Nostalgia, TV, and Entry Points

There’s something new happening with fandoms as far as TV goes. As Gen X (hi) and Millennials continue to age up there’s a large cohort who want to continue what they had when they were kids.

Now that, in and of itself, is fine. I get it. Sometimes I want to just sit and mire in the stew of nostalgia but still get new stories, too. But it can be harmful.

See when we were kids creative universes didn’t just keep going on TV. Shows ended and a new show might be in the same universe as an old one but it was also a new show of its own. Take, for example, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Is TNG a Star Trek show? Of course! Is it the Original Series? Nope, new characters, settings, building out the world, and so on.

But now, more and more, fans seem to want nostalgia, and when it is pushed back on, specifically when it is replaced with new things I am seeing a lot of “Well they can go watch the old stuff,” which is a terrible substitution.

TV has changed. It just has. The way stories are told, effects, scripts, everything has changed, and continues to change. Go look at things from before we were born and you’ll see they changed in that timeframe too.

Telling a kid now to just go back thirty years and watch something old to get into a creative universe is effectively blocking them from joining in.  They have no baked in love for the world, or characters. They need an entry point of their own, that is as current as they are.

You might be going now “But when I was a kid we watched old stuff and it was fine!” and we did. Because we had no good choice. There wasn’t nearly the depth of archival media available. I mean when I was a kid there were not VCRs in normal home use, and even when they started to come out tapes were pricey and buying shows (if they even got releases which was rare) was a lot of money to sink into a thing if you didn’t adore it.

So we watched reruns because they were on. That was kinda our only option, really. And yeah being able to tape stuff off TV changed that some, but not by much because tapes cost money and the quality was iffy and you could only fit a few episodes per tape.

And even then, I remind you, there weren’t giant universes that had been going on TV for thirty years to catch up on, anyway. Fans didn’t have a way to catch up regardless, if there were (which is part of why there weren’t really). And that’s assuming they even knew of the shows.

So if now going back is easy and there are thirty (or more) years of things to watch in a current creative universe why shouldn’t we expect new viewers to the place to do so? Because suddenly we’re right back the fact that storytelling on TV has changed. There’s a much higher chance that it will not fit what new viewers want at all.

If they have a new entry point though, well they can get engrossed in the world, and want to see more. And then the past is there for them, and their buy-in, and interest, is already set so the older stuff has a much higher chance of working for them suddenly.

But to deny them that chance just to satisfy your own nostalgic urges, is to ensure those creative worlds die off one by one. If you raise a barrier to entry, many people won’t bother climbing it, they will just go somewhere new that wants them. Your idea of a show being timeless is tainted by your context of time for it. If you weren’t there it isn’t timeless, it’s old. Doesn’t mean it can’t be good, but it will be seen in an inherently different way and context than you have for it.

I am very obviously aware this happens in Marvel and DC comic creative universes all the time. That doesn’t make it good, or better. It makes it worse. It means you know it happens there and are either all right with it in one place and not the other or worse yet, both.

But for TV this is a brand new thing. And we can make strides to stop it, and support the new, at the very least, alongside the old, but possibly above it, so that the ideas we love can carry forward.

If you love a thing, a world, a setting, wouldn’t you want people to be able to discover it and make it their own, just as you got to? Why would you be against it?

How incredibly selfish can you get?