{"id":129,"date":"2005-05-10T12:04:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-10T19:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=129"},"modified":"2005-05-10T12:04:00","modified_gmt":"2005-05-10T19:04:00","slug":"nostalgic-tv-the-z-channel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=129","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgic TV: The Z Channel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, I watched an interesting film on IFC<\/a> called The Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession<\/i><\/a>. This film focused on the Z Channel and its programmer, Jerry Harvey.<\/p>\n

What was the Z Channel, you ask? Back in the early days of cable television in Los Angeles, there was this cable system in Santa Monica called Theta Cable. I was familiar with them because, at the time, we lived up Kenter Canyon in Brentwood, and TV reception was crap. It was cable or nothing. Theta provided their customers with a wired cable box that had a slider switch for channels from A to Z. To put this in context: there were no cable-ready TVs; no VCRs; no national cable networks. Theta, given its audience of movie-industry people, started a premium channel called The Z Channel<\/a>. This channel showed recently released movies, about four per week, uncut. To those raised with HBO or Sho, this may sound like nothing; but back then, the only way to see movies was either in the theatre, or via encrypted over-the-air services such as On-TV (Ch 52) or SelectTV (Ch 22), which had image quality problems. <\/p>\n

What made the Z channel special was its programming mix. Very eclectic: major movies and little known films (I particulary remember watching The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder<\/a> on the channel; I’ve never seen it again). I was in my early teens at the time the Z channel started: this way my only way to see some of this stuff. <\/p>\n

Time passed. Theta was sold to Group W, and is now part of the Adelphia holding. The Z Channel died in competition with the national satellite providers. Yet I still have fond memories of those days. This movie brought them back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, I watched an interesting film on IFC called The Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. This film focused on the Z Channel and its programmer, Jerry Harvey. What was the Z Channel, you ask? Back in the early days of cable television in Los Angeles, there was this cable system in Santa Monica called Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,1],"tags":[94,63],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television","category-lj-xfer","tag-good-old-days","tag-memories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}