Even in this digital age, on most newsstands you still can buy a printed magazine copy of TV Guide – and if you buy the issue on stands beginning today (June 7), covering June 12-25, you can read the inaugural entry by the magazine’s newest columnist. That would be me…
It’s an unexpected new chapter for me at this stage in my career, allowing and challenging me to connect the dots between TV’s past, its present, and its future. I’ll appear, along with my friend and TV Guide senior critic Matt Roush, every issue – and, to be totally honest about it, it’s pretty much the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
That’s because I started reading TV Guide just about when Cleveland Amory began working as the magazine’s TV critic. He and Jack Anderson, TV critic for the Miami Herald, were the two TV critics I read voraciously then, and who opened my mind to the idea that there was such a job as someone who watches, and writes about, television for a living.
So I set out to do precisely that – and have. And all those summers as a kid, when I examined the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide to make my viewing choices for the coming TV season (Bonanza or The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour?), now come full circle. Now, beginning with this issue of TV Guide, I’m no longer outside looking in.
I’m inside looking out.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
“TV GUIDE MAGAZINE published its first national edition in 1953, smack in the middle of the creative big bang now known as the Golden Age of Television. The cover subject of that first issue was the newborn son of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the stars of TV’s most popular show at the time, CBS’s I Love Lucy.
“The same year Desi Arnaz Jr. and TV GUIDE MAGAZINE were born, so was I, part of the first generation to grow up with television…”
To read the rest, buy the magazine. I’ll still be here, and cranking out Bianculli’s Best Bets every day – but I’ve got a new gig for a while.
And it’s one I’ve dreamed about doing for almost as long as I can remember…