Unloved. Unwanted. Outdated.
TV Week, this newspaper’s weekly television guide, is inexorably fading away. The paper has been alerting readers for six weeks that Sunday is the last day to tell us they want to keep getting the guide with their Sunday paper.
This weeding-out process is of particular interest to me because I attended the birth of TV Week on Oct. 18, 1981, with a little-remembered ABC series called “The Greatest American Hero” on its slick-paper cover. The magazine looks about the same today but technology has whittled away much of its utility.
The earliest versions had a strip in one corner of the cover that teased, “Complete HBO Listings and Cable Highlights,” meaning it carried eight broadcast channels, two HBO channels and ESPN. Today, there are 61 channels in the book, and even that’s a small percentage of what’s out there.
As of Wednesday, about 114,000 of the paper’s 535,000 Sunday home-delivery subscribers “opted in” to keep receiving TV Week, according to Judd Alvord, vice president of circulation for the Denver Newspaper Agency. “We’re doing it because surveys show only 36 percent read it and want it. We burn up a lot of trees, and we spend a lot of money.
“The book is really past it’s time,” said Alvord, who declined to specify the cost of production, estimated to be several million dollars. There are no plans, he said, to cease publishing it.
Letting readers choose is “a way to meet the needs of the people who want to receive it. The people who want it, read it very heavily.” But there are lots of other ways to get program information these days – onscreen listings and TiVo, to name two.
When it debuted in 1981, TV Week was state-of-the-art, but, after 25 years, it’s time to retire.
Weekend highlights
Today
Make some popcorn, put on your tiara and settle in for the 55th annual “Miss USA Pageant” (8 p.m., KUSA-Channel 9).
Saturday
Jack Nicholson plays an older man who dates a younger woman (Amanda Peet) and winds up attracted to her mom (Diane Keaton) in 2003’s “Something’s Gottta Give” (8 p.m., KCNC-Channel 4).
Sunday
Once you cut through the accents, the British series “Footballers Wives,” starting its third season, is brash and riveting (8 p.m., BBC America, Comcast digitcal cable channel 162).
Around the dial
A new round of programming began Thursday for MetroBeat TV, carried on Channel 8 in area cities. Among the programs is an interview with Denver developer Dana Crawford by Bertha Lynn. … Quotable: “Digital TV, same desert but the sand grains are now all tiny little perfect cubes.” Roberta J. (Bobbi) Barmore.
Dick Kreck’s column appears Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. He may be reached at 303-820-1456 or dkreck@denverpost.com.
