Whatever Happened To Wholesome Family Entertainment—and How Do I Get It On My TV?

Grandpa Jim

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There was a time when watching television required almost no technical knowledge. You turned it on.

If nothing happened, you waited for the tubes to warm up. If the picture rolled, you adjusted a knob. If reception was bad, you sent the youngest member of the family onto the roof to rotate the antenna while somebody shouted through an open window.

“THERE! STOP!”

This was approximately the full extent of America’s home-entertainment technology.

Today, the average television can summon several hundred thousand movies and programs from around the world, yet you can spend 45 minutes clicking through them without finding anything worth watching.

This is called progress.

For those of us over 50—and particularly those who occasionally have grandchildren in the room—the problem is more specific. We aren’t necessarily looking for the newest dystopian thriller involving serial killers, drug cartels, zombies, or teenagers who appear to have learned considerably more about human sexuality than algebra.

Sometimes we just want to watch Perry Mason.

Or Gunsmoke. Or Leave It to Beaver. Or an old Cary Grant movie in which the principal danger facing Western civilization is that Cary Grant might marry the wrong woman.

I therefore undertook an investigation on behalf of Beaver County Almanac’s Department of Wholesome Family Entertainment, of which I am presently the director, staff, and principal research subject.

My budget was $25 a month.

The first discovery is that you don’t need $25.

The best bargain I found is Frndly TV, an unfortunately spelled service that appears to have been designed by someone who noticed that half the country would occasionally like to watch television without having to explain it to a 7-year-old.

For about $11 a month, its Classic package offers more than 50 channels, including MeTV, FETV, getTV, Story Television, INSP, Movies!, Family Movie Classics, Great American Family, and Hallmark.

In other words, this is television for people who remember when detectives solved murders while wearing suits.

The Classic plan also includes an unlimited DVR, allowing you to record old programs and gradually construct your own private television network.

For the genuinely cautious, there’s Great American Pure Flix, at about $10 a month, specializing in explicitly faith- and family-friendly entertainment. It’s a good choice for grandparents who don’t want to keep one finger poised over the remote in anticipation of explaining some unexpected development in contemporary culture.

If you’re already an Amazon Prime member, things get more interesting.

Prime Video comes with the membership and contains a surprisingly deep collection of older television, including The Rifleman, The Beverly Hillbillies, Family Affair, My Favorite Martian, and The Saint. Its movie catalog regularly contains genuine classics as well.

Amazon does introduce one complication.

It has developed an ingenious system whereby you discover a movie you’ve wanted to see for 30 years, make yourself comfortable, dim the lights, and press the button—at which point Amazon informs you that the movie you thought you already paid for costs another $3.99.

Or that you need a subscription to some channel you’ve never heard of, available after a seven-day free trial you’ll forget to cancel until 2029.

Look for the words “Included with Prime.”

Prime also now contains advertising unless you pay extra. Thus, after spending decades liberating ourselves from commercials by paying for television, we have completed the circle and are once again paying to watch commercials.

There are other possibilities. Paramount+ is particularly attractive if you like the enormous CBS and Paramount archives. Hallmark+ provides enough Christmas movies to begin celebrating shortly after Labor Day. Peacock opens NBC and Universal’s considerable vault.

But don’t subscribe to all of them.

That’s how they get you.

Instead, practice subscription crop rotation. Keep one inexpensive service permanently—I’d choose Frndly—and rotate another. Subscribe to Paramount+ for a month, watch what you want, and cancel it. Try Pure Flix the next month. Add Hallmark around Christmas, when apparently every successful woman in America must return to her hometown, meet a widowed Christmas-tree farmer, save the family bakery, and discover what really matters.

Cancel in January.

There’s an even better secret: Some excellent streaming television costs nothing.

Pluto TV, Tubi, and The Roku Channel offer large collections of older movies and television supported by commercials. The commercials don’t bother me much. I grew up with them. They provided the necessary interval for getting ice cream, visiting the bathroom, or asking your father what Walter Cronkite meant by “quagmire.”

When people complain that television isn’t as wholesome as it used to be, they’re only partly right. The old television is still there. In fact, more of it is available today than when it was originally broadcast.

You simply have to know where they’ve hidden it.

The sets may wobble. The cars are enormous. Everybody smokes. Doctors make house calls. Children address adults as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Husbands come home from work wearing hats. A television family can survive an entire season without anybody discovering a dark secret about his identity.

Nobody says those programs represented America exactly as it was.

They represented America partly as it hoped to be.

There is something to be said for that.

For $25 a month—or considerably less—you can still invite Andy Griffith, Matt Dillon, Perry Mason, Beaver Cleaver, Cary Grant, and John Wayne into your living room.

They’ve been waiting patiently.

You just need the right remote.