HBO and CINEMAX Program Guide from January 1985

It feels strange to say it, but... When I was a kid, we had something called cable television which allowed our TV to have 10x more channels than those available through the airwaves, and for an additional fee we could acquire even more, better channels that would provide unedited, commercial-free content, and one such channel was called HBO.

That may sound playfully condescending, but I can say all this to my 6-year-old son with a straight face and it's nothing but breaking news to him. Hell it was even a novelty to my dad who moved into my mom's cable-furnished apartment ca. 1980 and got to witness bare breasts on a TV screen for the first time ever. Me, I said goodbye to cable over 15 years ago when it clearly had nothing much left to offer - but all that really meant for me was saying goodbye to TV as I knew it, because I didn't know anything before cable television; I was born in it, molded by it. One of my earliest memories of life on this planet is the HBO Feature Presentation intro that debuted the year I was born -- and understandably so, it's a hauntingly bombastic production that could make something as mild as Tootsie feel like a Puccini space opera. Frankly it scared the shit outta me in the best possible ways. 

Back in these glorious analog days no enterprise could exist without its fair share of ephemera; everything was on paper and a lotta that paper was just roadmaps to more paper. HBO and its sister channel Cinemax already had listings in TV Guide but clearly it was more audacious to provide their own supplemental pamphlet exclusively detailing their program lineup. I assume these were distributed through your cable provider specifically to subscribers of these channels - so they were kinda like fan club newsletters (or at least that's how I like to think of them) detailing these very narrow windows of time in entertainment history. Because this is TV a lotta the "new" stuff they debut is already a year or even two years old, and so, along with Home Video, even the most seemingly inconsequential Cinema was granted an extended shelf life, and everything became a symbol of not just an opening weekend but the better part of a decade. 

The truest timestamps in these guides are the shows, concerts, and sporting events that HBO was maybe most famous for, and of which there are several in the issue I've chosen to share, from January 1985; it's been traveling 40 years to get here, and now it's here, on the World Wide Web so all of us know what night we get to watch Fraggle Rock after our bath. I've published all the pertinent pages (which is about 95% of the whole thing) so you can get a sense of the season, a sense of the art, and a sense of just how bland cable TV could be. Yes that's right, not all precious nostalgia is worth its weight in memories; you can't forget, TV through the years, up to and including (and maybe especially) streaming has always been hit or miss with a whole lotta miss and the "premium channels" were rarely an exception. Apart from the Fraggles, Not Necessarily the News, and a Men at Work concert, there wasn't a whole lot going on this month - but still just enough to constitute a 40-page glossy guide that we get to look at 4 decades later and feel comfort in the fact that very little has changed. 

- Paul