The TikTok Panic is Mounting
A lesson in nostalgia from your friendly Gen X pop culture aficionado
The world is ending … that is, if you believe TikTok is going to be banned in the next several weeks.
Seriously, the online chatter—especially in the Gen Z/Alpha community—is on tilt. The loss of one of their primary sources of entertainment and information has them up in arms, and I get it. I mean, I’ve been on the site at least a dozen times.
(Note to Developers: Can we create a “sarcasm” font style? Okay, thanks!)
For what it’s worth, this is not the first time a culturally significant network has had its life cut short, and I’m not talking about all the effort people put into their MySpace pages back in the early ’00s. No, I’m talking about something much, much more influential in the world.
USA Network’s Up All Night … and yes that was the clearest photo I could find. Honestly, it’s probably a higher quality image than was originally aired.
If you’re under the age of 35, you’ve probably opened up a new tab and are currently Googling. Let me save you the effort. Between 1989 and 1999, there was a channel on television (yes, you had to turn a dial) called USA Network—now just “USA,” owned by NBC Universal.
Every Friday and Saturday night after my folks went to bed, I was greeted by Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear introducing either an independent horror movie or a raunchy teen comedy. The show would start around 10 PM and typically had a double feature with short comedy sketches during commercial breaks featuring the two stars.
Now, the movies were edited for content—sometimes so thoroughly that the plots didn’t make sense. However, this was where a generation of X’ers learned to love horror. I was too young to rent these movies on VHS. Although I did occasionally sneak one of those little hard plastic cases into my room at night, volume on near-silent, face a few inches from the screen so I could reach the buttons on the VCR if I heard someone coming down the hall.
But if Mom had rented The Bodyguard for the fifth time, I just had to wait until the house got quiet. Then I could see movies like It’s Alive, Space Raiders (basically Guardians of the Galaxy before it was cool), and the occasional titillating time-travel sci-fi flick like Dinosaur Valley Girls. Granted, I typically liked the weirder shows—a trend that continued into my late teens and early twenties. My friends eventually quit letting me pick the movies.
It was an amazing curation of some of the worst—and best—independent films on the market. For a decade, between the ages of 11 and 21, I was fed a regular diet of censored gore and smut. It was glorious. But, as with all good things, it had to come to an end.
When the network changed ownership, the new C-suite decided they wanted to create a more “upscale” brand, and Up All Night was certainly not sliding into that window. Oddly enough, the cancellation of this late-night onslaught of indie B-movies coincided with the start of WWE’s “Era of Aggression,” also on USA Network. Perhaps viewership just wasn’t what it had been in the early days. Or maybe the advent of DVDs shifted the market away from this type of programming.
Whatever the reason, the show was canceled, and the place I relied on to feed me a regular diet of off-color entertainment and pop culture references was gone. In its wake, however, we now see movies like X and its sequels/prequels MaXXXine and Pearl. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gilbert Gottfried introduced these just before midnight today—they tick all the right boxes.
You’ve also got other amazing horror films from this year, like Late Night with the Devil (my personal favorite of 2024), Longlegs, and Terrifier 3. All of these would have fit perfectly in an Up All Night lineup.
All that to say, for my younger audience out there: “It’s going to be okay. I promise.” Everything worth saving always comes back around again, even if it’s lost. It’s just the way of things.
In twenty years, when we’re all watching movies on our living room augmented reality cubes and the average runtime is 4.5 minutes (with an intermission for ad breaks, of course), you’ll be able to hanker back to the good ol’ days—when you could just lay on the couch and get bite-sized bits of entertainment nonstop in your eye holes.
P.S.
For those looking for a deep dive, I found this great Letterboxd list from user Noah Lee that catalogs the movies aired during the show, and boy, is there some nostalgia candy inside. It’s super comprehensive, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch Flesh Eating Mothers again—though I’m sure it holds up. I’d like to remember it exactly as I first experienced it: my nose six inches from my 13” RCA set-top box, a peanut butter roll-up in one hand, and a cherry Coke in the other.