Henrietta Hay's Column

"Cheers" is gone. That Boston bar where everybody knows your name is no more. After ten seasons of highly entertaining television, we will be without Sam and Woody and Rebecca and the gang. But, like General MacArthur, they will return when the re-runs start.

My intellectual friends raise their eyebrows at this, but I must admit to being a TV junkie - well, sort of. I would be far more efficient and productive if I spent less time in front of the tube, but what the heck; I guess at my age I can enjoy whatever means of entertainment I choose. The problem is, it is getting harder and harder to find entertainment there.

I remember the first television program I ever saw, probably in the late forties. Some friends had this brand new toy and invited us out to listen to what may have been the first local broadcast. I can still see the set, and Rex Howell telling about this new communication medium. It was several years, however, before a TV set appeared in our house. My son John, the baseball statistician, had some childhood disease or other and was bored. I finally agreed to rent a small TV set so he could watch the ball games. Needless to say, that was it and we were hooked.

There is, of course, a lot of junk on TV, but there has been some good stuff, too. Remember Bonanza? It was the top rated show in the sixties. All in the Family was number one in the seventies and was the first TV show that combined entertainment with social consciousness. The rednecks loved Archie. The new liberals loved Gloria and Meathead and we all had a soft spot for Edith, who was not nearly as dumb as she pretended to be.

My own personal opinion is that MASH will never be equaled. It was TV at its best, combining things as they are, with the human ways of coping. It created real living people surviving the most awful situations with warmth and affection and black humor. It was not the event per se that was important. It was the way people were able to survive it.

Those were the shows that got me hooked on TV. Now it is not quite the same. We have "reality based" movies, bringing us all the tragedies of life glorified in living color with happy endings. Nothing is too gory or too intimate for the camera. We found it hard enough to believe that the Amy Fisher story was aired in three different versions, but now they are talking about doing one about her lover. Almost before the bodies were carried out, plans to put the World Trade Center bombing into a TV show were underway. A show about the siege in Waco was nearly finished when the cult ended in a spectacular fireball. One of the actors said the story was so great they didn't even need the fire. Where can you go from there but up?

We do have some relief from faux reality. Some of the cop shows are fairly entertaining if you can handle the blood and bodies. A few of the sitcoms would be tolerable if somebody would throw out the laugh tracks. The Senate Judiciary Committee has succeeded in doing that. Fortunately we still have Northern Exposure and Star Trek and Picket Fences and a few other shows to keep us sane.

So now if I manage to last through the news, I usually flip through all 38 channels to see whether there is any entertainment after prime time. It is amazing the stuff I learn that way. Most of it I didn't want to know, but it is often fun to watch. Depending on my mood I can watch news, sports, old movies, old TV shows, religion or rock music. Then there is one channel which majors in sex. They interview some very weird people.

Now they tell us that soon we will have 500 channels. If they ever come to Grand Junction I might as well say good-bye to sleep. It will take me all night to get through all 500.

"Cheers" and "Wonder Years" and "Quantum Leap" are gone, but don't despair. The re-runs are coming, and eventually somebody will bring them back in full-length movies. This year we have had The Brady Bunch, Gunsmoke, Gilligan's Island and Andy Griffith.

I guess I'd better leave TV reviewing to the experts, but I really don't know what I'll do with 500 channels.