The other day, I was driving Mylee and Cole to my house. In the way it happens in car rides, we somehow got to talking about television and specifically Netflix. In the course of our conversation, I told Mylee, “When I was growing up, there were only three channels available to us, and if we wanted to change the channel, we had to get up from our chair and walk over to the television and turn the knob to the new channel.”

She was stunned. “What channels did you have?” she asked, hoping to God that at least I had Nickelodeon and could watch The Loud House . 

“We had NBC, CBS, and ABC,” I told her. “You know, just the regular network channels.”

“What’s network mean?” she asked.

I tried to give her an example of a show she might watch that is on regular network television, and couldn’t come up with a single one. Most of the time she’s watching You Tube anyway.

Man, television has changed a bunch since I was a kid and dinosaurs walked the earth. Remember when Fred Flintstone’s television was made out of stone? That was just one step below our TV when I was in grade school. Our television was enormous, with a very small screen. It weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds. For a lot of my youth, it was black and white.

And the programs have changed as well. I know I sound one hundred years old, but I simply can’t believe what is on TV at 7 o’clock in the evening. What we used to call family viewing time. I guess it doesn’t matter, because our kids aren’t watching network television anyway.

Bill and I have been watching a program called Yellowstone. It is on Sunday nights on the Paramount cable channel. The show stars Kevin Costner, who I’ve always thought was a hit-or-miss actor. In this show, he is definitely hitting a home run. He plays the patriarch of the Dutton family who owns an enormous ranch in Montana that shares borders with an Indian reservation, Yellowstone National Park, and land owned by developers. Imagine the conflicts. The photography is beautiful. It reminds me of finally convincing my father to buy a colored television by pointing out how the scenery in Bonanza and Big Valley would be so much prettier in color. The Montana mountains featured in Yellowstone are definitely pretty in color. The shenanigans that the Duttons get away with is astounding.

Yellowstone is definitely worth watching, or at least I think so, but it is GRAPHICALLY violent and the sex isn’t just hinted at. I know. I once again sound 100 years old. Get off my lawn. But keep in mind that I really like the show, so there’s that.

Remember when Gunsmoke was popular? Matt Dillon killed people, but we didn’t have to close our eyes as it happened. Matt and Miss Kitty didn’t fool me, even as a kid, but whether or not they were more than friends was left up to our imagination.

Remember these guys?…..

The Cartwrights

Look familiar?…..

The Duttons

The only thing missing is Hop Sing.