Robert Thompson

Midway through this first decade of the new century we're bound upon, lots of things happened on the 2005 popular-culture front: EBay turned 10; VH1 turned 20; A Charlie Brown Christmas turned 40; Disneyland and McDonald's, 50; Nancy Drew and Twinkies, 75; The Michelin Man, 107. Johnny Carson, Hunter S. Thompson and Nipsey Russell died. So did the actors who played the Riddler, Oliver Wendell Douglas, Agent 86, Scotty, Gilligan and Gidget (Sandra Dee, not Sally Field). And Ralph Edwards, whose drive-by biography show This Is Your Life and Fear Factor-esque Truth or Consequences made him, with Allen Funt and Chuck Barris, one of the unwitting pioneers of reality TV. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel left their anchor chairs. Oprah got turned away from Hermes, took on child molesters, produced a Broadway play, finally went on David Letterman's show and, most surprisingly, got millions of Americans to read Faulkner. She also watched Tom Cruise behave peculiarly on her couch; shortly thereafter, Tom was rude to Matt Lauer. Dancing with the Stars happened; an American Idol contestant accused Paula Abdul of an affair with him; Tommy Lee went to college; Danny Bonaduce went postal; and, after a prison term, Martha Stewart was a one-term Apprentice host. Chaotic, showing home movies of Britney Spears and Kevin Federline's love story, debuted. It's on DVD. Lots of TV shows came out on DVD. The Miss America pageant left network TV and Atlantic City. Star Wars and Star Trek ended; Harry Potter came out in print and film. Al Gore started a cable channel, Current TV, seamlessly blending the worst of MTV, CNN and the Internet. NYPD Blue ended, but Steven Bochco launched Over There, the first show about a war in progress. Unlike M*A*S*H, the show didn't last as long as the war. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that sexual scenes on TV are up 96 percent since 1998. Is it a coincidence that 1998 was the year Viagra was introduced? Michael Jackson trial re-enactments on E! featured an underappreciated performance by Jimmy Kimmel as Jay Leno. No kidding. Lil' Kim got time. Buster the Bunny found himself in hot water when he visited lesbians in Vermont. Geraldo Rivera, in New Orleans before the cavalry, held a baby up to the camera. Poker continued to thrive on TV, and Sudoku swept the nation. Can televised Sudoku be far behind?It's likely 2005 will go down in the history of popular culture as the year that new digital TV technologies reached a tipping point. A lot of the developments, from the continuing penetration of the DVR to the increasing offerings of VOD, are just refinements on the real revolution a generation ago, when the VCR let viewers, for the first time, capture, store and replay programming at will. Mobile-television developments this year, however, portend bigger changes. Not that there aren't precedents here as well. Sony introduced the Watchman in 1982, and Panasonic was making super-portable TVs in the 1970s. But there were three problems. First, they could only receive programming that was broadcast over the air in that location, and they were at the mercy of the strength and quality of the broadcast signal. Second, unlike the audio Walkman, TV requires at least occasional eye contact; it's hard to watch TV while jogging. Finally, portable audio can produce high-fidelity sound with tiny equipment; pictures suffer at two inches. The latter two problems will not disappear, but the first is being solved. This year, content providers announced they will deliver TV material to personal computers, video iPods and cellular phones. Commitments have been made to help break television out of the home. Developments so far are hardly revolutionary—starting in January, Time Warner will offer AOL subscribers episodes of Alice and Scarecrow and Mrs. King—and most of it cashes in on cultural equity built in traditional TV. But in the end, it's not going to matter. These new technologies provide a viable solution to a nagging, half-century-old problem: how to get away with watching TV at work. A new aesthetic will need to be developed, of course. No one will want to watch programs on a 2-inch screen that were produced for the ever-bigger and wider and higher-definition models. Why spoil an episode of Lost on an iPod when you've got it waiting at home on your TiVo and giant screen? For consumption on the subway, in the waiting room and, most importantly, at the office, modular programming that falls somewhere between radio and conventional series TV is just around the corner. And 10 years from now, when managers confront plummeting workplace productivity, they'll curse 2005.Robert Thompson, an Adweek columnist, is trustee professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he also directs the Center for the Study of Popular Television. He can be reached at rthompso@syr.edu.

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