NYTV-B-Gone
August 31, 2020 2:40 PM   Subscribe

The New York Times is ending its print television listings after 81 years. “We are firmly in the streaming age and the TV grid no longer reflects the way people consume television.” @noahchestnut on why they lasted so long, and what they could become in the future.
posted by adrianhon (28 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
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posted by njohnson23 at 4:53 PM on August 31, 2020


I'm so old I remember scanning the Chicago Tribune's "TV Week" supplement in the Sunday paper (which my folks would buy from a news stand on Saturday nights) for which movies they were gonna play next Friday and Saturday nights. Always on the lookout for James Bond and sci-fi flicks.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:06 PM on August 31, 2020 [11 favorites]


This is one of those baffling tells about the NYT’s weird perception of who their “real” audience is. “The TV grid no longer reflects the way people consume television”, in 2020? My god, someone there is going to shit when they find out where people look for opinions.
posted by mhoye at 5:11 PM on August 31, 2020 [19 favorites]


SoberHighland: "I'm so old I remember scanning the Chicago Tribune's "TV Week" supplement in the Sunday paper (which my folks would buy from a news stand on Saturday nights) for which movies they were gonna play next Friday and Saturday nights. Always on the lookout for James Bond and sci-fi flicks."

That was me except it was the Newark Star-Ledger. I mean you didn't want to miss Godzilla week on Channel 9.
posted by octothorpe at 5:24 PM on August 31, 2020 [13 favorites]


I have a comment here about my grandmother perusing the TV grid and musing aloud "I wonder what the neighbors are up to", and for a long time I thought the TV grid was a minute-by-minute of your neighbors' agendas.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 5:48 PM on August 31, 2020 [12 favorites]


This is one of those baffling tells about the NYT’s weird perception of who their “real” audience is. “The TV grid no longer reflects the way people consume television”, in 2020? My god, someone there is going to shit when they find out where people look for opinions.

I mean I get the snark, but streaming wasn’t even a thing until 2007 and basically no one was using it for 2-3 years after that. Barely half of American households have a DVR in 2020. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that it took a decade to kill a part of the paper that had been a fixture for multiple decades.
posted by Automocar at 6:01 PM on August 31, 2020 [14 favorites]


Can anyone recommend a web site that tells you what "Prime Originals" or "Netflix Originals" movies and serials are about, and if they are well made?
posted by rebent at 6:07 PM on August 31, 2020 [4 favorites]


This made me curious about when the NYT stopped printing stock prices. Turns out it was April 4th, 2006, which feels about right.

It seems insane now that all the major papers used to print out a huge excel spreadsheet every day.
posted by phooky at 6:53 PM on August 31, 2020 [10 favorites]


Can anyone recommend a web site that tells you what "Prime Originals" or "Netflix Originals" movies and serials are about, and if they are well made?

A good place to start would be the AV Club, which doesn't exclusively cover streaming, but has done a pretty good job of either checking in on or doing full reviews of most Amazon, Netflix and Hulu originals.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:59 PM on August 31, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am old enough to have had a family subscription to tv guide. That was a combination of the listings and People magazine articles.

Interestingly, I cut the cord 4 years ago. I kluged together through various apps what I wanted. Last month I was adding up all the charges including for the Internet and YouTube TV and Netflix and locast, etc. It was a decent amount. I decided to check the VZ website and they offered me 1gb, internet up and down, 450 channels, a free DVR, free box, free modem and home phone line for $10 more than I was paying piece meal. I am one of the few that have gone back to cable. The convenience is great.

Now, I just talk into the cable remote and ask what time Perry Mason is on and I can record all six episodes airing daily.
posted by AugustWest at 7:21 PM on August 31, 2020 [4 favorites]


“The TV grid no longer reflects the way people consume television”, in 2020?

They get all their information from interviewing blue collar patrons of a roadside diner in a fading Rust belt town.
posted by condour75 at 7:55 PM on August 31, 2020 [5 favorites]


Yep old enough for TV Guide and checking the newspaper. Also OMG the big-dish satellite dish and the guide for that was 11"x17" and 3/4" thick. Back in the glory days when you could watch almost everything with a combo of OTA for local and dish for un-scrambled everything else. Pretty sure that's gone now.

I tend to use Streaming Service Search Engine - Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime, Apple TV+, HBO for finding out what's where ( Like other such sites, it also gets a bunch of the free-to-stream sites). And a customized TitanTV – Free Local TV Listings for OTA and other live-streaming sorts of stations.

I think the intersection of OTA and Newspaper but not Internet is getting much smaller.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:26 PM on August 31, 2020


I decided to check the VZ website and they offered me...

Definitely a good practice to not write the full name of the devil.
posted by fairmettle at 11:36 PM on August 31, 2020 [2 favorites]


Aww, TV Guide. I am trying to remember if I ever used the newspaper to look up TV shows. I think I only got movie times from the local paper and relied on TV Guide for everything else.

My parents never got DVR and preferred to tape everything instead. My dad was obsessed with having a VHS machine and got one as soon as they came out (whenever that was -- time is an illusion these days.) He still has stacks of VHS tapes dedicated to DS9, the Nanny, BBT, and best of all, the entire American dub of Sailor Moon. Every season! Every episode! It came on at 4:30pm PST every day on Cartoon Network. He loved watching it with me. He got why the series and the manga was so special. I treasure his dedication to capturing all of it.

Then my dad got really into ripping DVDs from the library, Netflix, and Blockbuster. He has over 2000! Maybe even more, I haven't checked in a while. He's a preservationist and felt suspicious of early streaming services that couldn't guarantee ongoing access to titles forever. He wanted to have copies of rare movies he knew would never be available online. There are a lot of unusual shows in his collection, too -- OG episodes of the Little Rascals and such. He's good at finding rare DVDs. I am good at finding rare books.

Now he loves Hulu, and my mom is a daily user of Netflix and Amazon Prime. When he can't sleep (which is almost every night now -- fuck you, profound sleep apnea), he gets out a DVD and just puts it on mute in the background. I think it comforts him to know he has media he holds precious at his fingertips in multiple ways. God knows what I am going to do with his collection when he passes. A lot of DVD and Blue ray media degrades substantially over time.

I'll have to ask him if he ever used the newspaper to figure out when to tape our favorite shows when I was little.

Thank you for this trip down memory lane.
posted by Kitchen Witch at 4:27 AM on September 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


Oh god, my father also has the massive ripped DVD collection. It started when he digitised his VHS collection, and now it's several DVD cakes of videos, stored on the spindle. He even worked out how to cut out the adverts using the inbuilt sony software of the set-top box he uses.
posted by The River Ivel at 5:58 AM on September 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


I grew up in a household where my family considered television a controlled substance, like alcohol, that was to be enjoyed with moderation, which was hell on earth for me as a kid and now makes me smirk as an unexpected parent at 52 with an eight-year-old step-kid who I'm trying to convince that our projector-with-a-pull-down-screen model of occasional curated viewing is superior to the screens-as-babysitter model in place in her other custodial household.

I showed her an old TV guide recently, as a sort of history lesson, an artifact I'd kept as a reminder of that time in 1985 when Marlo Thomas turned me gay, and she was overwhelmed by not only the abject novelty of the thing as a physical, unchanging object, but by the idea that my family would, at our weekly family meeting ("What's a weekly family meeting?") would take the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post TV guides (Scaggsville, Maryland straddles two urban broadcast regions), and each of us kids would use a marker in our personal color (red for my sister, green for me, blue for my brother) to select our personal blocks of allowed watching time from our weekly TV time allotment of 7-9 hours (varying based on our behavior and how much we'd wear our parents down). PBS access was unlimited, with favorites highlighted in yellow, and we were a family of nerd-leaning people, so that was a treasure trove, at least.

In 1978, my green markings would usually land on Lost In Space, Bewitched, The Mothers-In-Law, and Lucan, the series starring Kevin Brophy as a young man raised by wolves, whose every appearance on screen made my ten-year-old face hot for some inexplicable reason, all of which would seem to disprove my claims that Marlo Thomas turned me gay in 1985. My brother's blue would highlight a massive swath of Saturday morning cereal and toy commercials, whereas the red markings were blocked to include the too-late-for-the-younguns Saturday Night Live, MASH, and Bob Newhart reruns. The social order failed as we landed in our sassy teen years, when the rule of law broke down and we had a VCR, so I could stock up on Dynasty and other even campier fare (I pine for the day when a Madame's Place DVD boxed set is finally issued), but those earlier years when the grey smeary pages of the TV guide was a tool to keep us from unlimited brain-frying by television still inform much of who I am.

"What's that say there?" asked Little Miss, poking her finger at a listing that was printed in faded, too-small type. I squinted, then spread two fingers out across the text without success, and in a thoroughly modern gesture.

"Oh, wait."

"Paper books don't work like that," she said, with a tone of minor victory. "They don't get bigger when you do that."

I nodded, and mused on how far we come in going from being on the clock of the broadcast schedule like factory workers subject to the whims of the upper management to digitally simulating all the frustrated searching of wandering around a video store in 1983 as we'd scroll endlessly through Netflix and offerings that are never quite what you feel in the mood for as you wonder if maybe that thing you're looking for is on Hulu.

We live in the world of the future.
posted by sonascope at 6:04 AM on September 1, 2020 [10 favorites]


When I was small in the 70s, we had 6 channels of television and it was completely commonplace to have black and white shows from the 60s in active syndication on the three UHF channels. We used the newspaper TV listings because TV Guide was 'too expensive.' In the 00s, I worked at my local newspaper and if there was ever an error in the TV listings the phones would not stop ringing all day/week long. People didn't care what department they reached -- their displeasure had to be made known.

When I look at all that's available today, I feel like even though I haven't lived all that long the overlap of my life on our shared timeline spans more change than I could ever imagine. Especially as a little kid watching black and white episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club every night thinking that the Mouseketeers were still kids.
posted by kimberussell at 6:11 AM on September 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


the la times had a weekly booklet with check ratings for movies:
a classic
1st rate
flawed, has moments
desperation time
posted by brujita at 8:14 AM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


I distinctly remember going through the newspaper TV listings with my family in the 80s, although the TV listings weren't in the paper, they were in a separate insert. I think it was called "TV Week", although that might be wrong. Anyway, it was ubiquitously called the "TV guide" in my family, even though "TV Guide" was a separate (fairly thick) book you had to subscribe to, and we didn't even get. Confusing, in retrospect.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the weekly TV insert—whatever it was called—was one of the first things I learned to read that wasn't specifically aimed at kids, and certainly the first matrix- or spreadsheet-like information I encountered in print. But if you wanted to know what was going to be on when, in the era before on-screen guides, that was just what you had to do. Otherwise you were at the mercy of simple channel-flipping and hoping you ran into something you wanted to watch.

In retrospect, I think the printed guides had something that the on-screen guides lacked, which was visibility into the future, beyond just a few hours, at a glance. I'd argue that it led to a more thoughtful pattern of media consumption than the cable OSGs are designed for.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:32 AM on September 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


People may or may not be aware that at the U.S. network scheduling level, many of the weekly grids are in Wikipedia. That's national only, of course, doesn't include local scheduling.

Extra feature: the daytime grids include all the Saturday morning cartoons.
posted by gimonca at 9:47 AM on September 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


It is kind of weird to think that we used to use print media guides to broadcast media. Imagine waiting for the mail person to come with the new issue of Podcast Weekly.
posted by snofoam at 10:37 AM on September 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


Yup, the NYT and others had that weekly insert, which they discontinued at least 10 years ago. In the Boston Globe, it had one of the few crossword puzzles I could almost solve.

the la times had a weekly booklet with check ratings for movies:
a classic
1st rate
flawed, has moments
desperation time


The Globe had this rating for both TV shows and movies:

**** Worth staying home for
*** Worth watching if you’re home
** Worth watching if you’re tired
* Worth watching if you’re sick
• Worthless

I think the reviewers still use it sometimes, but I haven’t been paying attention.
posted by Melismata at 10:42 AM on September 1, 2020


God knows what I am going to do with his collection when he passes.

I recommend making copies on hard disk drives.

You can currently get Western Digital 12TB USB3 drives for about US$200. One of those will hold the contents of a couple of thousand completely full 4.7GB DVDs on its own. Make two copies.

My own media collection lives on a RAID5 array made from five of those. Because seriously, fuck streaming.
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 AM on September 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


I wonder how the convention for drawing channel icons came about. They used to draw the VHF channels with white numbers in a solid black cell, and UHF channels were inverted, with black numbers printed in a white cell, right? (Or am I misremembering?) Was there some backroom deal between TV Guide and the (then) three broadcast companies, to minimize local UHF stations?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:10 AM on September 1, 2020


It's easy to scoff at this, but streaming isn't as ubiquitous as it may seem from the Metafilter bubble.

As of September 2019, Netflix had 46.55 million average monthly viewers in the United States. Hulu had 26.48 million, and Amazon Prime had 16.46 million (and there presumably is significant overlap between the three).

By contrast, Nielsen estimates 119.9 million "TV homes" in the country.

So streaming may be occurring in approximately half or just more than half of the TV-watching homes in the US. Nielsen estimates that streaming accounted for 19% of TV time at the end of 2019.

Of course, most cable systems have had a channel guide for years, so a printed schedule has become less and less useful, but plenty of people still watch plain-old TV.

*goes back to binging/hate-watching HGTV*
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 12:47 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


The Globe had this rating for both TV shows and movies:

The AV Club uses a letter rating scale for just about everything that gets a full review: A+ to F

But back in the old days, before the original Univision takeover, they had a prolific commenter known as ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER (all caps, always) who had only two ratings: "OPTIONAL" and "NOT OPTIONAL".

Actually, that's not true, he had a third rating: "WACK AS FUCK"
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:55 PM on September 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


I never really checked the listings chart, but the newspaper did have daily reviews of shows and commentary on the same page, often about fairly obscure shows, which was nice in the days before the web.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:59 AM on September 2, 2020


I always enjoyed reading the hilarious 3-5 word reviews for whatever movies were going to be on. Someone at the Times really liked to use the phrase "A real mulligan stew" during the 80s and 90s.
posted by freakazoid at 4:19 AM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


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