Dead Air

Sad news: Television Chronicles, which debuted in 1995 as a quarterly magazine “geared for TV addicts, collectors and scholars,” but then disappeared four years later, only to be reincarnated this past summer as a Webzine, is disappearing once more. As editor Bill Groves explains in a note to readers:

... I have determined that there simply is not enough support for the magazine to merit the amount of time and work required to justify its continuation in any variation of its present form, let alone the significant expense involved in converting the site to a subscription format. Television Chronicles--the online version--was launched during a time when I had a unique opportunity to devote full-time energies to it. Had it begun to generate even minimal revenue, I perhaps could have acquired enough material from contributing writers to allow myself to maintain it on a part-time basis. That not having occurred, and with my “full-time” window of opportunity now closing, it has become necessary to pull the plug.

I discovered the reborn TVC when it published a lengthy piece, by television historian Ed Robertson, about the 1973-1974 mystery-adventure series The Magician. And as it featured stories about other crime-fiction-related shows since, I plugged those in The Rap Sheet. Unfortunately, the publication was not to be. Aside from Groves’ final note, everything else from the site has disappeared. No archives. Nada. Drat!