Something's Missing

 I confess that there was a moment of mild panic on my part when I toggled past HBO Signature and landed on HBO Family to find that there was no more HBO Family. My cable company, yes I still have a cable company, left a message on an orange and pink swirling background informing me that "This channel is no longer broadcasting." 

No longer broadcasting? How can this be? It was only a few days before that I had been watching Charlie avoiding all the perils faced by bad kids in that chocolate factory right there. This was the channel. I was sure of it. I flipped back up. There was HBO doing that Signature thing just like always, and two below that was HBO's Comedy channel, yukking it up as if nothing was happening next door. 

Which was the problem: Nothing was happening next door. All that wholesome feel-good family content had just stopped. As my wife would earnestly point out, one of the few spots on the dial where she could tune and feel reasonably assured that she would not be witnessing a gun battle was gone. 

Then it occurred to me: As comfortable as I am pretending that the benevolent TV gods are out there to keep me safe, warm and entertained, there are people or rather corporations out there trying to make as much money as they can off of that feeling. Television, it turns out, is a business. You have to pay someone to stand by and make sure that the family faucet stays on and doesn't get mixed up with Comedy or Signature or Zone or Latino. It costs money to keep the Gilded Age from slipping in there or some naked lady with pet dragons. 

Now it seems that fewer and fewer people are getting their dose of entertainment from "channels." Maintaining "channels" requires vast and costly resources that could be used to line the pockets of CEOs and CFOs and not the Family Faucet minders. If you want your family content, why not just pop on over to the big vat of streaming HBO Max (as in Maximus) to pick and choose how you'd like your entertainment: just a little bit of gun violence, a modicum of gun violence, or gun violence that doesn't even stop to reload. It shouldn't take more than forty-five minutes to locate Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And don't go looking for Sesame Street in that ever-shrinking basket of family-friendly shows. That little bit of corporate synergy ended but you can still find reruns of Elmo's World where he gets his federal funding cut. 

It just doesn't make sense to program for kids anymore. Cents, anyway. As for me, you can probably find me staring wistfully at that shifting orange and pink screen, remembering the good old days when TV was free. It just came into your house through the air. Cartoons in the morning. Mister Rogers in the afternoon. And after midnight, there was just static. Not even a slide that said no more Family Channel. So we turned it off and went to sleep.