With Schoolhouse Rock turning 40 this month, Soundcheck contributor reflects on the lasting impact and charm of the beloved children's cartoon. Have you used lessons learned from Schoolhouse Rock in your everyday life? 

In her book “The Future of Nostalgia,” Svetlana Boym reminds readers that nostalgia was originally a medical condition. The word was coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in the late 17^th century. He used it to describe a debilitating disease that plagued its victims with depression, obsessive thoughts of returning home, and hallucinations of scenes from their homeland and the voices of distant loved ones. Populations especially at risk of contracting nostalgia included displaced workers, students from foreign lands, and of particular concern, soldiers fighting abroad. Boym explains that “[i]t was unclear at first what was to be done with the afflicted soldiers who loved their motherland so much that they never wanted to leave it, or for that matter to die for it.”

Today, of course, nostalgia is no longer a battlefield illness. Instead, curiously, nostalgia manifests itself among many Americans as a longing for wartime.

Frontline producer and correspondent Martin Smith talks about his investigation into why the U.S. Department of Justice has failed to act on credible evidence that Wall Street knowingly packaged and sold toxic mortgage loans to investors, loans that brought the U.S. and world economies to the brink of collapse. Frontline’s documentary “The Untouchables” includes interviews with top prosecutors, government officials and industry whistle-blowers, and reports allegations that Wall Street bankers ignored pervasive fraud when buying pools of mortgage loans. “The Untouchables” airs January 22, at 10 p.m., on PBS.

Bill Persky, the five-time Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer of over 300 TV shows and films during the 1950s to the 1970s, including “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “That Girl,” and “Kate & Allie,” talks about his life and career during the Golden Age of television comedy. In his memoir, My Life is a Situation Comedy, he shares his tales of the people he worked with and of a life well lived and vividly recollected.

Thanks to a bustling economy, a scrappy local music scene and a certain ABC drama, Nashville is enjoying a moment in the sun.

The breakout HBO comedy Girls returns this Sunday for its second season, so we speak with the show's music supervisor Manish Raval about his work on the series, and about as the new Girls Soundtrack Vol. 1 compilation.

It turns out, the future of media consumption isn't that different from its past. David Carr of the New York Times discusses why "legacy media" is doing better than expected.

Brian Stelter, New York Times reporter and author of the Media Decoder column, discusses Al Jazeera's purchase of Current TV and its future presence on American television.

On Sunday, the PBS anthology series Masterpiece Classic begins its third season of Downton Abbey, the British period drama that has taken England — and America — by storm.

NPR's David Greene speaks with Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Joanne Froggatt, Sophie McShera, Jim Carter and Rob James-Collier — all cast members of the British TV hit Downton Abbey. The third season premieres in the U.S. Sunday on PBS.

In September, Hillary Clinton revealed that Burmese politicians told her they were learning about democracy from the West Wing. And the NYPD is going to film more interrogations because the "CSI effect" leads jurors to expect videotape of suspects. Listeners share what they've learned from television.

People who watch TV when it actually airs and blab about it online can ruin it for those of us who watch shows at our leisure. Their excited Twitter chatter about the great twist in last night’s Mad Men is frustrating if you haven’t yet watched last night’s Mad Men. New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum is a prolific tweeter who began grappling with this problem after Twitter users complained about a phenomenon they called "Nussbombing." She talks to Brooke about her evolving system of spoiler etiquette.

 

Big Joe Turner - TV Mama

On a Sunday evening in the late 1980s, two or more unknown men hijacked the signal for two Chicago area TV stations. They broadcast a spooky, subversive, disturbing message — twice. Brooke talks to Bohus Blahut, a Chicago broadcaster, who saw the broadcast and was unable to forget it. 

 

Doctor Who Theme - Delia Derbyshire/Ron Grainer

Reality TV — the very institution that has saved the medium by delivering high ratings at low cost — has also pretty much defiled the culture in all the obvious ways. What is perhaps less than obvious is how manufactured and unspontaneous it all is. To understand the reality behind the unreality of reality TV, we spoke to a former producer of such fare. The anonymous producer tells Bob about some of the elaborate staging and scripting he participated in while helping produce these shows.

 

Dwight Twilley Band - TV

Web TV services, DVRs, and on-demand TV encourage us to ignore the broadcast schedule and watch at our convenience. So what will become of the experience of watching the same show at the same time as your friends? Bob sits down with David Carr, media critic at the New York Times, and Matt Zoller Seitz, New York magazine's TV critic, to see if the water cooler will evolve or perish.

Back in 2005, Bob explained his Chaos Scenario about the future of media — including TV.  Now, he reflects back on predictions he made and the status of television viewing today.

 

The Who - Baba O'Riley

One of the surprising side effects of the upheavals in the TV industry’s business model is that, for now, we’re actually living in a golden age of scripted television. Television networks have found that one of the few predictable ways to build an audience is to create content that’s really, really good. Alan Sepinwall covers TV for Hitfix.com and is the author of the new book The Revolution Was Televised. He tells Bob about the unlikely path that led us to this TV renaissance.

 

Battles - White Electric (Shabazz Palaces Remix)

There are a lot of ways to watch TV: free streaming online, via a traditional cable or satellite package, paying for services like Hulu Plus, etc. But the TV industry makes vastly different amounts of money depending on how you choose to watch. We invited Peter Kafka, media reporter for the website All Things Digital, to play the part of a moustache-twirling cable baron, and explain which of our staffers have viewing habits he can support, and why.

Earle Hagen and Herbert W. Spencer - The Fishin' Hole

Red Foley - Television