1:22 AM
There was a moment when television lost control of television.
Beginning in the 1970s, New York public-access cable opened a small hole in the wall separating people who watched television from people who were allowed to make television.
The underground promptly crawled through it.
Artists, musicians, drag performers, activists, comedians, eccentrics and assorted Manhattan nocturnal wildlife suddenly possessed something normally reserved for corporations: airtime.
The results weren't polished. Thank God.
Shows like Glenn O'Brien's TV Party looked less like television than somebody had accidentally left the cameras running at the best downtown apartment in New York. Debbie Harry appeared. David Bowie appeared. Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared. Iggy Pop appeared. People smoked, argued, performed, wandered around and occasionally seemed uncertain whether they were even on television.
Now the documentary Public Access is excavating that world from surviving analog footage, including material rarely seen since its original transmission.
And that's what makes this more than nostalgia.
Public access was an early experiment in democratized media. Decades before YouTube, livestreaming or podcasts, ordinary people discovered what happened when the machinery of broadcasting became briefly available without the usual gatekeepers.
Some produced political television.
Some made art.
Some apparently just wanted to get extremely weird at 11:30 on Tuesday night.
The tapes now look like transmissions from another civilization—not because the technology is primitive, but because the people don't yet seem trained by algorithms to behave like media personalities.
Nobody is optimizing a thumbnail.
Nobody is begging you to smash Subscribe.
They're simply broadcasting.
And buried inside those deteriorating videotapes is something today's infinitely larger internet occasionally struggles to manufacture:
genuine local weirdness.
For a few glorious years, New York didn't merely watch television.
New York got inside it.
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