If your TV gets the Decades channel, enjoy it while you can. Monday, March 27 it changes to a channel called Catchy Comedy which, from what I see, carries nothing that I'd watch that I can't get on half a dozen other channels or online: The Carol Burnett Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, The Lucy Show, I Love Lucy, Love Boat, The Bob Newhart Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show…
I love many of those shows dearly. I own complete sets of some of them on DVD. I think I can watch some of them on six or seven other channels I receive…and that's not even counting online. Every episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show is on YouTube in good, compete prints with no commercials. If you were to name any episode from that series, I could be watching it on the screen in front of me in about ten seconds…or less time than it takes my office TV to warm up.
Pluto even has an "all Dick Van Dyke Show" sub-channel that runs 'em 24/7. I just checked and at this moment, they're running "The Square Triangle," my least-favorite episode of my favorite sitcom.
This is not to in any way berate the folks who run Decades Catchy Comedy. I've met a few of them. They're nice, smart people who seem to truly love old television programs. If anything, I'm berating a system that doesn't seem to incentivize programmers to seek out shows that everyone else isn't running. A lot, I know, aren't being run because it doesn't seem cost-efficient to restore the old prints to current broadcast quality.
And a lot might not draw an audience right away. There might be a Catch-22 in play here: I'd love to be able to watch all the episodes of The Defenders, the 1961-1965 dramatic series that starred E.G. Marshall and that guy who later starred in The Brady Bunch. I suspect though it would cost an awful lot of money to get all four seasons in rotation on some channel and then it might take an awful long time for enough people to discover it and start watching to justify that investment. If I owned a channel, I doubt I'd take the risk.
I don't have any solution to this. I don't have any suggestions. I hope some other channel picks up the Dick Cavett Show reruns which were one thing I could watch on Decades and nowhere else. I guess all I'm saying is that I'll miss that channel.
But you know, when I was much younger, if you'd told me that someday, my TV set could bring in hundreds of different channels for my viewing pleasure, I would have thought that was Heaven. I wouldn't have imagined they'd all be showing The Dick Van Dyke Show…and probably when I tuned in, "The Square Triangle."