Going down.
Where would New York or any city be without elevators? Maybe six stories high? “Look, you can see clear across the street from here!”
So it was with a sense of anticipation and fascination that I tuned into the History channel, last Tuesday, to watch the show “United Stats of America,” devoted, this night, to the history of elevators.
At first, an uh-oh. The program’s hosted by the Sklar brothers, Randy and Jason, who we knew as the hosts of the ESPN show “Cheap Seats” — or was it “Cheap Shots”? — which relied on lots of swing-and-miss wisecracks, yet did produce some legit laughs, now and then.
But Tuesday the Sklars played nice. At first. In a casual yet informative way, they told the story of elevators in America. Of I-didn’t-know-that significance, they noted that while Elisha Otis, founder of the Otis Elevator Co. in 1853 — the factory was in Yonkers — didn’t invent the elevator, he advanced their braking systems to create reliability and user safety confidence. The sky became the limit.
All was going well, until an elevator historian took the Sklars into the guts of an old Otis to demonstrate the founder’s braking inventions. When the fellow showed the Sklars that the system was predicated on the rise and fall of four large metallic balls, that was, for all higher purposes, the end of the show.
As soon as this man said “balls,” the hosts ambushed the audience with a volley of crude, junior high school-grade testicle cracks. Should’ve known better than to have hoped for better.
Once again, the highly inappropriate was added because it was highly inappropriate. Hear that? He said, “Balls.” Now we can vandalize our own show!
What a pity. But lately the History channel has been leaning further from legit history toward semi-reality shows (“Swamp People,” “Ax Men”) and barely treated garbage, including “Sex in the Ancient World.”
A journey along the cable TV trail makes for a sad trip. We see networks born to higher niche ideals now all aimed in one of two directions: low or lower.
MTV, once a music channel for the young, is now loaded with voyeuristic, desensitizing shows and antisocial, act-on-them messages — for the young. The Biography channel has been lost to profiles of pop-culture stars. Who is Henry Kissinger? Er, the founder of Kiss?
Spike TV, born the Nashville Network, is now reliant on drooling sex, no-holds-barred violence, home video of skateboarders wiping out and vulgar put-down artistry.
The Game Show Network’s new programs are loaded with crude and unfunny sex questions. TruTV, once Court TV, is filled with bogus reality shows that include staged violence and gutter dialogue, plus video clip shows narrated by doo-doo, pee-pee and crotch-talk.
Comedy Central has replaced comedy with vulgarity, genuine laughter with forced, “Wooos!” And even Disney’s ABC Family channel is “pushing the envelope” — how I despise that phrase, that “sounds good” substitute for doing bad — adding dialogue that families tuned to the network to avoid.
Then we wonder why we’ve raised so many remorseless wise guys, bullies, crude, coarse trash-talkers and mindless deed-doers who value no one’s feelings other than their own. The best parents can barely compete with what TV does to their kids and to the kids around them.
The price we all pay for what TV’s doing to this country is incalculable but certainly astronomical.
And the common reply — the steady rationalization from the TV industry for so purposefully and eagerly encouraging American society to continuing decay — is that it’s “No worse than this, no worse than that.”
But what’s it ever better than?
For crying out loud, last week we couldn’t make it through a History channel show about the history of elevators without being forced to get in the basement.