This post was originally posted on 07-31-26
I recently purchased a 1980s TV guide. It was cheap, and it had a pretty wild painting of the Dallas scene where Pam finds Bobby in the shower on the cover, so I figured why not, it'll be a laugh to look through. As I started looking at the listings, I was struck with a more fun idea: what if I bought the TV Guide from the week I was born and tried to watch everything I can from the day of my birth?
When I posed this idea, a few other folks liked the sound of it, so I had a larger idea: what if I get other people to also try to watch every bit of TV they can from the day they were born, and we share the experience together? Ideally asynchronously, so that people can continue to do this indefinitely, through social media hashtags, linking to each other's blogs, etc. What makes this particularly interesting to me is that there is not likely to be a lot of overlap in birthdays for participants, so everyone is going to have a different experience in what they see, but I guarantee they will have a lot of similar experiences in actually engaging with it!
So, I present my proposal here that I am calling Born Into TV. My own intention is to post about the things I view on my fediverse account (which you can see here), and I am proposing that we use the hashtag #BornIntoTV on social media so that we're all able to find each other. I also intend of course to write about the experience here on my blog (did you know I recently added an rss feed?). I don't intend to write a blog post about every single thing I watch, because in my experience feeling obligated to blog about something makes me put off doing it at all, but I'd definitely like to write some longer form posts here and there. How you engage with this challenge is of course up to you, in every way. But I'll discuss a little bit of the thought process I had behind it and some of the potential pitfalls below.
At its core, this concept is essentially three things: it is an interesting way to explore TV history (including things you may never have thought to look at), it serves as a sort of media scavenger hunt for people who find tracking down old media to be a fun use of their time, and it is a neat way for people who are interested in TV history to share what they see as a result.
Beyond this basic ethos, I really don't have much in the way of "rules" for this challenge. As long as you are watching TV from around when you were born, and sharing your thoughts about it, you're doing it right. If you don't want to try to track down specific sporting events, don't worry about it. If you only want to watch the TV shows and not movies, that's great. If you want to skip a Billy Graham TV special, I'm right there with you. If you would like to make this significantly less time intensive, maybe even just watch what was on during the HOUR you were born. It's completely up to you!
There will of course be a lot of things in your way, which is why I described this as part-media scavenger hunt. You'll need to find the media in question for one thing. As I get started with mine, I'd really like to write some blog posts about how to find these things. This could be a great sharing opportunity for all participants, maybe we can help each other find things we're struggling to locate. And it's not just a matter of finding the videos: see, one thing I only just noticed as someone who was not a TV Guide purchaser growing up (by the time I would have cared to look at it, our cable service had a TV Guide channel, so the listings were right there)...the guide doesn't tell you what episodes of shows are on. It will occasionally have a very short summary if it's a particularly interesting episode of a popular show, but that's it. So, if anything, this is the most scavenger-hunt portion of the challenge. You will need to do some amount of research to find out what you're actually supposed to be watching.
Now, when I say need...how much effort you want to put into that is up to you. If you want to spend hours scouring magazines and newspapers to see if that night's episode of Murder She Wrote was a rerun or a new episode, that's great. If you just want to go on Wikipedia and find out what episode aired closest to that date, that's great. If you just want to pick a random episode of the show from the season on that year, that's great. If you just say fuck it, I'll just watch any Woody Woodpecker cartoon from the 80s I can find, that's great. Hell, if you can't find the TV Guide for your birthday, grab the closest one you can. As nice as it is to watch the exact media from the date of your birth, at the end of the day it's about exploring old TV, if you don't get it exactly right it's FINE. Frankly if you're committing yourself to only getting the exact correct things for that day, you're likely to end up empty handed on a lot of stuff. Don't let it start to feel like work, do whatever leads to you having fun watching old TV.
There are some other considerations to think about. For instance, if you're outside the US, I have no idea what your TV Guide equivalent is. Hopefully you do! I have to assume there was something just about everywhere. Unless you think it'd be fun to do this level of research, in the US the TV Guide you end up with may not have reflected what was available in the area you were actually born in. Rural Kentucky I'm sure didn't have the same options as Boston even if my parents did spend the money for the good TV options. I didn't get access to Cartoon Network for quite a while as a kid, it just flat out wasn't an option on our cable package. The older you are, the less options you're going to have. Conversely, the younger you are, the more problems you might have doing this! You might have way too many things on the docket and may want to narrow it down a bit to certain channels, genres, or a specific window of time in the day.
So, you're sold on the idea and you're ready to get started. It's time to get a TV Guide! Or maybe it's not! You'll need to decide how you actually want to compile your list of TV shows. You have a few options here. You can of course purchase the TV Guide you're looking for. It's pretty easy to find a lot of old TV guides. You can check local thrift stores or flea markets, or used book stores that don't just throw them out. eBay will of course be a much easier option for finding the exact one you need. You can also check the Internet Archive for scans of TV Guides if you don't want to buy anything, and failing that you can see if there are any online resources that have TV listings for your birthday. I have some resources for the online options over here on my resources page.
At this point you've got the full sales pitch for the challenge. To wrap things up, well...as of right now this section is sort of a placeholder. I'd like to gather links to the blogs/social media pages of other participants down here (so if that's you, shoot me an email with your info!) I'm also compiling a page of resources for finding TV Guides, TV episodes and info online to help you in your search, that I would like to fill out later with more detailed guides on the process of finding old media.
One thing that might be neat is if folks participating in this challenge were to make lists of links to where they found the things they're watching (where it makes sense to do so, an archive.org link will probably work better than a sketchy putlocker link that will change urls in a week anyway) so others can check out what they saw. It also might be interesting one day to make a page where people could fill out the TV Guide listings they used and have some nice way to display those listings. Just thinking out loud, no idea if I'd have time to do this or if anyone else is interested in spearheading such a thing.
That's all! Go watch some TV that your tiny little baby eyes couldn't watch when it was on!