Often, I would hear an oldster issue the complaint, “When I was growing up, we only had seven channels to watch: ABC, CBS, NBC, three UHF stations, and one public television channel.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you poor dinosaur, playing with your rabbit ears and antenna; life was so hard. How’d you ever manage?
I am a child of the 60s. I, too, tinkered with rabbit ears and antennas and only had seven stations to watch. But let’s flip the deprivation issue that we of a certain generation claimed to have lived through, shall we? Imagine if the MLB, NFL, NBA, and MLS each had only 7 teams with roster spots to accommodate aspirants of athletic endeavor. You’d have to be pretty goddamn talented to become a professional athlete, would you not? With 7 NBA teams instead of 30, you’d have yourself a league chock-full of genuine all-stars! Wouldn’t the same principle apply to television in the 1960s and 70s? With only 7 stations, there was no room for average or okay. One, whether an actor, actress, writer, or director, had to bring the goods, or they ended up waiting tables or selling appliances. In case you haven’t noticed, there are plenty of people romping about studios and even news sets who, if not for oversaturation, would be touting the soup-of-the-day or explaining the virtues of “this fridge” versus “that fridge.” So if you grew up playing with rabbit ears and antennas, you were not deprived; you were lucky.
Michael's Corner 
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