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Ironically, as much as TV has been blamed for driving families apart, classic TV is becoming something, like books or records, that parents can hand down to their kids. For moms and dads tired of vetting the Jackasses and Limp Bizkits of the world, reruns are a haven in the big scary media environment. For kids, they are another manifestation of today's palimpsest pop culture, in which everything is ripe for sampling and nothing stays dead. They have seen the movies morph Charlie's Angels from jiggle joint to empowerment parable; now they can see the reruns, back on TV Land, big sisters once removed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dark Angel. Says Ron Simon, a curator at New York City's Museum of Television and Radio who teaches in the film department at Columbia University in New York City: "Most of my students make little distinction between film and television. That whole hierarchy has disappeared among the young."
It may fade even further when and if TV takes the next step, toward video on demand. Today media companies dream of using the technology to sell new shows like The Sopranos; tomorrow they could use it to make every TV into an a la carte TV museum. (If they don't, someone else might: already hackers are swapping digitized video files, raising the prospect of Napsterized TV.) The flip side is that we may lose the common experience of having watched a few agreed-on classics: as TV becomes more like books, we may find that access to the complete Keats or the complete Alex P. Keaton doesn't mean everyone will check it out. In the days of the three-channel universe, TV professor Thompson could count on students' having seen the same set of familiar shows like Andy Griffith. Now, he says, "I find myself having to put episodes of That Girl on reserve at the library." Anna Karenina, meet Marlo Thomas.