"The Best Day Of The Year"

A telling reflection on my quality of life.

This would be the wonderful week it happened.

What’s “it”?

The week the anticipated TV Guide Fall Preview Edition came out.

Hallelujah!

The TV Guide Fall Preview Edition, officially proclaiming the arrival the new TV season, profiled the new drama and comedy series, filling the then three networks’ prime-time schedules.  Checking it out, I could plan my entire year of television watching.

I loved TV, growing up.  And TV Guide was the “Television Bible.”

(No disrespect to the actual Bible, replete with moral direction.  But it stands mute about what’s on Thursdays at 8:30 on ABC.)

When I was eleven, I told my brother this joke I had made up, which he then co-opted for his performed monologs, but I didn’t mind because it was a pun and I don’t do puns.  I do, sometimes, but it’s embarrassing.

Quoting my brother, quoting me:

“My brother has this ritual.  Every Saturday morning, he picks up the old TV Guide and puts down the new TV Guide.  He has a little name for that ritual.  He calls it ‘The Changing of the Guides.”

Not bad, for eleven.  But a pun, nonetheless.

The TV Guide of my youth contained interesting articles, one memorable one in which the great George Burns, during a career “dry spell”, complained, “Comedy’s not ‘fashionable’ anymore.” There were also serious reviews… oh!  And the TV Guide crossword puzzle!

I was a whiz at the TV Guide crossword puzzle.  “Nine, across: ‘(BLANK) in the Family’.”  “Twenty-one, down:  ‘My Mother the (BLANK’.”)

I’m telling you, if an alien saw me acing that puzzle they’d think I was the smartest guy on the planet!

Another great thing about TV Guide:  For an astonishing number of years, they did not raise their prices.  TV Guide remained fifteen cents long after everything that was once fifteen cents had shot up, the “Guide”, a steadfast island on a sea of inflation.

Oh, and the covers!

Sometimes, a photograph.  Sometimes a painting.  And sometimes, a drawing by celebrity caricaturist extraordinaire Al Hirschfeld.  (Check out the “Travolta.”  It’s a classic!) 

I had all of them.  And then one year I went to camp and when I came home I had none of them.  But my room looked real neat.

Somehow, however, my collection of TV Guide Fall Preview Issues remains, going back to the 1956-57 season, which I can’t touch, ‘cause it will fall to pieces. 

It’s like the Magna Carta.

It should be viewed only “under glass.”

With the foregoing as preamble, you can imagine my excitement when my first show made it into the TV Guide Fall Preview Edition.

It was a torturous journey.

The Best of the West pilot was shot in the spring of 1981.  But we did not make it onto ABC’s schedule; ergo, no appearance in the TV Guide 1981-82 Fall Preview Edition. 

ABC did order twelve more episodes, promising that when a show dropped out, we would be scheduled as a mid-season replacement.  “Good news” and “Bad News”, as there was no TV Guide Midseason Replacement Preview Edition.

Turns out, we were not scheduled as a midseason replacement.  However, the following September, ABC finally put us on the air.

Earning us inclusion in the TV Guide Fall Preview Edition (1982-83.)

Oh, Happy Day!

It was the one time I was thrilled to be jerked around by a network.

When it became “Large Format” – the original, being conveniently compact – and more tabloidy than informative, I stopped buying TV Guide,  not caring who’s pregnant, and who’s getting divorced

Still, I recall, jangling with excitement, entering the convenience store, and plunking down thirty cents for two copies of the TV Guide Fall Preview Edition, one, to use, and a carefully handled one, to save.

What a life, seeing a magazine’s arrival as a celebratory event.

I miss that innocent kid.

I wonder where he went?