On Golden Eras and the Now

The other day I heard somebody refer to the “golden age of television.”

I immediately leaped to the conclusion that he meant that fuzzy black and white age in which all of America watched Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke, and Ed Sullivan’s variety hour and gathered the next day to share their mutual cultural three-channel (if you didn’t count PBS, which was at that point some guy standing at a blackboard writing equations), pre-programmed experience.

Just as I was about to remind the speaker that his “golden age” was mere seconds in geological time from when Newton Minow created waves — and a meme — by damning all of television as “a vast wasteland,” I realized that’s not what he meant.

He meant now. This very minute.

It seemed strange to hear, in these End Times for traditional television, that we’re in a golden age. Yet I could see his point without even waiting for him to explain. All this choice we have — and choice of excellence, to boot! A considerable bit of it driven by brand-new players to the world of production — Amazon and Netflix. Some series may not be to everybody’s taste (the big hits Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Six Feet Under, and Breaking Bad left me cold; and I don’t like vulgarity or nudity without good reason) but nobody can deny that we are awash in quality, from Amazon’s moody alternate history The Man in the High Castle to the ultimate political junkie series, Netflix’s House of Cards.

And we can watch all this bounty on our own schedule, in marathons and binges. With subtitles and sometimes in foreign languages. And we can rewind to catch bits we missed and fast forward through the boring parts (all without special equipment) and freeze the action while we go into the kitchen and fry up a pan of buttered and salted Cheerios (what, you don’t do that?).

As “hit” network shows earn audience numbers that would have gotten them canceled ca. 1964, a brilliant new world, a truly golden age, of television is born.

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We are simply not accustomed to thinking of ourselves living in any sort of golden era. Golden eras, we sigh nostalgically, were lived in a soft glow. All the neighbors were friendly, taxes were low, and kids were content to play stickball without needing wifi-enabled egadgets. Or golden eras were lived by dashing, larger-than-life figures — Medicis and Leonardos and Michaelangelos on every Firenze street corner — Renoirs, Van Goghs, and Lautrecs in every Paris bistro — Darwins and Faradays and Davys in every London scientific establishment.

Us? We’re too busy multitasking. The kid’s in trouble at school again and the new boss doesn’t like us. The lawn needs mowing and Obamacare (and Obama) is destroying the country. What if there’s a super-bug that wipes out life on earth? A meteor? Could be a meteor, instead.

But the truth is that very few people of any era see their own time as golden. Even in the nineteenth century, when Britons and Americans imagined they’d reached the peak of progress and prosperity, there were still those pesky orphans dying in factories and slaves being whipped on plantations. Still dreadful infant mortality. And revolutions cropping up here and there.

Another truth is that we are, or may be, in several types of golden age, right here and right now.

We may, for one, be in a golden age of self-defense rights. With luck, we may be just at the beginning of that age. With less luck, perhaps nearing its end. Or nearing a moment when we’ll have to defend self defense. But this, today, is a great time. We sometimes just don’t notice because we’re too busy tweeting back at foaming-at-the-mouth hoplophobic bigots who want us dead.

We’re certainly in a golden age (I hope not the golden age) of electronic communications. Yes, definitely matters are getting scary-ominous. On the other hand, we now have the most amazing ways of making connections with each other, of building communities. And of ferreting out truths inconvenient to those in power. Oh yes; want a blueprint for building a firearm? Download one and run it through your desktop 3D printer. Figure out a better design? Upload it to the world.

So golden ecommunications and the golden gun era embrace each other.

The golden ecommunications are an integral part of that golden age of TV, too, of course. And not just in the obvious ways. For instance, back in those other “golden days” of TV, a group of establishment executives would sit in smoke-filled rooms, screening pilots for proposed TV shows. If they didn’t think the shows would make money — and deliver whatever cultural messages they wanted delivered — we never even saw those pilots, let alone the shows that might have been.

Know what Amazon does? They produce a pilot as full-tilt fine as the proposed series will be. Then they throw it online and let the viewers choose. The shows most loved by viewers become series. Like The Man in the High Castle (which is based on a Philip K. Dick novel, BTW) or the gripping cop drama Bosch (based on the Michael Connelly novels; a personal weakness of mine).

I mean, that’s seriously golden right there! So much choice.

There must be many other ways that this era, right now, with all its perils, noise, and fears … that this era is golden. A dawning era of good health amid the blubber and diabetes? Historic heights of free-speech rights? A golden era for recreation, perhaps? Or for innovations in energy? Who knows? There are so many ways to look at it.

Perhaps even if a lot about the era sucks, it’s golden for you, personally. You’re in the best relationship of your life. You survived a cancer that was supposed to kill you and every day is a gift. You’re finally prosperous after a lifetime of penury. Or you’ve taken a happy vow of poverty after a life of wretched excess. Your dog loves you more than any canine ever adored any other human being.

But I’ll bet people can name at least a half dozen ways, perhaps more, in which even this perilous era is golden.

And, as Carly Simon sang, “These are the good old days.” Our times may be remembered as the dawning, the noon, or the twilight of something sublime.

Yes, we come to suspect that we’ve got more twilights than dawnings ahead. The dark night of tyranny looms, the bloody twilight of war. Whether that’s normal human pessimism or we’re really about to fall into total sh*t, only time will tell.

But now … we’d do ourselves some good to pause and consider just how much in our lives and our times is really, truly, glowing golden.