best." Through "branding," cable channels allied themselves with their "target demographic" and, more importantly, made everyone else feel unhip and out of it and undesirable and past their prime. In other words, the declared aim of the coolest cable networks was to wrest viewers from the mollycoddling they receive from self-help gurus and force them to examine the failed, unfulfilled lives they had, inadvertently or otherwise, created for themselves.

Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over "Swooshing" sound effects and an assortment of music-bites from sundry cable outfits): "Because they do not answer to the FCC, or Federal Censorship Commission for the layman, a government agency created to roll back First Amendment freedom-of-speech protections in order to ensure that devoutly religious parents not hear on broadcast TV the sort of language their progeny employs with their schoolmates, cable channels are able to truck in more sophisticated themes. For example, due to their extremely mature content, the last three years of the Clinton Administration could only be covered on cable."

Here's how some of the more high-profile cable networks established firmly entrenched persona that preserved for them lucratively tiny niches in national discussions emanating from the ever-frantically-spinning top that is the Zeitgeist (or, at least, the folks at Entertainment Weekly who decided that liking everything in popular culture would make them look like they had a clue as to what was going on):

* MTV: Became one of cable's most influential and innovative channels almost immediately, based on the heretofore shocking revelation that a certain kind of viewer just really likes to watch sexy women undulating in a promiscuous fashion.

* VH1: Established itself as the cool place for people who weren't quite cool enough for MTV, becoming so successful at it that eventually VH1 viewers discovered they were no longer cool enough to watch VH1.

* Lifetime: Initially attempted to appeal to women comfortable with the notion of women-as-victims, which, it turned out, was a notion with which a disquieting number of women were comfortable.

* Spike: Boldly targeted 14-year-old boys, a demographic almost no one (except every Hollywood movie studio, videogame manufacturer and lad mag) had dared to target.

* Food Network: Went after two ends of a spectrum - the morbidly obese and the morbidly anorexic - because everyone in the middle didn't have all that much interest in merely looking at food on their TV screens.

* FX: Via edgy programming with just a smidgen less nudity and profanity, lured all those viewers a little too cheap to subscribe to HBO.

* A&E: Eradicated "arts" and "entertainment" - which was what its acronym initially stood for - from its schedule when it discovered many viewers had no taste for either, just lurid reality programming.

* TLC: Similarly, truncated its name to an acronym when its original name - The Learning Channel - proved to be a turnoff to its core audience.

* QVC: Focused on viewers who, when extremely inebriated late at night, lost all sense of equilibrium, taste and restraint and would buy anything put before them.

* USA and TNT: Developed shows that, in the heyday of the broadcast networks, easily would've been greenlit and emerged as respectable successes, but now, given the disarray endemic at said broadcast networks, would've been considered perhaps a little too foursquare to air, forgetting that a whole lot of people are perfectly happy with foursquare entertainment, as long as it delivers the goods, narrative- and character-development-wise.

* TV Land: Aimed at people too confused by the current cable universe and current TV programming and our current society in general, and just want to remember life as it was back when it made sense to them.

This further aided cable programmers in wresting viewers from the broadcast networks, and by the year 2005, only 8% of television viewers were even cognizant of the fact that NBC still existed. By 2003, the average viewer was more likely to tune into a cable program than a broadcast network offering - Animal Planet's least popular production had a more loyal fan base than any ABC sitcom - and the average broadcast-network viewer was more likely to have hip-replacement surgery than an original thought.

By the way, additional off-network original scripted programming has long been produced in syndication - "syndication" coming from the original Greek σύνδικος (syndikos), meaning, "not good enough even for basic cable."

Coming soon: Dark (if influential) clouds on the horizon.