I’ve got another piece up at hilobrow.com, which I love writing for. The editor Josh Glenn has assembled 25 entries in service of “analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993).” It’s a great line-up, including Heather Quinlan on Mystery Science Theatrer 3000, Peggy Nelson on Seinfeld, Tom Nealon on Miami Vice, and Nikhil Singh on Chocky. And Annie Nocenti landed a personal favorite of mine The Singing Detective. Here are the first two paragraphs of my piece, which is about the ancient MTV (mostly) animated anthology series Liquid Television. This is easily the most Gen X thing that I (born: August 1966) have written in a long time.
There’s an old saw about how MTV doesn’t play any music anymore — old as in MTV dropped “music television” from its logo in 2010, so quit griping. More to the point, music doesn’t need MTV, and hasn’t for almost as long, because music videos are ubiquitous (hello, YouTube and social media). We no longer must weather Glenn Frey’s “Sexy Girl” and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” while waiting for a network executive, bearing an Excel spreadsheet with the word “demographics” on the Y axis, to deign to share some of the good stuff.
Plus, even back in the day, much of the good stuff wasn’t even music. Take Liquid Television, the network’s classic animation anthology, which ran for four delectable seasons during the early 1990s. The sheer anarchy and variety of Liquid Television was its own special zone of mainstream weird.
Read the full article at hilobrow.com.
