Don't worry. No clips of Lynda Carter today. Just traces of her memory, and Hal Linden's and Bea Arthur's.
Memories, that is, of the variety specials they hosted in the late seventies or early eighties, and the wonderment that they were allowed to do so. Did anybody enjoy these shows? Lynda Carter's Celebration was one of the highest-rated programs of the 1980-81 TV season, so people definitely watched. But why?
It's hard to remember now, but the dawn of the eighties was very different from its twilight days. Cable TV was much less common, and most channels consisted of bad prints of old movies and reruns of old sitcoms that had already played for years in syndication. ESPN existed, but in a crude form, and MTV didn't go on air until late in '81, and HBO's original programming was a joke. VCRs still weren't that common, and most people who owned them still hadn't figured out how to program them to record, and the most easily found videotapes were again movies everybody had already seen.
In other words, the broadcast networks still ruled. So if you were, let us say, in junior high or high school, stuck on a farm with zero other options and you wanted entertainment, you turned to the TV. And found absolutely nothing.
I'll drop the second person voice here and make it clear: I found nothing. Nothing even remotely designed to capture the attention or imagination of a young person. Oh yeah, sure, there were youth-targeted sitcoms and the occasional "relevant" TV movie--anybody else have fond memories of The Survival Of Dana?--but these were clearly made by older men, or worse, by corporations. They'd toss us a bone and hope we were happy. Sure, there was Saturday Night Live, but by 1980 it had reached the lowest imaginable ebb, and when it started booking musical acts along the lines of Desmond Child And Rouge, it was almost like watching...well, it might as well have been a Lynda Carter special.
And so was born my fascination with those weird variety shows. They were so far removed from my taste, from the tastes of anyone I knew, they seemed almost avant-garde. Consider Bea Arthur's special: Guest stars included Rock Hudson and Wayland Flowers and Madame, which would seem to make it the gayest show imaginable. But it was at pains to deny that, to deny any sensibility whatsoever. It was just sort of there, a transmission from a world in which sexuality, individuality, wit and imagination had ceased to exist, or perhaps never existed.
Or to put it another way: Why the hell was Rock Hudson singing? Why was Hal Linden wandering the streets of New York, bursting into show tunes at the drop of a hat? Why was Lynda Carter--God help us--dancing? Who thought any of this was a good idea? Why was it on the air, and who was expected to watch it?
Someone did. They must have; the networks kept churning these things out. Where did those viewers go? Who serves the entertainment needs of the millions who willingly sat through Hal Linden's Big Apple, and possibly even enjoyed it? As much as I mock, I was, after all, one of them, and I still miss the time when TV could be so innocent, so lacking in irony, so deeply, unintentionally strange.
