No More Nights at the Museum

The Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills is a lovely place that preserves the history of television and offers interesting screenings and panels and exhibits. I've never been to the Paley Center for Media in New York but I assume it does the exact same thing equally well. I shall have to get familiar with it because the one in Beverly Hills is going away in mid-2020. The institution will keep doing some of its events in other facilities as they already do, but they'll no longer have that lovely building.

Yes, it's a shame. I never quite understood why they chose one of the priciest hunks of real estate in the world in the first place…but it's still a shame. It also may be understandable because so much of what you might have gone into the Paley Center to view can now be found on YouTube, archive.org or one of several other online repositories. What you can't find are videos of most of the in-house-produced Paley events, especially the early Paley Fest programs which were about the history of television. The ones today are almost wholly to honor current programming and to declare shows "classics" early in their first seasons.

I understand that an organization like this has to always think in terms of what will bring in the most bucks and that honoring recent shows and letting the videos of those events be released commercially has been a much-needed source of income. I also understand that a lot of old shows can't be honored because everyone involved with them has died. But they did some wonderful, important seminars and panel discussions with people who are no longer around to be interviewed and I hope that material is available somewhere else than their New York headquarters.