In the final episode of the first season of AMC’s Mad Men, set in 1960, advertising wunderkind Don Draper pitches his creative concept to Kodak for its latest product, a slide projector called the Carousel. He speaks of the power of nostalgia and describes the device as a time machine with the ability to take people to that place everyone most longs to go, “back home again.” As he delivers his presentation in a darkened conference room, images of Draper’s own young wife and children flash onto a screen one by one, and the carousel works its magic on on those who watch.
MeTV is another sort of time machine. Its viewers are regularly transported to an earlier, some say more golden, age of television – the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, those decades when the network’s target audience, baby boomers like me, was very young. Tripping into the past by way of MeTV is a purely cheerful experience, nothing at all like the harrowing journey of Martin Sloan (Gig Young) whose “Walking Distance” detour into his past took him through the looking glass of The Twilight Zone.
