Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.
Every Daily Show episode since Jon Stewart took over as host in 1999? Disappeared. The historic remains of The Colbert Report? Disappeared. Presumably, one hopes, those materials remain archived internally somewhere, but for the general masses, they’re kaput. Instead, the links redirect visitors to Paramount+, a streaming service whose offerings pale in comparison. (The service offers recent seasons of the Daily Show to paying subscribers, but only a fraction of the prior archive.)
Such digital demolitions are becoming routine. For fans and scholars of pop culture, 2024 may go down as the year the internet shrank. Despite the immense archiving capabilities of the internet, we’re living through an age of mass deletion, a moment when entertainment and media corporations see themselves not as custodians of valuable cultural history, once freely available, but as ruthless maximisers of profit. Those of us who believe in the historical value of accessing media from the past are paying the price.
GenX tv addict here. I grew up in a time when, if you wanted to watch a show, you need to make an effort to be in front of the tv when it aired. If you missed seeing it, you had to hope that if was repeated over the summer (only about 2/3’s the episodes of a continuing series would be repeated, and if a show was cancelled, that was it). If you missed it on summer repeats, you’d have to hold the show went into syndication, was carried locally at a time you were able to watch it, and then stalk the series because syndication packages were notoriously shown out of order (which is why almost all the episodes ended up with the characters being in the same base situation as they started out in).
It was the same thing if there was an episode or series you loved and wanted to watch again.
VCRs were an absolute game changer. You didn’t have to revolve your life around a tv schedule- you could go out, to go events, go shopping, have a late dinner. You could pause tv to go to the bathroom, you could watch and re-watch episodes that you enjoyed, or verify something you thought had happened earlier instead of relying on collective memory. If you missed taping something, you might still have to wait for re-runs - but there was also the chance that someone else had taped it and could loan you the tape.
Having learned the lessons of broadcast tv, I taped everything I watched, and I kept the tapes of the stuff I liked, or that had actors I liked. I could sit down today and watch all the episodes of David Soul in Casablanca or Billy Campbell in Moon Over Miami, or short-lived shows like Space Rangers or South of Sunset.
I still record and save things locally. The myth of having immediate access to everything ever produced was always just a myth.
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“TV Guide” is still a phrase in our household. Mostly because I used to have a cat with… personality - he loved to push the limits of what was acceptable kitty behaviour. So my go to became ‘threatening’ to throw the TV Guide in his direction (not actually at him!) and saying firmly, “TV GUIDE!” He would always immediately stop what he was doing when he heard “TV GUIDE!” LOL. Fun times and fond memories!
Oh, access to everything will happen.
The owners will just charge us for every viewing of every episode.
access to everything that isn’t bogged down by stupid licensing deals, too. so many things just disappear because someone wants someone else to keep paying for that one song they added in a single episode 15 years ago.