Let’s Bring Back Prime Time TV

I hate to admit it, but I miss prime time.

For those of you born after Seinfeld went off the air, “prime time” dominated an era when television viewers only had three or four choices at any given time. Before streaming took over our devices, before cable devolved to 500 channels with nothing to see, there was “prime time television.” If you’re old enough to remember when Friends ruled “Must-See TV,” you (and tens of millions of others) likely spent a fair amount of your weeknights engaged with prime time’s three-hour post-dinner programming block.

Prime time once acted like a national water cooler — offering a shared set of conversation (and argument) starters. At its peak, 20–30 million of us watched shows mirroring a conformed, but often entertaining brand of American homogeneity. The situational comedy format ruled, but there was also the procedural (CSI, SVU), the news serial (48 Hours, Dateline), and the casually subversive (The Simpsons, Twin Peaks).

There’s plenty of reasons to celebrate prime time’s demise — the lineup almost always projected a distorted, white-male dominated version of American life, and most of its offerings were, well, terrible compared to the cornucopia of quality shows that can be found across today’s streaming universe (does anyone mourn the loss of Models Inc.?).