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TBAA Fans on the 'net - the Early Days
People seem very curious about the 'early days' of TBAA and TBAA fans, so I've put these pages together to tell that story. I'm telling it from my own point of view, so this is mostly about fans...since most of you have seen/will see the episodes I was seeing, I don't say too much about the show itself.
I've been watching TBAA since the summer of 1995. I really don't watch much TV (for all I get very involved in what I *do* watch) so it's not surprising I never even heard of TBAA when it was on Wednesdays. I happen to have found some of the early ads to add to this page, but that's not because I saved them initially...it's because I stuck the magazines in a box because I hadn't read through them or wanted to save something else out of them and forgot about them for a couple of years. By the time I *did* check through them, I knew I wanted to keep the TBAA stuff. It was a happy little bit of disorganization, there. Some wonderful friends have also sent me clippings they saved for me.
| When I started watching TBAA, my father was
extremely ill and hospitalized for most of that summer. I started watching
TV on Saturday nights more than I had been, trying to leave the phone lines
open but be home in case of a phone call when I wasn't with my family. This
started right around the time TBAA was switched to Saturdays. With so much
worry in my life, TBAA presented me with a much-needed positive outlook.
By early the following year, my father was doing much better (thank God!) but I was still catching every episode of TBAA and I looked for fans on the internet. I was surprised to see an old 'net buddy, Red, had put up a fan page for it where we could write each other. That page was the earliest root of what has become the TBAAngel mailing list. I think it boasted the largest mailto: link I have ever seen in my life. It was around this time that TBAA was preempted three weeks in a row by NCAA basketball. This was especially worrisome since on one of those nights, the game was finished before TBAA's timeslot and the network had chosen to air Dr. Quinn at the wrong time rather than TBAA at the right time. Those on the webpage list wrote the network to protest and the studio to offer encouragement. One of the neatest things to come out of that bout of writing were these postcards that they sent us to let us know whenever changes in the show's schedule occured.
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There were nowhere near as many of us back then, but we still eventually managed to generate more mail than a webpage could handle and had to look for a mailing list. Red initially managed to set one up at a University with a friend, calling it simply the TBAA list. Unfortunately, the list was plagued with technical problems and kept crashing - finally to crash for good after just over half a year, at the beginning of 1997. After all of us looking unsuccessfully around for another free site for about two months, I finally decided to set up the TBAAngel list with a friend's service provider (execpc) for a reasonable fee. That friend, Diane E., did a lot of the work contacting the provider for me because I was too shy to call them. In fact, she is the one who actually named the list and set up the initial webpage for it. ;-) In those early days, Diane handled most of the technical end of things and I handled the administrative end (like writing and enforcing the rules). Eventually Diane turned the entire thing over to me (and boy, have I learned a *lot* since then!) I doubt this list would be here (or would've run for nearly as long) without Red and Diane. So thanks, both of you!
Other developing fan forums
I am not on Prodigy, but I understand that Bob Colleary, one of the TBAA writers/producers, was posting to the boards in Prodigy and answering questions around this time, too.
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On America Online (AOL), a regular TBAA chat was started during summer of 1996 by TVVDeb. Initially the chat was on Wednesday evenings, but eventually the chat was moved to Sunday nights. Unbeknownst to most of us, John Dye's mother was there in the chat room with us on several occasions, chatting away with the rest of us fans. If you ever wonder why I keep reminding people that you never know who will hear what you say in a chat room or on a mailing list, this is one of the reasons. :-) That Christmas, when John came home, he came to chat with us for the first time. You can find the transcript for the chat on The John Dye Home Page (Under "Touched By an Angel".)
I should probably point out, here, that I was sharing the keyboard with my roommate during that chat, so half of what "I" said was actually Amy, or Amy and I deciding together to say something. This was before we got a second phone line. (The hair comment/question, for instance, was because everyone seemed so nervous so we figured throwing a bit of humor in, plus getting everyone's worst nightmare over with, might help some. I'm not entirely sure the other chatters felt it was helpful, however...some of them *really* didn't want John to know how often we discussed his hair, I suspect. It's that whole 'dignity' thing. <g>)
Other, not-so-early highlights: 1997 sped by for me, because of all the things that were going on outside of the Internet. About all I can mention during the early part of the year (other than TBAAngel being set up at execpc) are the fact that I got to formally meet John's mom online towards the beginning of the year, and then John chatted with the AOL chat again in June. (Now that I think of it, the Internet was doing its share to keep me busy that year too...)
Towards the end of the year, Susan, myself and another friend all seriously needed a break, but we were literally scattered across the US, so we decided the fair thing to do would be to all meet in a fairly central location. Naturally, we decided Salt Lake City would fit that bill. The idea was just to see the sights and see if any of them looked familiar from the show, and just relax for a bit. Susan *did* need to discuss the webpage with John, but we knew he was very busy and that it was very likely not a good weekend for him so we assumed we weren't going to see him at all.
Boy, were *we* wrong.
Being informed a day before we left for Utah that we were going to the set to see John didn't exactly contribute to our relaxation, but it sure did make the trip special. It turns out that it *wasn't* a good weekend for John, who was headed out of town for a talk show, but he'd arranged for us to meet with him at work that Friday, since we had made a long weekend of it. It was quite an experience, so if you would like to hear that story, head to the set visit webpage.
In 1998, a friend in LA let me know about the Paley Festival, where TBAA was being honored that year. It's a terrific program put on by the Museum of Television and Radio that honors several television programs every year and holds a question and answer session with the cast and production staff of those shows. Thanks to some friends in LA who were willing to let me crash with them and were willing to drive me all over, I was able to attend. The program was absolutely terrific and this is where I finally got to meet Martha Williamson, the executive producer of TBAA.
I guess the only little bit of 'history' left is the recent move of the TBAAngel list from execpc to onelist. Execpc was a terrific, reliable service but onelist has been very reliable for several months of heavy use with other lists I am on, so we've moved the list back to it's old 'free' status. <g> In our own way, we have come full circle.