When I was younger, one of my biggest pet peeves was watching movies on television.
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“This movie has been formatted to fit your screen,” the disclaimer would cheerfully announce.
That was Hollywood’s way of saying, “We’ve chopped off a third of the picture.”
Back then, most televisions were nearly square. Movies were wide. Rather than ask viewers to tolerate the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, television stations simply sliced off the left and right sides of the image. Directors carefully composed every shot, only to have someone decades later decide audiences would be happier if part of the picture disappeared.
I hated it.
When DVDs arrived, sanity largely prevailed. Bigger televisions made letterboxing less objectionable, and suddenly people could watch films in their original aspect ratio—the way the director intended.
Or so I thought.
Now we’ve done the opposite.
Classic television shows from the 1980s and 1990s were filmed in the old 4:3 television format. But because modern televisions are 16:9, many studios have “updated” those shows by cropping off the top and bottom of the picture. Every episode is examined shot by shot so the missing image isn’t too distracting.
But it’s still missing.
The audience isn’t seeing what the director, cinematographer, and editors created. We’re seeing someone else’s revision—a version altered not because it is better, but because someone decided modern viewers shouldn’t have to adjust.
Shows with smaller audiences, like Columbo, have largely escaped this treatment. But many of television’s biggest hits—Seinfeld, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond—have been quietly reformatted into something they were never intended to be.
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Of course, I’m not really writing about old television. I’m writing about a culture that increasingly believes the original should be altered whenever modern sensibilities find it inconvenient.
We’re told men should become more feminine and women more masculine. That fathers are optional. That marriage is whatever we say it is this week. That boys can become girls through declaration and medication. That biological reality should yield to personal preference. That long-established moral standards are oppressive while behaviors once considered shameful are celebrated.
The Constitution is no longer read according to what its authors meant, but according to what today’s judges wish they had meant. History isn’t studied so much as edited, with statues toppled, names erased, and historical figures judged exclusively by twenty-first century standards. Even language itself is under constant revision as familiar words are assigned entirely new meanings.
Every generation makes improvements. That’s not the problem.
The problem comes when we stop believing there was any wisdom in the original design.
Whether it’s a television show, a marriage, a nation, or the created order itself, we’ve become convinced that we can improve almost anything simply by trimming away the parts that no longer fit our preferences.
But cropping doesn’t add anything. It only removes.
The result may fill the screen more completely, but you see less of reality than you did before.
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