TV Guide: 1953-2008?

George Costanza's father's collection of TV Guides may be nearly complete: After last week's hatchet jobs on the magazine's editors, there's a sense the print edition is not long for this world. Macrovision bought Gemstar, TV Guide's owner, mainly for the technology that creates listings for the cable channel and online; the magazine itself was more or less thrown in as an afterthought, a white elephant that's hemorrhaging money.

This, after decades as the magazine with the highest subscription base in America. Today, of course, it's a shell of its former self, a People Magazine Lite cluttered with frivolous gossip and childlike cheerleading for just about every show and sorely lacking the one thing people for which used to subscribe to it - the listings, which people of a certain age will recall fondly, riffling through the black-and-white pages when the chubby little thing arrived in the mail and checking off the shows that sounded promising to them, making a mental note to try to catch them, but knowing that convenient reminder in digest form would be there on the living-room end table.

But as TV evolved, TV Guide devolved. Cable gave the magazine more to write about, but it also diffused the star power of its cover stories - there were no shows watched by 30 million people every week -which seriously injured newsstand sales. It got to the point where they were featuring cover stories that had nothing to do with TV - hawking the big movie opening that week or NASCAR or pop singers or something, anything that might catch the eye of those in a grocery-store checkout line, since fewer TV personalities had the ability to move large numbers of copies. And the glut of channels made printing listings a logistical and paper-wasting nightmare, and with them being available online and from your cable or satellite provider, and with the advent of telegrazing via channel surfing, listings became expendable. Which probably inspired more channel surfing.

Ah, well, 55 years is a good, long run. It will be survived by TV Guide Channel, an eternal if less slick version of "Entertainment Tonight," and its online presence, defined by giddy gossip and vague spoilers for shows' upcoming episodes.

(Full disclosure: I once toiled for a couple of years for the L.A. bureau of the Canadian edition of the magazine, which had separate owners and content. At the time, it, too, had the highest circulation of any magazine in Canada; today, it has been reduced to a mere online presence. It was one of the most exasperating professional experiences of my life, if in fact "professional" is the appropriate word to use to describe that publication.)