I am happy to report that Susan Orlean’s smart and witty joyride into that American evening unlike any other, Saturday Night, is back in print after twenty years. Even back in the early nineties, Susan perceptively understood that this nocturnal release of passion and intensity was undergoing a fundamental change. Her book proves so prescient in illuminating how technology was beginning to transform the one evening where people “get together, go dancing, go bowling, go drinking, go out to dinner, get drunk, get killed, kill other people, go out on dates, go to parties, listen to music, sleep, gamble, watch television, go cruising, and sometimes fall in love.”

I consulted with Susan, one of the New Yorker's most irresistible and zestful writers, about the watching TV chapter. For forty years, the medium broke new ground on Saturday nights. Network TV saved its best and most challenging for Saturday. In the fifties, Your Show of Shows with the incandescent Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca was as hip and satirical about contemporary mores as any movie or play. In the sixties, The Defenders was serious and thoughtful, probing societal ills like few series in media history. In the seventies, the evening became very reflexive, where single people could watch Mary Richards justify the joys and challenges of the single working life. The Mary Tyler Moore Show captured the zeitgeist as well as any show in pop culture, reframing the concept of family.

Even in the succeeding downward eras, Saturday night prime time reflected some type of societal yearning. The eighties was pure escapism led by The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. The nineties became harder edged with the show that helped to jumpstart the reality movement, Cops. For fifty years TV programmers tried to make the evening special, some competition at least to outside activities.

Now network television has made Saturday evening a total graveyard for reruns and outsourced events. I look at the Fall Previews of TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly and Saturday now is just skipped altogether. There are six days of primetime network programming, and on Saturday the executives, I guess, rest. The big news is that CBS will move Rules of Engagement to Saturdays, their first original series to hit that fall night in six years. As star David Spade wisecracks, “maybe people [will] flip over from the Proactiv infomercial.”

Obviously digital technology has made the idea of a nightly schedule almost irrelevant. As Susan points out in the afterword, television used to create “a virtual community before we had even thought of the idea of virtual communities.” Saturday Night Live can still generate that must-see-live TV excitement on occasion, but the evening is almost totally dead, TV wise. Sunday night now has that aura of media connection. The Video Music Award’s record-breaking ten-million tweets a few weeks ago proved communities can be built on that night.

Susan will be talking at the Paley Center during our PaleyDocFest in October about her latest work on the animal superhero Rin Tin Tin. Before then, let us know if you think Saturday night still could have some viability for any sort of original network television. We leave you with the Bay City Rollers classic about the magic of that evening.