TV used to be about the movies. Now it's ESPN

Here's a bit of early Glen Campbell from a 1965 episode of ABC television's Shindig! music program. By today's technical standards, the production is primitive -- black-and-white, graphics limited to simple superimposing of a title card over the main image, analog 525-line NTSC broadcasting instead of high-def digital.

And it's visually stunning. Every camera shot is a masterwork of composition and choreography.

YOU COULD OFFER a similar critique of any number of TV broadcasts from the "old days" of the 1950s and '60s. Here's another clip from the days when TV had nothing to rely on except artistry:

This was what was happening in the mid-'60s over on Hullabaloo on NBC.


And here, The Doors on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967. They were never on again . . . Jim Morrison said "get much higher."

And, finally, The Killers on MTV's Total Request Live a few years ago. In some respects, live television is still live television, but you'll notice how quick cuts now predominate -- and how crane shots fly like a rocket, instead of float like a balloon.

It's probably overgeneralizing, but I would submit that television -- somewhere along the way, probably starting in the 1970s and '80s -- began to lose the cinematic aesthetic and instead adopted that of big-budget TV sports.

In other words, television -- particularly music television -- doesn't look like the movies. It looks like Monday Night Football. And SportsCenter.

I wonder what that says about us . . . and our culture.

HAT TIP: The Dawn Patrol.