How can I make a television "time machine"?
The idea is simple: on any given day, I wanna know what TV show was on with new episodes 10, 20, or any number of years ago. To make it simple, let's restrict it to US television.
The reasoning behind it is that shows were made with that expectation (they are not "binge friendly"), and it was wonderful to have a different show every day of the week. It was magical to be able to randomly catch Monk, E.R., The X-Files, The Pretender, Psych, Star Trek TOS, or Early Edition on TV. Hell, even Game of Thrones made a lot more sense when I had to wait a week before watching!
So yeah, this is 100% about nostalgia. At least one day I week, I'm gonna watch whatever was on TV that exact day 10 to 30 years ago.
I'm gonna choose a decade and start from there.
But how could I do it, from a mechanical standpoint? I mean, where can I easily find the information of all the episodes that premiered on US TV exactly 10, 20, 30 years ago to the day?
Additionally, any tips on finding obscure 80s and 90s TV shows?
Thanks!
Edit: what I want it is really nothing complicated, I just wanna know what was on any day of the week for the past 30 years. No automation required!
It’d be near impossible to do it as you’re describing purely because people didn’t record/archive ever single episode of every show back then. Popular shows, sure.
I’ve some something similar though by downloading all the shows I personally loved growing up, and build a media server that streams a permanent shuffled playlist of those shows to an RTSP stream on my network. Then I’ve modified a CRT TV that sits near my desk and streams that “channel” whenever I turn it on. I even dug up a bunch of period-correct ads that I remember and love from that era, and they play between episodes.
I was thinking something like a TV guide wiki or repository, with a simple and accessible listing of what was on each day. That way I could search for the shows independently on a torrent tracker or something.
I wasn't thinking of literally creating a channel like you did, just having accurate episodes available for each day.
I'd love to know more about your setup though!
Oh ok. You’d have to try dig up archived run sheets for each channel your interest in then I guess, or contact the channels and ask if they have archives. I don’t know if any central repo of that sort of stuff.
https://www.myretrotvs.com/ has done something kinda' similar. It'll immerse you into the TV programming available for each decade. The 1950s thru the 2000s are covered.
It isn't the type of precise weekly scheduling your talking about but it does cover the nostalgic angle very well.
Update/edit: I'm impressed... Wikipedia has pretty good coverage at: Lists of United States network television schedules
TVDB has an API that might work for this
at a quick glance,
/series/filteraccepts year as a search parameter, which would give you series active in a given year. from there you can drill down into seasons of that series, and they have the date each episode was aired on.This is great. I'm afraid I'm not entirely sure how an API works. This is something I can input on their website itself? Do I need some kind of programming environment?
Depending on how you choose to use it, familiarity with a programming language might be helpful. However if that's a nonstarter for you, you could use a program called curl from the command line. You would then have to parse the JSON data, which I think you could do manually by copy and pasting the response, saving it as a .JSON file, opening that in your browser and using something like Awesome JSON Viewer to make it more human readable.
If you are willing to try and learn a little programming, it seems like a great project ideas. Python or JavaScript would probably be the easiest ones to get started quickly with.
I see. This is definitely something I could learn in the future. Right now, I'd probably want something simpler, like looking at a bunch of TV guides.
I was hoping someone had e done this before, maybe in nice table in a wiki. Sounds like something others might find useful or interesting to know.
Thanks! ;)
Honestly, dates aren't going to translate that well across 30 years. You're probably better off just looking up what timeslot the network had each show in at the time (assuming they weren't in first-run syndication) and scheduling your copy in the same way.
Using Star Trek as an example, Voyager has timeslot information available because only repeats were in syndication, whereas TNG was in first-run syndication and there were a bunch of airdates across various local networks that picked it up.
depending on your sourcing, searching 'WOC' will really make this more authentic.
I'm sorry, Google didn't clarify this for me. What do you mean by 'WOC'?
With Original Commercials. There's a growing subculture of nostalgic data hoarders raiding large VHS lots from estate sales and ebay then digitizing them with little-to-no-edits. Watching an old show by itself is one thing but seeing it in its original presentation with the ads and bumpers is something else.
You normally end up with a entire spreads of shows, recorded over years and sometimes decades by diligent VCRs with auto-record features. Sometimes people find coverage and reactions to large new events that someone recorded for posterity.
If you want to get started without having to schmooze your way into some of the super-private WOC communities, check out the amazing VHS Vault collection on the internet archive.
@Oxalis nailed it -- its fun to get one with commercials from another country, too.