From the Uncanny Valley to the City of Faith

A while back, I asked subscribers what Tulsa could explain next. “There is no limit to the amount of things Tulsa can explain,” Allie said. True, true.

I received a few responses from Carlos, Shane, and Michael. All the questions seemed to revolve around the medium of television. There’s a lot of interesting information online about Tulsa’s weird corner of TV history. If you grew up here before the Internet, you might have memories of Uncle Zeb, Mazeppa, Gusty, Tuffy, and several other characters.

What’s interesting about all of this is that the most creative period of Tulsa television happened right before the advent of cable, which is curious. The standard line in media history is that cable TV broke up American monoculture and democratized the medium, allowing stations from Chicago and Atlanta to become “superstations,” and compete with Los Angeles. Tulsa, though, kind of shatters this assumption. Let’s look at a few examples.

If you aren’t famil…