TV GUIDE and TV listings

I have been thinking again recently about the old weekly digest-sized TV GUIDE magazine that I imagine almost all the North Americans in here grew up with! I'll assume the magazine-sized later-years version is still in business, but I didn:t gander it when I took a look at the magazine stand of my local Walgreens' recently...The Annenberg family were behind it, but they sold it long ago...
In their ongoing reduction of the amount of pages you get for the money while charging you ever more for it, day newspapers have reduced the size of their TV listings,,,For an example, the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE used to dedicate a full jp of the daily to TV listings, and s week-long TV supplementson Sunday...Now it's 1/2 page daily and just daily listings for Sunday on Sunday, a weekly TV nagazne on Sun is a seperste - paid - subscripion!

 

I can share a story about TV Guide though it isn't really mine. I had a friend many years ago who had one musical obsession and a few downright OCD patterns. One of them he shared with his wife. Throughout the 70s and 80s, while she was pregnant with their children and after, they both would snip out and catalogue TV Guide descriptions. How do I know about this obsession? One day in the 90s he proudly showed me the folders of catalogued descriptions they had saved with highlighted ones being those that he or his wife deemed accurate. They clipped out descriptions of every show they watched - as if this was a perfectly normal behaviour.

Along with this, my friend had the best stories of him getting into minor difficulties and humourously getting out of them. It's been years since I've last seen him. I'm sure he has more.

 

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-internet-archive-archive-org.675999/page-3#post-22338578

Somebody uploaded some TV Guides to the Internet Archive. Most are post-'90, but one is from 1955 (Arthur Godfrey cover story)



TV Guide (Indiana) - 1955-09-10 - Arthur Godfrey Feud With Press : Lost Library of the Atypical and Unobtainable : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

 

The "sad thing" about TV Guide, isn't all that sad if you think about it. They decided to change to make it a bit more like the magazines in the stands where most of them were being sold - that is, the tabloids, geared towards a more general-interest, lower-calibre reader. More stars, less issues about the business, more fluff and hype, less detail and journalism. But then again, that had been going on constantly since I started reading it (cover-to-cover, I was such a teevee geek) in the '60s.

But the landscape was changing at the same time in the world outside the checkout line. Not only were the grids running out of space for what people needed to know, but they were finding it elsewhere. Cable offerings were making TV Guide's original format unusable, and the internet was becoming a better place to access specific information, chat and news about specific programming (just like the changing landscape of news itself: no longer would general-audience-targeting satisfy somebody who preferred news only about subject he was interested in, or opinions about the news only he agreed with).

And, you had a machine in your house that not only showed you your entertainment, but showed you a grid with everything on it. How could a weekly tabloid compete with that, and retain dominancy. Heck, the magazine couldn't even compete with their own cable channel, and the cable company's own in-house grids were still challenging the relevancy of that!

Today I'm still the biggest TV geek I know. Only I may (may!) only purchase one TV Guide magazine a year...as well as perhaps the Entertainment Weekly Fall Preview, which I find more targeted to readers, not to magazine advertisers looking for dolts. And yes, I go out looking for specific information on the shows I want to watch specifically, because whatever passes for Google in my life, is much more helpful than anything on newsprint I could pick up in the checkout line.

Nowadays because of the complexity of the scheduling of broadcast, cable, premium and streaming choices - and because I prefer quality and personal preference over convenience - my information is trickier, and most wouldn't put up with it. I keep a list of shows we watch, according to where they are, and when they are currently running. I update my info as often as I need, checking Wikipedia entries for the shows themselves, as the sources don't tend to be as forthcoming with their own information anymore (competition, and just wanting to make viewers jump through hoops, I suppose). It's hard, but it's worth the effort for me.

 

Wow, TV Guide. A must have at one time, my parents started a subscription in 1958. There was a handful of channels then. Seemed like issues stayed 15 cents for decades. You’re right, Dillydipper, the news part of it was much more in depth behind-the-scenes stories and star profiles, NOT program ads disguised as articles.

I got a gift subscription for TV Guide a couple years ago and told my gifter to stop. The guide was not local, as it used to be, but time zone, I think, so PBS was never correctly called. Plus, there are a billion channels now. They can’t possibly cover it all. Sad, but TV Guide has become irrelevant.

 

....Some years ago I was discussing old TV GUIDE in a now-gone forum connected to a magazine from Iola, Wisconsin (The now-defunct COMIC BUYER'S GUIDE'S " CBGX-tra " forum). This was maybe about the time TVG switched to its current magazine format at which time they were a sponsor at a comics convention I went to that year - Wondercon, at the Miscone Center in San Francusco - with attendees getting a plastic handout bag one side of which had the version of the TVG logo the mag was using at that time.
On that board the question of vintage TVG collecting came up. It was presumed, I think? that New York or LA copies might be the most common - but would they? It sorta seems to me that a lot of people emigrate to America through those two cities or move there from elsewhere in America for job/" making it " reasons, and often don't stay there forever...and, for residents in NYC proper, would that many people think they had space to store old TVGs?

 

...Yeah, the old Annenberg (One if whom was Nixon's ambassadorato the Court of St. James) 70s TVGTVG " concerned ", " serious ", articles...kind of examples of the old " proper " media which is long-gone!!!!!!!!!!!
I recall a rotating political commentators column during the Nixon era, 4 different commentators rotating, so monthly or so each. I saw it commented once that TVG was ' one of the last strongholds of magazine illustration " - I recall Jack Davis cartoon covers, others? I remember this lovely, sorta retro, portrait of Lucille Ball cover by the same artist who did Bette Midler's first album's sleeve. I remember, when my family went from our Westchester County, N.Y. home (getting the N.Y.C. edition) to visit her family in East Texas (where I think the edition had Texarkana in it) seeing that week's issue in my aunt's TV room that I had already seen up North...and being shocked when it had a page if one:label gag cartoons that wasn't in our home edition? An unsold ad page, obviously, now I see.

 

You would have died walking the halls. Every cover was made into a high quality matted print available for free to anyone who asked for it. The halls were lined with fantastic covers (Mr Ed, Avengers, Hitchcock, Murrow, Lucy, Berle, Kovacs). But the covers were only available for 3 months. I was lucky enough to get under the wire for the John Lennon cover. Fantastic painting

 

Listings have been a mess since cable took over in The '80s ...
I knew TV Guide was gonna be collateral damage but in retrospect
it was a good blueprint for how to list shows in an easy to understand
format. We bumped it in favor of lesser-known Cue Magazine* for a
while, but TV Guide was by far the easier to digest. Just a simple
run through the hours of what was on. No grids, just listings.

The only way one can get listings for Roku channels often is through
Facebook. No thanks.

* Likely a misspelling.

 

T.V. Guide
Yellow Pages
Sears Catalog

....sadly, add to this so many great magazines that are no longer with us. While the content's been replaced by the internet, we've lost something precious.

 

Seeing the phrase "Annenberg family" breaks me up. Local(Philly) ties,the old man,Moe,cornered the market for horse racing info(a big deal 100 years ago)was, if not a gangster at least gangsterish,with union fights,owning both political folk and police,eventually cornering the Philadelphia media market with son Walter's Triangle Publications ownership of the Philadelphia Inquirer(from the old man),the Philadelphia Daily News,WFIL-AM radio and WFIL channel 6(where American Bandstand started and rescued ABC from oblivion) and,yes,the 15 cent weekly digest that for many years was the number one selling magazine,TV Guide. A creep,a crook and,yes,a billionaire,but one nasty person. Sub-headline on Slate for his obit:So long,you rotten b#$tard.

 

That's a neat thing to do, but since TV guide printed TV listings on both sides of each page, how did they handle TV descriptions that overlapped each other? Seems in some cases, if you cut out a description, it may cut oddly another description printed on the other side.

 

Good point and I asked exactly that. They would look ahead and plot out what descriptions they would cut out knowing they might cut into another one. And in their obsessive compulsive ways even they thought buying two copies was a bit much. I was simply fascinated by their desire to track such a mundane activity and hold onto it for over twenty years.

But then this is the same guy who created his own cut of Michael Mann's Heat with all the relationships eliminated. He was/is a very interesting guy.

 

TV Guide was still pretty popular when I was a kid in the 90s. It was nice to know ahead of time what shows and movies would be airing and was kind of like a personal viewing planner. TV watching used to be an experience and it was pretty fun growing up with 'blocks' such as TGIF on ABC or SNICK on Nickelodeon. You often had to plan your day around some viewing schedules unless you programmed the vcr to record.

 

The Seattle Times doesn't even have any sort of TV listings, daily or (I believe) weekly. I think they occasionally highlight a half-dozen shows (usually specials) and that's about it.

 

...Is it, perhaps, in Seattle even more than SF, abthoughtnof sooeslingnyo the ' new, cool, generation ' of millennials?...On the theory that ' the : NOW ' generation is ' cutting the cord '...disengaging themselves from Old Media! If we have less TV listings, they'll think we're Keeel, too,like them...and they might actually BUY a couple of newspapers !"

 

I didn't read TV Guide for a long while because where I lived there was no cable, we only had seven channels at the most, three network, one PBS, and two independents. It was frustrating to look through TV Guide and see dozens of shows that I could not watch. I just went with the local guide from my newspaper until I moved to a place that had cable.

I think what has hurt TV Guide is that most cable systems now have guides that tell you what is and will be on television, including a synopsis of the episodes and the ability to search for content. Added to this is the ability to schedule programs for recording just by selecting them from the guide and then just choose to record all showings.

 

You left out Trouser Press.
And you might just as well have added Strategy & Tactics to your list, even though it's still around.
Oh yes, and MAD Magazine.

 

...At a Safeway to-day, I did see TV Guide, with Dolly Parton on the coverz and bought it. It claimed to be a " Special Double Issue ", covering two weeks, but in my observation when I've seen it recently, every issue is a " double issue " published bi-weekly. I couldn't find any incidia (small print) inside giving the frequency but perhaps I think too much in comic book fan terms!!! Frankly, perhaps they switched to bi+ to be 2. able to charge more, make, - have all others make a larger profit margin & 2. reduce to frequency, certainly, of having to deal with returns.

 

it was a weekly magazine my parents never failed to get...I loved it.

 

This creeps me out. I’m listening to John Fugelsang’s SiriusXM show from tonight as I type this, and Gilbert and Frank are the guests, along with Gilbert’s wife.

 

My late friend recorded just about every episode of every prime time series, starting in the early 80s, and cut out the TV guide descriptions and taped them to the back of the VHS tapes.

 

I also remember a couple of times buying every single regional issue for a week and then going through them all to see what rare shows were playing in what markets in the country. This was before the mid-80s cable boom when shows like The Fugitive and Man From UNCLE for instance were maybe playing in 5 markets in the whole country. I also remember the excitement when making a new trading partner and sending each other TV guides. When I saw Toronto was airing Car 54, How to Marry a Millionaire and one-hour Twilight Zone, among other rarities, I flipped!

 

Were you one of those weirdos-- er, I mean aficionados I read about when I was a kid? Apparently there was a subculture of fanatical collectors in tbat period between the intro of the Betamax and the cable explosion of the early 80s. I've read stories of people in NY driving to North Carolina b/c they heard some ultrarare movie would be broadcast on a UHF station in Charlotte at 3 AM.

There was a rumor going round that Hugh Hefner had two VCRs running 24/7 in the mansion, recording movies.