[Jeffhs]

Disney is not all bad, even if it now owns a majority stake in 20th Century Fox. One Disney movie I've been meaning to watch for months, titled "Moana", is still running on Hulu; one of these days I'll get around to watching it, as my Roku player receives the Hulu channel (among others).

Times change all the time (no pun intended); we cannot expect anything, including TV networks, motion pictures, or anything else to remain the same forever. Television and motion picture content changes with the generations; what one generation likes, another, later one may think is garbage, and vice versa.

I don't think the ABC television network is all bad, either, even if Disney owns it; in fact, I think ABC-TV and CBS-TV, to say nothing of PBS, are head and shoulders above NBC-TV as far as program quality goes. NBC's programming minions could learn a few things from those networks if NBC wants to get out of the ratings dungeon it has been in now for some time. The way NBC is presently going, it is in a rut and may never again get the ratings it got during the 1970s, when the network was at the top of the heap. NBC used to run promotional announcements during the '70s, '80s and even the early '90s, in which it proudly proclaimed "NBC is the place to be!" and other proud slogans; who can forget, for example, NBC's "Proud as a Peacock" image campaign of the '80s?

I don't watch the broadcast networks any longer except for news, preferring instead to watch former NBC, ABC and CBS programs on MeTV, Antenna TV, GetTV and COZI, to say nothing of watching many of those shows on DVD and VHS (if I want to see them without commercials, or if I don't care to stay up until all hours of the night to watch them when the networks run them). These networks show TV the way it used to be; having grown up in the '70s, almost all of the shows I remember watching as a kid and as a younger man (I am now 61) are always on one of those networks at any given time. Two of my all-time favorites are Quincy, M. E. and Mannix; the former was on NBC from 1976 to 1984, while the latter was on CBS from 1967 to the mid-1970s. Both shows are still running in reruns on COZI and MeTV, and I have them on DVD as well. I still like NBC's mystery movies of the '70s, such as McMillan and Wife, McCloud, and Columbo; I bought the entire network runs of McMillan and Wife, The Streets of San Francisco, and Mannix on Amazon.com recently, as well as having several individual seasons of other shows such as Banacek, et al.

Man, they made better TV 45 years ago. With all these older shows now on the retro DTV subchannels of local TV stations and on DVD, I sometimes wonder--who needs the broadcast networks anymore?