the beginning and end of cable, part 1

Cable TV is dying, and many are saying good riddance. As monthly bills go up and viewership goes down, as original content rushes to streaming as quickly as possible, the remaining cable subscribers are faced with a bunch of channels that just show old movies and reruns, and start wondering, why are we still paying this much for this little?

Here’s the thing, though: cable was always full of old movies and reruns. Unless you’re producing live or close-to-live content like news and sports, there simply isn’t a way to produce 24 hours of new television every day. It’s just that now that there’s so much content on streaming sites, why would you wait for, say, FX to put a particular Simpsons episode on when you can pick any episode you want from its multi-decade run and watch whenever you want on Disney+. (Or is it Hulu? Personally I don’t stream a lot and can never remember which service has which shows, I just know Disney owns two services it has only semi-integrated.) Same with movies - all the Paramount movies are on Paramount+, all the Warner Bros. movies are on Max, etc., no need to wait for Comedy Central to show Ghostbusters or Caddyshack again, and you won’t get any commercial breaks or clumsy censorship like “wally wick.” But I can tell you that Comedy Central showed those movies a lot, as well as lots of reruns of sketch comedy shows and stand-up specials. Sure everyone remembers South Park and the Daily Show but those were only a couple of hours a week - and there were lots of reruns of those shows too.

Anyway as we reach the end of an era, as the channels I wasted so much time watching start to wink out one by one, let’s take a look back at the weird early days of cable.

For one thing, the early days were much earlier than you think. The first “community antenna” system in America was constructed in 1948, at a time when television itself was an expensive novelty and only three countries besides the US had TV stations at all. An appliance store in a small town in the mountains of Pennsylvania couldn’t sell any TVs because the town couldn’t pick up any signals over the air, so they put a large antenna on top of a nearby mountain to receive broadcasts from Philadelphia and wired cables throughout the town to provide a clear picture of the three major networks - NBC, CBS, and… DuMont. (ABC would launch its television network later that year.) That system, Service Electric Cable, still exists and somehow has avoided getting bought out by a major national cable company.

Almost immediately, Service Electric noticed that a TV could tune to twelve different channels but the antenna was only picking up three, and started planning to populate the remaining channels. Initially all the content was over-the-air, using various methods to bring in television signals from out of town - stronger antennas, transmission over telephone lines, microwave repeaters. The first was limited by distance from the transmitter, while the latter two (also used by the networks to send their national feeds to local stations) were expensive and low-capacity. Efficient nationwide distribution would have to wait until the launch of communications satellites in the 1970s… but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Through the 1950s and ‘60s, CATV was mainly a way to provide over-the-air television channels to areas with poor reception. These were primarily rural communities far from transmitters, or mountainous areas that signals couldn’t reach, but in 1965 the city of New York began granting cable franchises in Manhattan and some Bronx neighborhoods. Tall buildings are just as disruptive to radio waves as mountains are, and fuzzy television was a constant complaint for Manhattanites.¹

In addition to the local and out-of-town broadcast channels, the cable systems had several channels for locally originated content. During the 1970s, the southern Manhattan system would show its own commercial content on channel 10. This most notably included sporting events from Madison Square Garden, and eventually the Garden would take over the entire channel, becoming the MSG Network. (By some measures this was the first regional sports network, and possibly the first cable network anywhere, although initially it didn’t have full control of its channel. Even into the 1980s MSG was sharing channel slots with other networks.) Channels C and D² were noncommercial “public access” channels where anyone could show up at the cable company’s studio and request a block of time on air, as well as use of the studio equipment to produce a show. This would become a standard feature of cable systems nationwide³, and though the content was amateurish and the viewership almost zero, it did something to democratize the mass media. You or I could have our own show on cable, and it had its own channel right next to the big national networks.

Lastly and most infamously, there was Channel J for “leased access.” This was similar to public access but allowed commercial content and was leased to producers for a fee.⁴ Through the 1970s and 1980s the cable franchises with the city simply required that leased access be available to the public, without any restrictions on content. New Yorkers being the filthy folk we are, it didn’t take long for Channel J to fill up with nudity and pornography in prime time, on an unscrambled channel without any additional fee required. Moralists decried this filth, and eventually got the cable companies to offer channel filters on request so you wouldn’t be exposed to even a few seconds of Channel J. (There were only a few hundred takers in a borough of millions.) Meanwhile some folks in the Village cheered a few of these shows, known as “Gay on J” - it would be decades before commercial television would be willing to touch that kind of content. Ultimately, the 1990 revision of the cable franchises would allow the cable companies to restrict content on leased access, and Channel J suddenly vanished.

I think it’s a function of there only being two or three dozen channels on those early cable systems that public and leased access could cause such an uproar. In the late cable era with hundreds of channels, they simply got lost amid all the national channels and many people were unaware these services still existed. But in the ‘80s, Channel I was USA, Channel K was Nickelodeon, and the channel with the naked talk show was right in between. Setting aside the nudity, it’s hard to imagine amateur video being equally prominent with “professional” national productions from big companies. Sure, YouTube is better than public access because you don’t need to go to the studio and request a timeslot, everyone can post videos immediately… but with millions of “channels” content discovery is left up to the vagueries of the algorithm. You’re never going to see some randos interviewing their friends on everyone’s TV next to the national channels everyone watches (in part because there aren’t those national channels anymore) but for a few years, cable subscribers in Manhattan did.

I will also note that some adult content remains permissible on public access TV, even today. Nudity is only allowed in late-night slots and hardcore pornography is banned, but a few of the Channel J producers migrated over to public access for a little while. Ultimately it didn’t last because of the ban on advertising. Nowadays you hear about adult content getting demonetized… there’s nothing new under the sun.

This post has gotten pretty long, so I’ll call this the end of part 1. In part 2 I’ll look into the national cable networks of the 1970s and ‘80s, and what they were like before they turned into nonstop reality show reruns.