In Praise of Nick-at-Nite | GREGORY J. CAMPEAU

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.

(Not to mention I was fast realizing I was gay, which felt like its own kind of end-of-the-world scenario.)

An always-simmering cauldron of panic, my mind could never reconcile itself to the prospect of doing anything physically reckless. Riding dirtbikes down steep hillsides, among boys my age, one of the more popular routes to find release, filled me with prostrating fear rather than exhilaration. Ditto for football. Ditto for hunting. Ditto for paintball.

I did once try to run away from home—according to a certain literary concept of childhood familiar to me as a youngster, this is de rigueur, a rite of passage. But I made it only a few houses up the street before my anxiety and sense of filial duty restrained me from proceeding any further. Instead, I plopped myself pensively on a large rock in my neighbor’s front yard and there reflected on my ill-conceived adventure and how worried my parents would be if I were discovered to be missing. Soon I was ambling home, heart palpitating, legs like jelly. On arriving, I announced to my parents and sister that I’d at last come back. They hadn’t noticed I’d run away.

Rather, my rebelliousness was quiet and largely invisible from the world. It was a radicalism of interests, demeanor, aspirations. Very early on, I began constructing an inward bulwark of idiosyncrasy, of intentional backwardnesses and quirks, strong enough, and secret enough, to keep me safe in a bewildering world. In college I majored in history; I was obsessed with, and always halfliving in, the past.

It’s hardly surprising that during the pandemic, when most of us of necessity became escapists of one kind or another, I sought refuge again in classic TV. This time, it was far easier to find; one needn’t wait for the appointed hour for Nickelodeon’s giving way to Nick-at-Nite.

YouTube, that limitless wonderland of pirated delights, has full episodes of all kinds of shows I had only ever seen little clips of before. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and The Dick Cavett Show became special favorites: smart hosts, a parade of interesting guests, everywhere (with few exceptions) marks of gentility and charm.

But neither of those can hold a candle to my real pandemic-era obsession: What’s My Line? The show, which started airing in the earliest days of television and lasted for twenty-five seasons, has a simple premise. Each episode, a panel of (usually minor) celebrities encounters a series of contestants whose “lines”—i.e., jobs, positions, or claims to fame—have to be guessed. Typically, the lines being guessed are amusing in some way, either because they’re uncommon (girdle fitter, bread-box maker, astronaut, Congressman)

or because they seem not to fit common gender stereotypes of the time (a shy, small-framed woman who works as a circus clown, or a big brawny man who tends roses). Each episode, there is also a mystery (major) celebrity contestant, for whom the judges on the panel are customarily blindfolded. Panelists have to judge only by listening, which many of the celebrity contestants attempt to circumvent by assuming unfamiliar and often amusing voices. Lucille Ball, whose voice is so well-known, affected an alien squeak to avoid detection during one of her appearances. Colonel Sanders, on the other hand, was not so recognizable at the time of his first appearance on the show (1963) as to merit blindfolds at all.

To sit down and watch an episode of What’s My Line? is to be treated to a very fine parlor game played by sophisticates, writers, journalists, and stage actors, all of whom are serious in their play and playful in their seriousness, using language and logic to amuse each other foremost and the audience secondarily. It doesn’t quite have an analogue today (except on public radio), and I think that’s largely its charm.

And I’m not alone in thinking so. All you’ve got to do is look at the view counts and the comments on these videos on YouTube to get a sense of how many folks are finding and enjoying TV that aired 60 and 70 years ago. Can you imagine people in the 2090s caring one whit about watching old episodes of Is It Cake?, Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, or The Kardashians? I can’t.

But maybe they will; maybe, during their own political tumults or global pandemic, they’ll take comfort in the simplicity of cake and Kardashians.