As I continue to mourn the impending death of TV Guide (or, more accurately, the slow, painful, decade-long demise of the once mighty magazine), articles continue to pop up that help explain why I once loved the mag -- and why it was probably time to put it to sleep.
Today's Slate notes that TV Guide truly lost its bite in 1988, when founder Walter Annenberg sold to Rupert Murdoch. Gone were the heady investigations about the state of TV and the (sometimes odd) political pieces -- as the author of the Slate piece, Bryan Curtis, notes: TV Guide... may go down as the only media institution the Aussie magnate has depoliticized.
Curtis also gets to the heart of what happened to the mag, and what its legacy will be: Murdoch's stewardship sent it spiraling toward editorial and financial decay, and it will take more than a "revolution" to reverse the tide.
What, then, remains of TV Guide's legacy? For one thing, its volumes represent an unrivaled vault of TV history—an attempt to make the disposable medium slightly less disposable. As historians ponder the meaning of Marcus Welby MD, they will no doubt turn to TV Guide's yellowing back issues to find out what shows aired and why.
If "the Guide" never reaches the encyclopedic status afforded it by the 1993 Seinfeld episode in which Frank Costanza curated his old volumes with Playboy-like reverence, it represents a noble effort all the same.
Meanwhile, the Nashua Telegraph perfectly captured the mix of sadness and resolution most TV Guide collectors felt when news broke that the magazine as we know it will die in October.
The newspaper interviewed TV Guide megafan Jim Ellwanger -- who I knew in college, and now runs an e-mail message board for the magazine's collectors:
Zoned editions are also coming to an end in October in favor of one national magazine, “so it looks like I won’t be collecting any issues of the new TV Guide,” he adds. “There’ll be no more pulling off the interstate while I’m driving out of my home area, to look for supermarkets or drugstores to buy TV Guides. There’ll be no more strange looks from cashiers when I’m going through the express lane with four copies of the same issue – one to keep, three to trade.”
(Image credit: Charlie Powell/Slate)
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