To this day and age television reigns as the most popular form of entertainment. Whether it is for kids and programs like Dora the Explorer or Spongebob to Teens with programs such as Wizards of Waverly Place or Glee to young adults with programs such as CSI, House, Doctor Who, Lost, and so on, Television has ways to keep you coming back to watch more. From sports, to soap operas, to reality television there is something for everyone. Don’t like what’s on one channel? That’s fine! Switch to the next and the next and occasionally you will come across something you like out of the 1,000+ channels your provider offers. In the early days of television if you missed a program, you missed it! There was no way of going back and watching an episode of “The Honeymooners” that you missed. Missed the new episode of “I Love Lucy”? You have to wait until next week for the new episode to air. Then all that changed when the VCR and Beta Max we’re created and suddenly we could record our favorite programs and watch them whenever we wanted. Now years later the VCR and Beta Max have gone the way of the Dodo and we have DVR’s which allows us to record a program without the need of a video cassette and we also have access to on demand television which allows us to watch whatever we want, whenever we want, and as many times as we want to.
Television has grown to be one of the biggest forms of mass media, the internet may come to a close second, but it doesn’t compare to the power of television. Charles Kenny, the publisher of “Revolution in a Box” states that “[The] TV is a powerful force for shrinking the emotional distance between peoples within and between countries.” Mr. Kenny is stating that TV has a way of bringing people together. The programs and their characters have a way of establishing a bond with the audience no matter in what part of the world they live in. For example, Doctor Who is a British science fiction program that has been on the air since 1963, and now on its 49th anniversary. Doctor Who has reached so many people and its fandom is so huge that no matter where in the world you travel to, someone has heard of Doctor Who. Friends is another example, an American comedy program that was on the air for 10 years and reached millions of people. Every week someone tuned into that show to see whether or not Ross and Rachel would get back together, whether or not Monica and Chandler’s secret of them dating would be revealed to the rest of the group. You can travel anywhere in the world and ask someone if they’ve ever heard of the show Friends, and someone is bound to reply with a quote from Joey, “How ‘u doin?” If there is anything we’ve learned it is that television is here and it’s here to stay.