WRITINGS FROM THE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH
In Praise of Nick-at-Nite GREGORY J. CAMPEAU | OXFORD As a youngster, Rocko’s Modern Life and Aahhh! Real Monsters simply didn’t—and couldn’t—hold the same appeal for me as a restless housewife’s thwarted attempts to get rich quick and become a star of stage and screen, or an astronaut’s desperation to keep his beautiful live-in genie a secret from NASA. Each day, I could hardly wait for that late hour—8 o’clock maybe?— when the fast-moving swirls of color and irksome clamor of the cartoons on Nickelodeon would give way to the quieter, simpler monochrome of Nick-atNite. As it turned out, I, too, loved Lucy and dreamed of Jeannie. Why I was drawn from a young age to classic TV is unclear. But it did accord with some of my other quirks. In my teens, while my peers were listening to the Black Eyed Peas, Fallout Boy, Beyonce, and Bow Wow, I was investing in Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole CDs. I didn’t know what a badonkadonk was. I did, however, know what made Chicago Sinatra’s kind of town (answer: it has razmataz) and why you ought to get your kicks on Route 66 (reason: it goes west, and it is, of the routes going west, the best). My favorite movies, meanwhile, were the campy 1966 Batman and snappy midcentury musicals like The Music Man. Like these things, classic TV moved at a pace I was more comfortable with: it was more self-assured, and, I daresay, classier. I was born in the late 1980s. What I most remember from TV was decidedly un-classy. I remember watching OJ Simpson flee from police in his white Bronco. I remember seeing the grim aftermath of Columbine. I remember Bill Clinton testifying that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman.” I remember watching the second passenger jet fly into the World Trade Center. I remember the orange lights of American warplanes dropping bombs on Baghdad in the middle of the night at the start of the (second) invasion. I remember my dad regularly switching on a doomsday preacher who pointed to all this dark, upsetting news and, looking right into the camera, warned that the world’s end was at hand—which, mind you, I earnestly believed. You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to suppose that by resorting to Nickat-Nite, and all my other backward-looking tastes, I was trying to escape. Escape the complexity. Escape the instability. Escape the terrifying tokens of imminent apocalypse all around me.
SUMMER 2022 | 45
