Nostalgia and Pseudo-Nostalgia in TV

“Happy Days” portrayed the 1950s when the 1950s weren’t even 20 years in the past. Last week saw the premieres of two new series, “Quantum Leap” and “Reboot,” that explore similar territory.

Before we get to today's main topic, four miscellaneous goodies…

1. The Streamer you don’t hear about: For all the spilled ink about the streaming wars, F.A.S.T. versus ad-free premium services, and how the premium services are all now embracing ads anyway, there’s not enough talk about PBS Passport. This service has an astonished depth and breadth of programming, free of ad interruptions (once you’ve started a show), and it’s cheap at $5.00 per month. That five bucks is actually the minimum donation you can make to your local PBS station and get access to Passport, and it’s tax deductible. We recently watched the Mark Twain Awards honoring Jon Stewart from the Spring, which was moving and hilarious.

2. From the CEO Obfuscation Department: this week, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters said the reason Getty would no longer allow AI-generated images on its platform is that there might be legal challenges around those images.

Nonsense. Fair use and parody protections make that argument a non-starter. The real reason Getty is getting rid of AI-generated images is that those images devalue human-created images.

It wasn't in the interests of newspapers to tell their readers about CraigsList, and it wasn’t in the interests of the RIAA to tell listeners about Napster.

AI-generated images create an alternative to Getty’s business model that poses an existential threat—and at the moment that alternative is free. The best analogy here is Uber. Like Uber, these AI-generated image services present a faster and easier new way to do an old thing, and the newcomer is competing unfairly either by giving away the product (AI-generated images) or by selling it below costs and cheaper than the incumbent (Uber).

3. Speaking of AI, while we don’t know who will follow Daniel Craig as James Bond we do know that the new voice of Darth Vader isn’t another flesh-and-blood actor: it’s an algorithm. Ukrainian AI company Respeecher has cloned James Earl Jones iconic baritone. I’m a bit sad that we won’t experience a different actor’s interpretation of what Vader sounds like.

More importantly, I’m downright alarmed that voice cloning as a technology is going to pose yet another challenge for our ability to determine what’s really real.

Amazon’s Alexa has already created a user-level version of this that lets a little boy listen to his dead grandmother reading a bedtime story to him, which is creepy. The potential for misuse is vast.

4. Spotify is now selling audiobooks, but it’s a weirdly not-at-all-like-Spotify model where listeners purchase individual audiobooks. This is the opposite of the all-you-can-eat subscription model Spotify has with music and podcasts.

There’s a hint in the WSJ coverage that Spotify might innovate ad-supported models, which would make more strategic sense, but I think it’s a loathsome idea to have a random interruption for an ad while I’m entranced by an audiobook. The last thing I need to hear—say, after Darcy proclaims to Elizabeth, “In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you”—is an ad for Axe body spray, erectile dysfunction drugs, or the new Prius.

Getting ahead of Amazon’s Audible (with its extensive free titles and “Audible Originals” for subscribers) and Apple Books (with its app store platform advantage) will be tricky.

Please follow me on Twitter for between-issue insights and updates.

On to our main story…

Nostalgia and Pseudo-Nostalgia in TV

For kids in the 1970s the biggest star in the world was Henry Winkler, who played The Fonz on Happy Days. The show was set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in roughly 1955, so when it premiered in 1974 the era it depicted was less than 20 years in the rear view mirror.

It’s bracing to do the math and realize that if a new TV show were set 19 years in the past today, that year would be 2003. (I own tee shirts that I bought before 2003!)

Happy Days was a show for the whole family, but adults and kids had different experiences. If you were the parents of young children, then Happy Days took you back to something akin to your own teen years: an exercise in nostalgia.

If you were a young child, then the first vision you had of the 1950s was through the lens of a sitcom that created an inaccessible pastoral fantasy of a world that never really existed but seemed idyllic. This is pseudo-nostalgia, where you long to return to a place that you’ve never actually been.

When I say that the Milwaukee of Happy Days never really existed, what I mean is that in real life the 1950s were a decade of immense transformation in that city: the black population increased from 21,772 to 62,458 with tension growing between the new arrivals and the majority white established families. None of that is visible in Happy Days, a show in which there were almost no black characters over its 11 seasons.

Two shows premiered last week that were exercises in nostalgia and pseudo-nostalgia: Quantum Leap on NBC and Reboot on Hulu.

Quantum Leap: The original Quantum Leap (1989-93) perpetrated one of the great narrative betrayals of my life as a TV viewer. For five seasons, every episode started with a voiceover explaining the conceit of the show: Dr. Sam Becket was time traveling through history to set right what once went wrong, always hoping that his next leap “would be the leap home.” Then, in the series finale, the last thing shown was a line of text saying, “Dr. Sam Becket never returned home.” Arrgh! This still frosts me nearly 30 years later.

I later learned that there were external reasons for this betrayal: the studio canceled the show after the finale was already in the can. But it was still a mistake. Had the text read, “Dr. Sam Becket eventually returned home,” then I would not have felt like I’d watched nearly 100 episodes of a bait-and-switch.

The end of the original Quantum Leap is the beginning of the new series that premiered last Monday. Decades later, Dr. Ben Song thinks he can rescue Sam Becket. Song uses the Quantum Leap accelerator to follow Becket into the time stream, where he now finds himself helping people in the same way.

For fans of the original series like me, this is powerful nostalgia because—in a crazy meta exercise—it has the potential to put right what went wrong in the original finale: bring Sam home! (My spirits were a bit dashed to learn that Scott Bakula, the actor who played Sam, has no plans to return.) For people who never watched the original series either on broadcast or in reruns, this is pseudo-nostalgia where you’re hoping the team rescues somebody in whom you have zero emotional investment.

The pilot of the new Quantum Leap was fun, and I’ll tune in for Episode #2, but the differences between the two shows were quickly apparent. The original had only two regular characters: Scott Bakula as Sam and the late Dean Stockwell as Al, the helper from Sam’s own time who appears as a hologram only Sam can see. The two regular characters were both white guys, even though the 97 scenarios into which Sam leaped were diverse with many guest stars.

The new show has a large cast: Ben Song (Raymond Lee) is the leaper, and Addison Augustine (Caitlin Basset) is the hologram. Herbert “Magic” Williams (Ernie Hudson) is the military lead of Addison’s support team; Ian Wright (Mason Alexander Park) is the other scientist, and Jenn Chou (Nanrisa Lee) is the project’s head of security. The show has bitten off a lot of characters to develop on top of the “what to set right” dilemma of each episode with all those guest stars. The race politics of the cast will appeal to Liberals like me (two Asians, a white woman, a black man, and a white nonbinary person), but regardless of your politics that’s a lot of characters to manage. The new show’s structure is more like one of the Star Trek series, with a crew visiting a new planet each week, than like the original Quantum Leap.

Reboot: The conceit here is that Hannah, a young TV writer (Rachel Bloom), pitches getting the original cast of an early 2000s sitcom, “Step Right Up,” to continue their characters’ stories, but she wants to turn the saccharine original into an edgy dark comedy.

There was no “Step Right Up” in real life, although the title is a nod to Step by Step from the 1990s, so this is pseudo-nostalgia.

Reboot is a fictional version of actual reboots like Mad About You (originally in 1992; reboot in 2019) and And Just Like That (rebooting 1998’s Sex & the City in 2021) that reunited some or all of the original casts to play their old characters.

One intriguing way that Reboot deploys actual nostalgia into its pseudo-nostalgia is through its cast choices. Paul Reiser, who created and starred in both the original and reboot of Mad About You, plays Gordon, the producer of the original “Step Right Up.” Gordon is in tension with Hannah. Johnny Knoxville, who plays Clay, one of the parents in “Step Right Up,” got his big break as the star of Jackass on MTV in 2000… and Clay is a bit of a jackass (at least in the first episode). So even though the characters aren’t familiar, they feel familiar because of the actors playing them.

Reboot is fun, and I look forward to digging into more episodes as Hulu releases them.

What, I wonder, will constitute nostalgia and pseudo-nostalgia for young people today who spend more time looking at TikTok videos and Instagram Reels than half and full hour TV programs? Is it possible to create an Experience Stack about a meme?

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.