TV Guide editions and online resources

[IM42A]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2055014797696225357

This brings back some memories for me. I was in Aachen (Germany, very close to the area the author describes) in 2003 and the Plus grocery store (similar to Aldi or Lidl) had small black-and-white TV sets on sale for something like the equivalent of $20. On a whim, I snapped one up and took it back to my hotel which was a few blocks away. With a single rabbit ear, I was able to get channel 3 from Liege (Belgium), channel 5 from Roermond (Netherlands), channel 11 from Koln (Cologne), and three UHF channels from Aachen (the various major German networks). The hotel cable carried a whole host of stations from those three countries (not sure whether they carried French TV or not). I still have that TV set (airport security didn't know quite what to make of my carrying it onto the plane). It is, of course, analog, and I still use it for home experiments with a flea-power TV transmitter I got on eBay and which can be set to PAL with the appropriate audio offsets.

Here it is:

 

[vchimpanzee]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2055014797696225357

If it was in TV Guide I should have seen it. I don't remember it, but I guess that's too much to expect.

 

[TVWorldwide]

Here's a good article on TV Guide in its best days:

Before the Internet, TV Guide was the Place for Smart Criticism - Electric Literature

Carrying articles by John Cheever, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates was definitely a touch of class. It was the furthest thing in the world from a mindless, trashy magazine.

This book is a very worthwhile read on how TV Guide covered television and American society:

 

[Gregg.]

In a few editions, out-of-market stations were limited only to network programming listings, and their full schedules didn't appear. WSBA York PA comes to mind, when they were listed in the Washington-Baltimore edition (they were later dropped).

A similar situation could be found in smaller, less-viewed stations only having their listings in the grids, rather than the daily program listings themselves, in the years when TVG featured both.

In the NYC edition, I believe TV Guide would not list more than a show's name for smaller UHF stations, such as Channels 50 and 58, the New Jersey PBS stations. Same for the NYC municipal-owned WNYE 25 and WNYC 31. There were no details about each show.

I think a few Connecticut stations would only get included if they simulcast a show also airing on a NYC station, such as Channel 20 in Waterbury and 30 in West Hartford. I believe 3 in Hartford, a CBS station, and 8 in New Haven, an ABC station, did get their shows listed.

Even the channels that would later become Univision and Telemundo, Channel 41 WXTV Paterson and Channel 47 WNJU Linden, would only get their program titles listed at first. When those networks got bigger, these two Spanish-language stations got full listings.