Turning 42 and Thinking of TV. Huh.

Today, on my 42 birthday, I’m feeling nostalgic for parts of my life that I haven’t thought about in decades. In a lot of my blog posts I feel compelled to mine through the more obscure parts of my past to connect with aspects of myself that I’ve needed to bring out of the box and give value to once more. When I sit down to write, I often aim to bring to the page some truths that I’ve come to over time about life, spirituality, and family. What ends up erupting in my brain, these days especially, are moments from my middle school and early high school years. Maybe fully growing into my 42nd year requires that I spend a little more time with the 12 year old me. And so, today that 12 year old showed up in the weirdest way. But, she still had a lesson for me.

9 Broadcast Plaza

If you lived within a 45 mile radius of Secaucus, NJ in the early 90’s, you might remember shows like 9 Broadcast Plaza.  9 Broadcast Plaza was a local and possibly early incarnation of the Jerry Springer Show and it may have even been more outrageous, more bawdy, and more over the top than anything Jerry was doing in his hayday.  And it was a morning talk show!

9 Broadcast Plaza was a show that appeared on Channel 9 (WWOR) and it was broadcast from the studio at the same address in Secaucus.  The show seemed endlessly long and I think it actually had a running time of hours, not minutes. This show gave a sick kid in the 90’s something to be excited about when you were stuck on the couch during TV’s dullest time of day.

Between The Price is Right and Days of Our Lives there was really nothing else to pick from for a sick adolescent girl.  At least I liked one soap opera. I was a lucky one. If I didn’t have my 1pm Days of Our Lives to check in with, I would have had to read.  For my brother, it was even worse. He only liked the “Showcase Showdown” on The Price is Right and then he had to pick from one of the ancient and impossible to connect with movies being shown on channel 11, like any of the original Godzilla movies. Those movies were guaranteed to have half-assed voice dubbing that was always 2.3 seconds off.    

Being sick and stuck home back then was kind of a struggle.  If my mom was able, she would run to the library and take out some videos for us but, she worked, and the video selection was pretty bad.  I watched a lot of Laurence Olivier films as a 13 year old.  

I know.  I can’t believe we all survived.  

Times were bleak, channels were few, and tv, for the most part was a wasteland until “8pm Eastern Standard Time” when the tube came to life.  Until I was 10, my family didn’t have normal tv stations because we couldn’t afford cable and when we finally got it I was like a kid crawling out of the desert and reaching a spring.  Even I was disappointed by daytime tv.

And then I discovered Channel 9 and Richard Bey, the host of 9 Broadcast Plaza.  From that moment on, I developed a chronic case of what my dad referred to as “schoolitis.”  I was dizzy. I had headaches. I thought I might have mono for the 30th time. Honestly, maybe I had the flu.  I should probably stay home and rest on the couch with Lipton Ring-O-Noodle soup, hot chocolate, some twin pops for my sore throat, and maybe some microwave popcorn.  

I think my parents must have really been struggling to make ends meet back then or I was even more Shirley McClaine than Shirely McClaine because they nearly always caved.   I did get to spend many a sunny day on the couch in our living room convalescing to the sweet sounds of a Richard Bey telling people to “shut up” on his show.  

Richard Bey, the host, was an integral result of Channel 9’s redevelopment in the late ‘80, a redevelopment that the NY Times indicated was “eroding the barriers between news and entertainment.”  For a hot second that meant a blend of journalism and human interest. From that NY Times piece it sounds a little Donahue-esque. Which, to be fair, Donahue had some crazy good faceoffs like that KKK versus Civil Rights Activists episode where chairs were thrown and audience members went running.  Who approved that pitch? Still, Donahue was for a more discerning viewer.  

But 9 Broadcast Plaza?  Well, you didn’t need any sense of the nuances of race relations back then (of which I had none) to know what was up.  The show had a predictable format that captivated the masses and that format was simple: tune in, drop jaw. Midget swingers, I’m looking at you.

Any kind of shocking human spectacle you could think of in your most “make it past the censors” brain was just right for 9 Broadcast Plaza.  It wasn’t like Jerry Springer where you had trailer park couples fighting over the right to claim someone’s grandma as the third in their threesome.  It wasn’t even like a Maury where a 400 lb stipper was trying to pin paternity on an 80 year old man with early onset dementia. Oh no, no, no. Those were like episodes of Reading Rainbow in comparison.  

On 9 Broadcast Plaza, you would see trailer park couples square off against the stripper and her fairly confused old man WITH the newborn baby of questionable paternity in a sumo wrestling match with the grandma waiting to be claimed by any one of the brawling couples as the referee.  And everyone would be in the neon green and “hot” orange sumo gear and nothing else.  

And this show went on for hours a day!

Segment after segment viewers were presented with a feast for the morally corrupt.  No race, religion, or disability was spared from being paraded around the studio enduring the very things that offended them most simply to win tickets for a Perillo Tour. Honestly though,I don’t think there was anything left in the budget for a tour of anything beyond the Pulaski Skyline and it was guided not by the sophisticated italian from Staten Island, Steve, this tour was instead led by his sister’s second husband, Joe, who just got out of Riker’s.  

And yet, people who showed up ready to battle the stigmas and stereotypes of whatever societal affliction they presented with caved when presented with a chance to date a leper in a bikini made of beef jerky by eating a bucket of refried beans in under 3 minutes.  

It was incredible.

We, of course, were not allowed to watch this garbage.  A few kids I knew would be allowed to watch this kind of thing any time they wanted and their parents would let them.  I was genuinely frightened by both these kids and their parents in those cases. These were families that had their standards of appropriateness eroded over generations of hard living.  Mud wrestling for the right to spend a night with a conjoined twin seemed a little par for the course, I suppose. These were confusing times for me.

I often wonder if the excitement of catching an episode of 9 Broadcast Plaza had something to do with being deprived of actual tv for so long.  Sure, we grew up with a television set in our house but, for a good year the only show we had was an episode of Cheers called “Manchild in Beantown” on some random VHS tape.  We watched that more times than I care to recall and it’s a part of our family’s lore that seems to outsiders like it just has to be an exaggeration.  Could it be this kind of Branch-Davidian style of living that led me to sit, transfixed to Channel 9 all morning long?

What I’m discovering about myself as I raise my own kids is that, perhaps, the lack of access to certain things makes the having of them hard to regulate.  When Cheerios is the junkiest cereal in your house--ever!--and your friends are eating Kaboom, it can be hard to stick to a serving size when that Kaboom is finally within reach.  Or, if you get only pure, 100% Cranberry Juice to drink, and with seltzer sometimes as a big treat, it’s going to be impossible not to drink the Kool-Aid that flows like the springs of Lima at the neighbor’s house all day long until you puke fruity goodness back up.  And, when there’s a candy dish at your grandmother’s house piled high with spearmint leaves and hershey’s miniatures, it’s nearly impossible not to mow it all down like you’re headed for the electric chair in ten minutes. Perhap this logic applied to my appetite for oddball tv, too.

Weirdly, I don’t have normal tv anymore.  No one does, though. I don’t watch reality tv or crazy talk shows even if they are within reach because that stuff just doesn’t do it for me anymore.  I’ve really matured, you know. Pig racing priests absolving as many carnal sins as possible before the finish line is hard to come by, even if I wanted to tune in.  Nothing like 9 Broadcast Plaza would fly 5 days a week on basic cable in this day and age.  

Times sure were different then.

Nowadays, if given the chance to spend a day on the couch, I’ll take watching something a little more politically correct with a medium sized bowl of Lucky Charms and 1% milk. It feels as though I’ve reached that age of maturity where watching Game of Thrones is what we adults do. I mean, this is a show where threesomes only happen if there’s a beheading involved and bikinis of beef jerky are traded in for masks made of actual human faces. This is thoughtful television, people.  

As I reflect on my own upbringing and how its affected my habits over the years, I feel lucky. I know that I can steer my kids to a middle ground somehow where Kool Aid isn’t the most exciting part of their day and watching an absolute depraved spectacle on television isn’t what they get “schoolitis” for. What’s on that middle ground is anyone’s guess though.

Look at that. I even have a source.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/16/arts/a-channel-innovates-and-moves-up.html