Mondays with Mike: Time machine

We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to screen entertainment. And it drives me nuts.

For example, we have Netflix. But nearly every time we think of a movie we want to see and I search on it, I get the dreaded “Titles like…”. Which means “we don’t have it but you might like these.” Like, we wanted to see “Wall Street.” Netflix suggests a bunch of titles that, you know, we didn’t search on. We don’t see anything we want. So I search where “Wall Street” does stream. And I find it’s on other services, which we don’t have. And if we did, we’d still have to pay for the movie. Or we could buy it one-off from YouTube.

Check out Dick Cavett. And the Dick Van Dyke show has aged well, also.

The Balkanization of screen entertainment has me thinking that people who unplug from cable will eventually pay more for a multitude of streams that cost more than their old cable bill.

It also makes me nostalgic for another time.

Enter Decades TV, and oldies-but-goodies TV channel that has everything from Ed Sullivan to…The Dick Cavett Show. Bingo!

Back in the day, my mother routinely favored Cavett over Johnny Carson. As a kid, it was over my head and I didn’t get it.

But now, every night at 8 CT, Beth and I switch to Decades and we are transported in time. Kind of. Because so often the questions and topics are pretty much the same as they are during modern talk shows. That’s pretty striking.

Except the questions are smarter, the guests are civil, and the monologues are funny but not mean spirited.

Cavett was kind of Terry Gross on TV before Terry Gross was on the radio. Thoughtful questions and discussions that go off script.

And I’d forgotten: Guests don’t come and go one at-a-time. They stay, so by the end of the show there may be three or four of them interacting.

Last week, for example, one show had Florence Henderson as the first guest. She was followed by Sid Caesar. Then Jack Klugman and it ended with Robert Shaw (who knew Shaw was also a writer?).

Other combos: Melba Moore, Don Knotts, and…F1 racing champion Jackie Stewart. On another, Jackie Robinson was joined by Joan Baez. And they got into a great political exchange. (Jackie Robinson was a brilliant man.)

Anyway, if you’re of a certain age and want some nostalgia, try Dick Cavett. If you’re not of a certain age and want to know how good we had it, give it a look.