Once again, I am denied It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Apple TV + has it, and the other Charle Brown holiday specials are locked up. If you have Apple TV +, you can watch any of these wonderful shows anytime, which would be the same if you own them on DVD but forget catching them on broadcast TV.
(In full disclosure, Apple did allow A Charlie Brown Christmas to be shown on PBS for one night the first year they owned them).
Look, I know I am an old fart. I actually still watch network television, I am cable connected, and I truly believe that the facility we now have to get what we want, when we want it, how we want it, while we sit wrapped in the comfy confines of our living room couch does us more bad than good, I feel. My buddy Tom and I often have this discussion when we start to rant about the current generation with our “Hey, you kids, get your bikes off my lawn” (quick story about that…Tom and I grew up on the same street, and he lived next door to an old guy who not only didn’t want you to park your bikes in front of his house but would doddle out his front door and push the offending bikes off the sidewalk in front of his house, right into the street). Tom and I postulate that since we can all pretty much à la carte our lives, we rarely get introduced by anything we haven’t been looking for. Our experiences are truncated; therefore, our education about life is lessened. The creative programming of radio shows a lost art, practiced now only across satellite radio, where we still have the ability to truncate our choices, spinning across all the specific shows we can seek.
But back to Apple TV +. I can’t damn them for making a business decision to buy the Chuck shows. But even if I can stream a show or pluck it out of a DVD case and slip it in (that’s what she said), the problem (and I know this is wholly my problem, it’s not a big deal, ok, I get that) is that I am once again, ala carting my life. And life, for me, is as much about the surprises that come at me (and granted, those surprises, as you grow older, are usually more bad than good). I like to try and plan and make sure I am home to catch the holiday TV specials I so loved as a kid, as much as I love them now. I don’t want a Spotify algorithm picking songs for me based on my past choices or Amazon making recommendations by considering my shopping of a month ago.
And I damn well abhorred a supposed world-wide epidemic that took us all away from socializing in person for two long years and ended up making such paranoid weaklings of big sections of the population who will never again want to venture out of their homes without a mask.
Or does this all come down to being aged-out of life? Am I complaining about the same thing, in how it relates today, that everyone my age begins to rail against, mainly, that what I once cared about, needed, and enjoyed has become obsolete, pretty much as I have? I really don’t know, although I fear what I just wrote is true.
I just really wanted to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown this year.
Bummer Ralph. That was a great show that I always looked forward to as well.
Living in Thailand, I’m very used to paying for subscriptions to get what I want. MLB, NFL & NBA. It adds up, but at least I can watch my beloved teams.
And it won’t be long before those are your only choices in the US as well. It’s already started with Amazon buying Thursday Night Football. The rest will sadly follow.