TV Land, catchphrases and a complaint

In case you missed Julia's earlier post about it, TV Land's countdown of the one hundred greatest quotes and catchphrases kicks off a five-night run this evening at 10 pm (it will also air at 10 pm the following nights).

I like TV Land, I really do, and this is just another example of the network's dedication to light-hearted entertainment that's not meant to be analyzed too deeply. It's easy to find fault with the list and notice certain omissions, but what the heck, it's only television.

On the other hand, this special touches on something that's been sticking in my craw for a long time: our inexplicable need to manufacture instant nostalgia. Some of the entries on the list make sense ("Here's Johnny!," "Say goodnight, Gracie") because they've become part of the vernacular and haven't faded away over the years. Then there are phrases like "The tribe has spoken" from Survivor and Paris Hilton's monosyllabic catchphrase "That's hot," that are too new to really be considered for this list.

Again, I understand it's just a list and they wanted to include the old as well as the new, but I think it's symbolic of the current entertainment industry, this need to shoehorn everything into the annals of pop culture whether it belongs there or not. Perhaps in several years "The tribe has spoken" will transcend the small screen and become as ubiquitous as "Here's Johnny!" but that's for history to decide.

The biggest offender in this is VH-1, a network whose very existence now hinges on its ability to convince its audience that everything churned out in the last few months is just as pop culturally significant as everything else that came before it. I Love the '90s won't end civilization as we know it, but constantly spoon-feeding a person the same dreck simply because it's familiar to them doesn't bode well for the history of television, either. The result is a Sisyphean loop of entertainment that leaves us trapped in a kind of pop cultural stasis. It may be time to stop looking over our shoulders at what just happened and look ahead to something even better.