I really miss the music culture of the 1980s, especially MTV.
And John Mellencamp was one of my favorite solo artists. His commercial breakout album, American Fool, came out in 1982, just as I was entering high school.
Mellencamp was atypical in an era of polished arena rock and heavy synthesizers. Both his songs and his persona had a distinctly midwestern American vibe.
The singer hailed from Seymour, Indiana, less than two hours from my home in Cincinnati, Ohio. My dad grew up in the same general area of the Hoosier State. Perhaps for this reason, I found Mellencamp’s music relatable. (On the other hand, I could never relate to the worlds of David Bowie or Ratt.)
The attached video is for the single “Cherry Bomb”. It was released in 1987, and included on the album TheLonesome Jubilee. The music video features plenty of vintage footage from the 1960s and early 1970s. I don’t know if these video clips are from Indiana, but they sure look like Indiana, back in those days.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the interracial couple featured in the video. John Mellencamp has never been shy about his (progressive) politics; and we can be sure that this was a deliberate choice.
I remember 1987 like it was yesterday. (I was nineteen.) In 1987, a young interracial couple in a music video was not as shocking as it would have been twenty years earlier, and not as ho-hum as it would have been twenty years later. And certainly not the cliché that it would be now, almost 40 years after the music video for “Cherry Bomb” was made.
In 1987, this was something that people would notice, without being either outraged or inspired by it. Mellencamp was not being “brave” or ground-breaking by presenting this in 1987. But he was making a statement.
December 31st marked not only the end of 2025, but also the end of MTV (1981 – 2025).
As I explain in the video below, I was one of MTV’s young fans back in the early 1980s.
MTV was a brilliant mechanism for content marketing. Suburban teens like me would discover new bands on MTV. Then we would go to the local mall and purchase the albums.
I discovered many of my favorite bands on MTV, including Def Leppard.
I’m late to this party. I didn’t realize that yet another television adaptation of Stephen King’s It was in the works. So now I know.
Forgive me if I skip this one. I love Stephen King’s books. (Or well, I love many of them, anyway.) But I read It for the first time as an 18-year-old in 1986. (I purchased one of the original hardcovers at the Waldenbooks in my local mall.)
I reread the book once in the 1990s. I’ve seen two screen adaptations already.
I always preferred King’s shorter, tighter books, anyway. For me, It marked the point where every Stephen King book was no longer a guaranteed page-turner.
But that really isn’t the point. This story has been in my brain for almost 40 years now. I understand that Hollywood prefers stories with prequalified demand (i.e., decades-old franchises). But there comes a time when I want something new.
No disrespect intended toward Mr. King. It was entertaining, the first—even the second—time around. But do I need yet another tour through the mythical town of Derry? Of all the teenage experiences I’d like to relive at the ripe old age of 57, this book doesn’t rank very high on the list.
I’ve recently been binge-watching Mayor of Kingstown, the gritty prison town drama co-created by Taylor Sheridan.
A few years ago I listened, just for giggles, to a lecture entitled “How to write a bestseller”. The lecturer, an author and a fan of women’s beach novels, warned her audience not to set their stories in impoverished or depressing environments.
Kingstown is a fictional small city in Michigan, on the Lake Michigan coast. Kingstown is the epitome of rust-belt poverty and decay. Kingstown is wracked by street crime and gang warfare. Mayor of Kingstown makes me grateful that I live in southwestern Ohio—no easy feat.
The only real industry in Kingstown is the city’s state prison. Most of the storylines involve the prison in one way or another.
There is no Jack Reacher-like superhero at the center of this show. Nor is there a good-looking young dude who is sure to make the female audience swoon. The hero (I use that term loosely) of Mayor of Kingstown is Mike McClusky (Jeremy Renner) a fiftyish ex-con and fixer who tries to bring some semblance of order to the town. The female lead in Mayor of Kingstown is Iris (Emma Laird) a prostitute with a history of abuse.
This show depresses me every time I watch it. But I can’t help tuning in, because the storytelling is so compelling. Every scene in Mayor of Kingstown is filled with multiple levels of conflict, and usually ends with a polarity shift.
Mayor of Kingstown is entertaining television. But for writers looking to branch out beyond clichés, the show is also proof that you don’t necessarily need to write “the same, but different” in order to find an audience. You just have to tell a good story.
Escape is one of the few rock albums with no duds. Every song is good—if you like Journey’s style of music.
But the best song on the album, perhaps, is “Don’t Stop Believin’”. It is a great song because it is simultaneously specific and universal.
We wonder about the small town girl, and the city boy “born and raised in South Detroit.” What compelled each of them to take “the midnight train going anywhere”?
And at the same time, the song is vague enough that we can each apply it to our individual stories. “Whoa, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” My movie has gone on for 44 years since I first heard this song, and counting.
For years, this song instantly took me back to the 1981-2 school year, and the adolescent I was at that time. The song can still do that.
But then a few years ago, I watched The Sopranos from start to finish. (I was about a decade behind everyone else in doing this…the story of my life.) Then, for a long time, I would see the final, iconic scene of The Sopranos when I heard, “Don’t Stop Believin’”.
Most recently, I have discovered First to Eleven’s interpretation of the song. (First to Eleven is a very talented cover band based in Erie, Pennsylvania.)
None of the members of First to Eleven was even born when I heard “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the first time, back in 1981. (They are all very young.) And yet, their music video, and lead vocalist Audra Miller’s performance, put yet another spin on the song for me.
And some people worry—or hope—that AI will replace serious musicians? They base this on the fact (for example) that AI can now reassemble good music into mediocre music. (See my recent post about The Velvet Sundown.)
AI will never be good for anything but mediocrity. Only a human imagination could have come up with “Don’t Stop Believin’” almost half a century ago. And it took human imagination to come up with all these reimaginings of the song since then.
The question “Where’s the beef?” was a common “meme” in American culture in the mid-1980s. (Nobody used the word “meme” back then, though.) “Where’s the beef?” implied that something lacked value or substance.
It all came from a series of Wendy’s commercials, starring Clara Peller (1902-1987). Pellar made this inquiry whenever she was confronted by a hamburger that was too much bun, not enough beef.
Wendy’s made the size of its beef patties a selling point. And while fast-food hamburgers were never among my favorite foods, the Wendy’s burgers were better than most, at least in the 1980s.
This commercial is pure genius. It is entertaining in itself, but it also conveys an effective marketing message.
The X feed Super 70s Sports has the following to say about the late Merlin Olsen (1940 – 2010):
“I miss Merlin Olsen. A true renaissance man who could kick your ass, eloquently break down exactly how he did it, then send you a thoughtful bouquet of flowers as a gesture of goodwill.”
I miss Merlin Olsen. A true renaissance man who could kick your ass, eloquently break down exactly how he did it, then send you a thoughtful bouquet of flowers as a gesture of goodwill. pic.twitter.com/rLxImgSPtR
I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but most Gen Xers don’t remember Merlin Olsen as a professional football player. Olsen played his last game in the NFL in 1976. This Gen Xer was an 8-year-old third-grader then.
Most of us do, however, remember Merlin Olsen in his post-NFL acting career. Olsen portrayed Jonathan Garvey on Little House on the Prairie from 1977 to 1981. In this secondary role, he was the “male buddy” figure for Michael Landon’s starring role.
My childhood household had one television, and my mom loved Little House. So we of course tuned in every week. I didn’t love this show quite as much as my mom did, but I didn’t exactly hate it, either. It was pleasant enough television for that pre-cable era, when most TV shows were written to the broadest audience possible. Little House on the Prairie was written and billed as wholesome family fare, with all that label implies, both for better and for worse.
I recall watching Olsen on Little House on the Prairie for several years, perhaps, before my father mentioned, apropos of nothing, that Merlin Olsen had previously been a professional football player.
My research tells me that he had quite a career in that capacity. But I, like most Gen Xers, will always think of him as Jonathan Garvey.
I am a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, and a frequent visitor to Indiana. My father grew up in Indiana. I have many childhood memories of family holiday gatherings in Lawrenceburg and nearby rural Switzerland County.
I have always considered myself an “honorary” Hoosier (the nickname of a person from Indiana), because of my familial ties, and also because of my affection for the state.
Family reunion in Switzerland County, Indiana, 1987.
But there are famous Hoosiers, too.John Cougar Mellencamp was born in 1951 in Seymour, Indiana, and he grew up there. Mellencamp, now in his seventies, is a proud son of Indiana. He has long incorporated small-town Indiana into his musical brand.
Mellencamp was one of the most popular solo artists of my teenage years. He was also a frequent presence on MTV. (This was back when MTV actually played music videos, as every Gen Xer will remind you.)
Many of Mellencamp’s songs and MTV videos incorporated small-town themes. Whenever possible, he inserted an Indiana-related Easter egg or two. I have become aware of some of these only decades later.
Consider, for example, the MTV video for “Hurts So Good”. This song hit number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982. In the summer and fall of that year, it was hard to turn on FM radio without hearing “Hurts So Good” within the hour.
The “Hurts So Good” MTV video was also popular on MTV. Little did I know, back then, that this video was filmed in the small town of Medora, Indiana. Medora is close to Seymour, where John Cougar Mellencamp grew up, and about ninety minutes from Lawrenceburg, where my father grew up.
The lesson here, for me, is that great art—and great artists—can come from anywhere. John Cougar Mellencamp would not have been the songwriter and musician he became, had he spent his formative years in Los Angeles or New York.
Many people grow up in small town or rural environments and do not find art, of course. But it is a mistake to assume that every denizen of LA is working on a screenplay, or that every NYC resident is an aspiring novelist.
I don’t evangelize many 21st-century television shows. But I am unabashed in my enthusiasm for The Americans, the period spy drama that originally aired on FX from 2013 to 2018.
The Americans is about big events of the final decade of the Cold War. But it is also a family drama: about Philip and Elizabeth Jennings and their two children. The Jenningses are deep-cover Soviet KGB operatives. Philip and Elizabeth do all the bad things you would expect KGB agents to do. But they also cope with the pressures of maintaining their cover, and keeping their secret from their two children, who were born in the USA.
The series finale was set at the end of 1987/early 1988, just as Cold War tensions were easing. No spoilers here, except to say the series ended in a way that was satisfying, while simultaneously leaving the door open for sequels.
And it’s easy to imagine any number of sequels, based on a myriad of post-1988 plot lines. So much was yet to happen: the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and the collapse of the USSR (1991).
And what about the post-Soviet, Yeltsin and Putin eras? The possibilities are endless.
In a March 11, 2023 interview on The Rich Eisen Show, series star Matthew Rhys hinted at the possibility of The Americans continuing in some form.
That was almost two years ago. I remain cautiously hopeful. But I am also realistic about these things. Despite the high quality of the show’s concept and execution, a revived version of The Americans would face certain obstacles.
To begin with, young audiences may have difficulty relating to the subject matter. I am in my 50s and I remember the 1980s as if that decade ended last year. Viewers under 40, who lack such a perspective (and who have suffered the intellectual depredations of American public education) may struggle to get a foothold as they begin a show that involves Cold War-era history.
The Americans premiered in a crowded 2010s TV arena, filled with more accessible shows involving dragons, superheroes, and teenagers performing magic. The Americans was always a critical success, but it never got the viewership it deserved.
That may also have been an issue of timing. Between 2013 and 2018, the US public was focused on economic recovery, ISIS, Islamic terrorism, and the 2016 presidential election. The Cold War and Russia seemed far, far away.
That faraway perception of Russia may have changed, however, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and talk of a Cold War II from all quarters.
Now may be the perfect time to revive The Americans, in fact. A post-Soviet storyline would make the most sense. But there is plenty of material surrounding the fall of the USSR, too.
Even if The Americans zoomed forward to the present era, it could be made to work. All of the main characters, though much older, could plausibly still be alive.
I’m crossing my fingers for a sequel to my all-time favorite television show. As the above interview with Matthew Rhys suggests, I’m not alone in hoping for more seasons of The Americans.
I study multiple languages, and I worked for many years as a professional translator. I love foreign languages, and I love learning them.
Nevertheless, I don’t have much interest in the online “polyglot” community, as it has come to exist on social media platforms like YouTube.
Nor will I ever create one of those cringeworthy YouTube videos in which a language learner displays his or her various languages for the virtual claps of fellow language learners.
I am far more impressed with people who combine multilingualism with a full slate of personal and professional interests. Foreign language study should be a part of every well-rounded, well-educated life. But not the sole focus of it…and certainly not an excuse to engage in constant public preening.
This is why I’m genuinely impressed by the linguistic achievements of the late Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993). Her first language was Dutch. She also spoke fluent French, English, and Italian. She was proficient in Spanish and German.
Watch the above video, and you’ll see what a natural multilingual she was. You’ll also note that, unlike so many of today’s YouTube polyglots, she did not make a big deal of her attainments. She did not say, “Hey, watch me speak X language now!” Rather, she used the languages she had learned in a situationally appropriate and unpretentious manner.
In those days before a zillion cable channels (let alone the Internet), there was TV Guide.
Launched in 1953, these little weekly magazines would be familiar to anyone from the Baby Boom generation or Generation X. (Some of the older Millennials may have dim early childhood memories of TV Guide, too.)
Each issue of TV Guide contained a listing of the week’s programming, of course. There were also articles in the front of the magazine that were sometimes worth reading. (If you were interested in television and Hollywood happenings, that was.)
The covers, moreover, were often minor works of art. Like this one from 1986, which depicts the cast of Cheers, one of the most popular shows of the 1980s.
TV Guide was always on my mother’s shopping list. It was on everyone’s shopping list. Why? Because without this publication, you would have a hard time knowing what programs were on, on which channels, and at what times.
The magazine was cheaply priced. (The 60¢ May 10, 1986 issue shown above would equate to only about $1.70 in today’s dollars.) But TV Guide was nevertheless essential.
With a shelf life of only one week, these weren’t magazines that anyone saved for posterity. Sometimes, though, one of them would end up beneath a sofa or behind a recliner, only to turn up months later.
TV Guide still exists as a going concern, but it’s a shadow of its former self. The TV Guide website probably gets some traffic, but the stripped-down, printed version of the magazine is no longer the weekly grocery-cart essential it once was. Not in this era of cable, Hulu, Netflix and YouTube. I could not find a copy of TV Guide at my local Walmart, Meijer, or Kroger. The publication now seems to rely on a shrunken, hardcore base of snail-mail subscribers.
Yes, another casualty of our digital age of hyper-abundance. TV Guide’s original mission has become not just obsolete—but impossible, even if someone wanted to attempt it.
Network and cable listings are only a small part of the viewing options nowadays. On-demand is where the real action is…not just on Netflix and Hulu, but on the endless sea of variety that is YouTube. On-demand viewings, loosely organized by search engines, defy the bounds of itemized printed lists.
It would not be incorrect to say that the original TV Guide is a relic of pre-Internet times; but this description would be insufficiently precise. The old TV Guide is a relic of a time when the scope of available programming for a single week was small enough that it could be completely curated, listed, and described in a single publication.
Needless to say, those days are gone; and—barring some cataclysmic change that restarts everything from scratch—those days are gone forever.
I was poking around on YouTube when I discovered the above trailer. Apparently Max (formerly HBO Max) has created a new screen adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot, Stephen King’s 1975 novel about vampires taking over a small town in Maine.
I saw the original TV miniseries when it aired back in November 1979. I was 11 years old, in the sixth grade. There were some scenes in the 1979 original adaptation that were genuinely creepy–especially to the 11-year-old me.
When I started reading Stephen King’s novels in 1984, ‘Salem’s Lot was the one I started with. About five years had passed since my viewing of the miniseries. And I was then a sophomore in high school instead of a sixth-grader.
I read ‘Salem’s Lot in about three days. I found the book an absolute page-turner. (I seem to recall doing poorly on a geometry test, because I was reading ‘Salem’s Lot when I should have been studying!)
I’ve reread the book several times since then. From my more critical (and more jaundiced) adult perspective, I can see some flaws that I didn’t notice back then. But no matter. ‘Salem’s Lot is still a humdinger of a story, at the end of the day.
‘Salem’s Lot has a modern (1970s modern, anyway) feel to it. You don’t get the sense that you’re reading a story set in a remote location in 19th-century Europe, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot therefore seems like a story that could happen. (If vampires existed, that is!)
Moreover, ‘Salem’s Lot is a real vampire story. Not a fake, teen girl romance tale masquerading as a vampire story, like that Twilight nonsense. (Don’t even get me started on Stephenie Meyer’s high crimes against the vampire genre.)
The 1970s/80s paperback version of ‘Salem’s Lot that I read in 1984
The new Max film version of ‘Salem’s Lot looks scary, based on the trailer. I will doubtless get around to seeing it a some point, but this is one that can wait, in my case.
‘Salem’s Lot, great story that it is, is one that has been with me for 45 years now, in one form or another. I watched the original TV miniseries at age 11. I read the novel for the first time at age 15. I’m now 56, and I know this story so well that I cannot help anticipating all the major plot points before they occur.
But such are the vagaries of age, and of rereading books, and watching their screen adaptations over decades. If your history with ‘Salem’s Lot is less extensive than mine (and it probably is), you’ll want to rush to the new Max version of it. A younger version of me would have felt the same way.
Television in the 1980s wasn’t afraid to be shamelessly fun and escapist. Case-in-point: The A-Team, which aired from 1983 to 1987.
The premise of The A-Team was actually semi-plausible: during the Vietnam War, an elite American commando unit is charged with a crime they did not commit. Having escaped from a military prison, they survive in present-day (the 1980s) as “fixers” and soldiers of fortune (only for the good guys and noble causes, though!).
That was where the realism of the A-Team ended, however.
One thing about any A-Team episode: no matter how many rounds were fired, no one ever got hurt. Another thing about every A-Team episode: it was sure to end with a needlessly elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style plan. Often this involved modifying a commandeered vehicle into a makeshift tank.
The series made an international star of Mr. T, who had already distinguished himself in Rocky III (1982). The A-Team also starred Dirk Benedict, whom all Gen X teens and adolescents remembered from the much loved, but short-lived Battlestar Galactica (1978-9).
Yes, The A-Team was cheesy, throwaway television. But it was a great means to unwind for an hour on a Tuesday night in 1984.
The Walking Dead debuted on AMC in 2010. As most readers will know, The Walking Dead was a series about…the zombie apocalypse, of all things.
People die, come back to life, and prey on the living!
The Walking Dead was immensely popular from the get-go, among both critics and viewers.
But that didn’t last, as we’ll see shortly.
In one sense, the creators of The Walking Dead did not create anything new. The Walking Dead was not the first zombie tale available to viewers.
Since 1968, the filmmaker George A. Romero (1940-2017) had churned out movies in his “dead” series. These included Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Diary of the Dead (2017).
While Romero’s movies enjoyed a strong cult following, they never really achieved mass appeal. Many horror movie fans liked them, but not much of anyone else did.
The appeal of The Walking Dead, on the other hand, extended far beyond the relatively small audiences that are usually drawn to extreme horror.
The Walking Dead was similar to Romero’s movies. But also very different.
The Walking Dead had plenty of flesh-eating zombies, just like the George A. Romero’s films. The Walking Dead was violent and intense, just like the films of Romero.
But unlike Romero’s films, The Walking Dead was also focused on quality scripts and character development. The Walking Dead was as much a drama series as a horror series.
And the drama was top-notch. Many viewers cared more about the characters and their struggles than they did about the zombies.
Herein lay the difference.
As a result of this difference, The Walking Dead attracted millions of viewers who had never had any interest in the horror genre—and certainly not in the gruesome zombie sub-genre of horror.
I was amazed at how many of my female friends, in particular, became diehard fans of the show. Women who, in high school, would have scoffed at the idea of reading a Stephen King novel.
Even my mother enjoyed the first few seasons of The Walking Dead. And my mom had never had any interest in horror movies. (She’d always hated them, in fact.)
***
The “secret sauce” of The Walking Dead was the well-written drama and character development mentioned above, interwoven with the expected tropes of the zombie genre. The combination of the drama and the horror made The Walking Dead a favorite of anyone who loved a good story.
But then things deteriorated. During the fifth and sixth seasons, the taut storytelling and character development of the first few seasons were replaced with repetitive violence and gore—an insidious temptation in anything zombie-related.
This trend hit a nadir in the first episode of the seventh season. The seventh season’s initial installment began with an act of sadistic human-on-human violence that was well…over the top.
This was the now famous—or infamous—“bat episode”. The villain Negan brutally killed two of the show’s main characters with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
I watched it, and hated it.
I wasn’t alone. Millions of other viewers hated it, too.
As more than one critic pointed out, The Walking Dead had degenerated into “torture porn”.
George A. Romero’s zombie films had also wallowed in the excesses of human depravity and cruelty.
This, too, is a common trope in zombie stories. It’s a natural outcome of the genre’s premise. As the world descends into post-apocalyptic chaos, the surviving humans give in to all the evil impulses that society ordinarily keeps in check.
That theme has its place, but it can easily be overdone—even in a zombie apocalypse story.
George A. Romero’s movies overdid it.
And now The Walking Dead had overdone it, too. In a big way.
***
But why?
Here’s my theory: The Walking Dead’s producers, writers, and showrunners had lost sight of what made the show so darned great in its first few seasons.
Or maybe they never identified it to begin with….
***
Over the years, I’ve followed numerous rock bands, novelists, and movie producers whose creative careers rise and fall with the following trajectory:
The creator comes out of nowhere with a sequence of masterpieces. This might be a run of near-perfect albums, page-turning novels, or edge-of-the-seat movies.
Then one day, the creator releases something that “isn’t quite up to their usual standard”.
Then the next thing is equally lackluster.
And the next thing. And so on. Nothing is ever quite the same again.
***
Such a creator may continue to ride the coattails of their previous work in the marketplace, but the glory days never return. After the debacle of Season Seven, AMC continued to milk the cash cow of The Walking Dead for four more seasons (plus a slew of spinoffs).
But for most of us, the magic of those first few seasons was gone.
What is the cause of this observable and so often repeating phenomenon? A rock band, novelist, or filmmaker shouldn’t be subject to the age-related declines that are so inescapable for athletes.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to artists. It can happen to restauranteurs, self-employed tradespersons, and corporate employees.
***
This is the other side of quality control.
Just as you need to understand what you are doing wrong when things go badly, you also need to understand what you have done right when you hit one out of the park.
Or hit a bunch of them out of the park.
***
How do you know that?
You analyze your process. You identify your secret sauce, and keep on doing what works.
It wouldn’t have been difficult for the writers, producers, and showrunners of The Walking Dead to get together and say: “What makes our show so successful is strong dramatic storytelling, combined with the horror elements of the zombie genre. So let’s keep doing that!”
I am a diehard fanatic of only a handful of books, movies, and musical oeuvres. And I evangelize only a subset of those.
For example, I love the music of Rush and Iron Maiden; but I don’t consider the appeal of these bands to be universal, by any means. Likewise, I realize that a coming-of-age movie that spoke volumes to me in 1984 might not have the same significance for a teenager of 2024. Or for a Boomer who was a teenager in 1964, for that matter.
But everyone should see The Americans.
The Americans is part family saga, part period drama, and part espionage thriller. The show is set in both America and Russia during the last decade of the Cold War.
I watched The Americans in its entirety during the show’s original primetime run on FX from 2013 to 2018. During those years, I looked forward to each new episode.
I loved the series so much, I recently decided to watch it again. But as is so often the case with these modern conveniences of ours, the situation has been made less convenient than it would have been in pre-Internet days. No longer do non-primetime shows circulate to rerun syndication in non-primetime hours. They move to paid streaming platforms.
If you want to see all six seasons of The Americans in 2024, you have several options. You can pay to download each episode from Amazon, or you can purchase a subscription to Hulu, where the series is now streaming.
Or you can purchase the complete series on DVD. I determined this to be my best and most cost-effective option. The above package arrived on my doorstep from Amazon yesterday.
I look forward to watching this series again from beginning to end. And if you haven’t yet seen The Americans, you might consider buying the DVDs, too. They are still in stock on Amazon.
