The New York Times had them also. My favorite was for a movie called “Land of the Pharaohs”: It sphinx.
I used to keep the Fall Preview issues also, back from the early '60s. It was fun to see which shows had vanished by the spring. I remember the page for Star Trek, with Kirk and Spock, Spock holding a phaser rifle.
In 1975 - 77 I bought the TV Guide to see which rerun TOS episodes were on so I could write my online Star Trek Preview.
Cheers was “Closing Time” (I remember the Canadian edition used “Last Call!”). The Canadian version was pretty much the same format (Cheers & Jeers, Close-Up, crossword puzzle in the back, etc.) but most or perhaps all of the articles were different from the U.S. version.
I haven’t seen a TV Guide magazine in decades. I liked doing the crossword, and sometimes marking upcoming shows I wanted to watch.
For Newhart, it would be funny if the cover said, “Bye Bob!” You know, a play off of all the prople saying “Hi Bob!” in the show.
I really wish I could remember what the movie was, but all I remember was the TV Guide listing description began “An unintentionally humorous film, …”. 
I’m not gonna claim that “the old days were better”: searchable listings are swell. But we made due just fine before TV Guide introduced it’s Prime Time Grid despite getting … 25 channels?
Of course, it helped that a lot of those were duplicates. Up in northeast Connecticut you got stations from Hartford, Boston, and Providence, an there were affiliates for all 3 networks (remember when there were only 3?) in each city. So unless the was a Bruins game, all 3 CBS affiliates were showing the same things in prime time.
And Connecticut Public Television actually maintained 4 different stations that were showing the exact same broadcast, because I guess that was cheaper than buying one transmitter that could cover the whole state. We were among the privileged few who could tune in all (or most) of them.
My strongest memory of TV guide was why my dad stopped subscribing, which happened around 1986 or so.
See, the TV listings in TV guide started at about 6 am Saturday morning, and ran through Friday night. (Apparently, 6 am was their arbitrary line for when one day ends and the next begins. Works for me.)
New magazines arrive in the grocery stores on Tuesdays, but TV guide came in the mail on Thursday. Except when it was late.
So sometimes, when you got the mail after work on Thursday, there was no TV Guide in there.
And sometimes it didn’t come on Friday either.
So a couple times a year you arrived home after work on Friday to learn that you had to go out and buy a TV Guide either tonight or tomorrow morning. Annoying.
AND, you’d better hope the store hadn’t sold out, as they often did.
Well throughout the 1980s, TV Guide had been raising their subscription rate. When dad dropped his subscription, he’d been paying the cover price for 51 issues for a 52-week subscription for at least a year, probably two. He realized that if just once he had to buy an issue in the store because it hadn’t come by Friday, he was breaking even.
And then he realized that he wasn’t “breaking even”, because he would have had several weeks where it didn’t come on Thursday, causing the stress while he wondered if he’d have to go buy one.
Whereas he could just buy one every Tuesday while buying his groceries, save all that stress and worry, get the magazine 2 days earlier, and only be paying like 50 cents more per year. (He didn’t mention the ‘not having to pay for the full year up front’ part, which ought to be worth something. I’m not going to do the full compound-interest math right now, but I’ll bet paying $25.50 on January 1 versus $0.50 per week is actually a bad deal.)
So well before the internet, and before cable TV became ubiquitous, TV Guide’s customer service had dropped to the point where subscribing was a bad deal all around.
“Newsstand” sales are nice, but subscribers are how magazines pay the bills, in part because those are numbers you can promise your advertisers. And TV Guide was driving them away.
After not having seen one in many years, this thread is making me remember how much I loved them. My mother and I were big tv watchers and “the guide” was a constant in our home for my whole life there. Like others have mentioned I would read what all my favorites shows were going to be about that week - hell, I read about what *every *show was going to be about. I remember they always featured a synopsis of the Sunday afternoon horror movie including a picture. How I looked forward to / dreaded turning to the Sunday page and it was often a terrifying (to me )image that I alternately tried to avoid and yet couldn’t help myself from looking at, like this one. I also loved Al Hirschfeld’s drawings and once I heard about how he would hide his daughter Nina’s name in the drawings I would stare at them until I found it. Good times.
How about: “Bob Newhart hangs it up.”
I was at the other end of the curve, color was the norm so they would denote B&W for shows that weren’t. And of course, the capital (R) at the end of the description meant rerun. Those numbers however were not for DVRs (i.e. TiVos), they were for VCRs. In fact they were called VCR Plus+ codes. I must have stopped getting TV Guide right around when they started to appear because I never used them (I could always handle programming even the most complicated of VCRs). Cecil even did a column about them…
I kept a few of the ones talking about Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine for a few years. Don’t have them now, though. I especially remember the grid listing for TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds”, which was listed as a cliffhanger. I asked Dad what that meant. He still screamed “NO!” when the words “To Be Continued” appeared on that screen, though.
I used to save the fall schedule grids that were in the Fall Preview issues to see how many shows from the previous season were still on (and also to see if there were any shows listed that had been pulled at the last second - for example, The Powers of Matthew Star had to be delayed for a year because the star got seriously burned in a stunt gone bad, and I think “Untitled The Office Spinoff” (which would morph into Parks & Recreation) was listed one year as well.
However, the current one is pretty much meaningless in terms of seeing what shows are on, as there are no local station listings, and even the network and cable listings usually don’t list which particular episode is going to air very well, if at all.
It was the 00’s when they changed the format. When I was throwing out a lot of stuff I’ve packrated over the years, I decided I could finally bear to part with the various TV Guides I’d saved for whatever reason, and definitely had some in the old format with shows from the 00’s (like Lost) on the cover.
I kept getting it in the new format for a while, just out of habit, but eventually it got to be really hard to even find. In the original format you could get it practically anywhere, grocery store, convenience store, etc, now, well, sometimes I see one at a Target once in a while, or some other random store, but certainly not in many places.
My biggest gripe with the nuTVGuide came when they devoted a huge, multipage spread covering the death of Heath Ledger, someone who’d barely ever even acted on TV. Meanwhile, Suzanne Pleshette, who’d also died around that time, and who’d, among other things, been part of one of the greatest, most memorable endings to a TV series of all time? She got something like a one paragraph blurb shoved into a tiny corner of a page. Yeah, fuck you TV Guide.
I like that James Lileks scanned an entire week of a 1967 TV Guide. It’s an issue featuring Star Trek on the cover! Embedded in the scanned pages, within the description of each show, are links to youtube fragments of many of the old shows listed. It has been awhile since he created this, so it’s possible that some of the links are broken; the actual TV listings start several pages in.
It’s a blast from the past to see some of those short-lived cartoon shows.
Here’s another TV Guide tidbit, the upside down Enterprise from the The Tholian Web. Urban legend has that printed on the cover, but actually it was a small piece in the newsprint portion. The editors blamed the layout artists but I’ll bet some editor had never seen the show and passed it on by without knowing it was upside down.
Not the iconic roster listings I remember from the mid '70s with the crude 2D NFL helmet designs, but interesting nontheless…an image of the rosters for the long-defunct College All-Star game that pitted the Super Bowl champ against a group of collegiate all-stars.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tRMP0vpeN_w/VbLzPljsayI/AAAAAAAAFsI/rIFjHffnecA/s320/AllStarsFB.png
Actually, it was The Bob Newhart Show on which psychologist Bob Hartley was so often greeted by name. On Newhart, the titular performer played innkeeper Dick Loudon.
Our family never subscribed to TV Guide. But we did get the Sunday paper each week, in which there was a newsprint local tv guide. Did other places do that?
I remember how utterly important the guide was to the family. We pored over it daily!
I was excited to find out that they went to regular-sized magazine. I found out just a couple months ago when I saw it in a doctor’s office. I love television and like the idea of a tv-only entertainment magazine without having to deal with all the extra space for listings.
But, then I realized that it was like 90% about reality stars (not just Kardashians I mean like The Voice, America’s Got Talent, etc) which is the TV stuff I don’t watch, so I didn’t delve further in to fandom.
I think I did subscribe to TV Guide proper during college, so I didn’t have to get a newspaper. Great reading!
Yes indeed. My family always called it “the TV guide”, and we saved it for the week. I never gave much thought as to why they called it that; I just figured it was a guide to TV. Only as an older child did I learn that “TV Guide” was an independent magazine and my parents were scorning its trademark by using it as a generic.
I used to always purchase the Fall Preview issues. Back then I also made a point of watching a least one episode of every new show. :eek:
I remember when I was a kid, if Kraft was sponsoring a show, TV Guide would have all Kraft recipes made during the commercials.
I thought something similar. In the early 80s TV Guide first began advertising itself on television commercials (when they first started getting real competition). And in the ads the narrator referred to it as “TV Guide magazine”. I so thought of it as just ‘the TV Guide’, almost as a utility like ‘the electric bill’, that I thought ‘TV Guide Magazine’ must be some new, full-size spin-off publication with just articles (kind of like what it turned into*!*)
