These are brutal times for the newspaper industry. Widespread buyouts, shuttered bureaus, diminished ambitions—in many cases, not even the physical size of the paper has been spared. May I suggest a balm for newsprint devotees? Watch some old episodes of Lou Grant, the late-seventies TV series about life at a newspaper, which has never been released on DVD but is now available on the streaming video site Hulu.com.

The show, which stars Ed Asner as an irascible city editor at the Los Angeles Tribune, a fictional version of the Los Angeles Times, is a time capsule of an era when circulation was up and anxieties about the industry’s future were down. In Lou Grant’s newsroom, the phones are always ringing, the typewriters clacking, the reporters free to spend days or weeks working a story, without fretting over ballooning expenses or the next round of layoffs. The Internet, of course, is a nonfactor; the most advanced technology is a Telex machine. In short, Lou Grant revels in the old-fashioned milieu of shoe leather and black ink.

In the current climate, a TV series based on a newspaper is almost inconceivable. Imagine if the show were filmed today—the dialogue would focus on declining ad dollars, not Pulitzers, and cynicism about the media is so prevalent that even the Lifetime channel would have difficulty creating sympathetic characters. Case in point: the final season of HBO’s The Wire, created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, depicts a dysfunctional newspaper beleaguered by cutbacks, its management callously using inexperienced reporters, one of whom becomes a Jayson Blair-like fabulist. A more likely series, given the popularity of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, would be an Onion-esque show about a fake newspaper.

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