The 2:30 alarm pierced the morning quiet.

It was 1985, and Robert Thompson was a radio, television and film doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. He lived in an age before five-day VCR presets and automatic timers.

Thompson’s dissertation was about the programs of Stephen Cannell. To write his paper, he needed to capture every episode of Cannell’s “Rockford Files,” a detective show that had ended its run five years earlier. There were 123 episodes, and the reruns aired only at 2:30 a.m.

So every weekday morning for a year, Thompson, clad in pajamas, would stumble to the television. He’d fiddle with a tape for his clunky Beta recorder. Then the fight to stay awake would begin. If he fell asleep, he wouldn’t be able to pause the tape during commercial breaks.

Videotape was still pricey in the mid-1980s — about $10 per three-hour tape. He’d been taping television programs for about four years, saving the culture that otherwise would have been lost with each passing hour.

When David Rubin, dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, hired Thompson in 1990, one thing stuck out.

‘When he described how he gathers old television shows, what he’s got, what he’s seen — I was stunned,’ Rubin said.

Five years ago, Rubin urged Thompson to found the Center for the Study of Popular Television. It wasn’t a center in the physical sense of a building, but rather an umbrella term that brought together audio and visual interviews of television pioneers, a collection of books about television published by the SU Press and a lecture series of producers and directors.

Rubin felt the center would increase Newhouse’s prestige while simultaneously showcasing the school’s television and film program. And, he added, ‘It would give Bob more status to lead a center instead of just being a lone professor.’

Rubin’s calculation proved correct. Journalists loved it. The center’s name exuded authority and credibility, and Thompson’s — and the school’s — name started popping up everywhere.

The advent of network reality TV shows such as ‘Survivor’ and the resurgence of prime-time game shows such as ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ fueled the demand for Thompson. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Thompson’s phone rang incessantly as reporters sought comment on how the attacks would affect television.

The New York Times quoted Thompson about the reassuring nature of comedies such as ‘Friends’ after the attacks. He was in the Los Angeles Times, talking about the Harry Potter phenomenon. The Washington Post recruited him to discuss MTV’s 20th anniversary. When reality shows dominated television in 2000, the New York Daily News tapped him to comment.

Thompson’s pithy comment? ‘It’s prime-time network television the way God meant it to be: easy to watch.’

Bill O’Reilly has grilled him. So has Matt Lauer. He’s appeared on ’20/20′ and ‘All Things Considered,’ in Time and Newsweek and in hundreds of other media outlets.

“Syracuse couldn’t hire a better publicity machine,” said Ray Browne, who founded the nation’s first Department of Popular Culture in the early 1970s at Bowling Green State University.

Those who know him offer several explanations for his success. He’s knowledgeable. He’s photogenic. He knows more about what’s actually on TV — not the regulatory or economic aspects — than anyone else. His collection of television programs — more than 30,000 hours on 10,000 tapes — is staggering. He spouts sound bites that brim with eloquence, glibness and humor.

‘Whenever you see a Robert Thompson quote in an article, go to the end of the article. See if he’s got the last quote,’ said David Bianculli, a television critic for the New York Daily News. ‘Writers will always save the best quote for last, something that will leave people thinking or laughing.’

In Bianculli’s articles, Thompson “gets them most of the time.’

Some days, all Thompson does is speak to the media. He receives about 12 interview requests each weekday; that number spikes to about 40 when there’s breaking entertainment news. He grants nearly all of the interview requests. The benefits of speaking to the media, he said, outweigh risks of overexposure.

‘It allows you to completely transcend the classroom and talk to an enormous audience,’ said the 42-year-old Thompson. ‘Yes, you need to do it a sound bite at a time. And yes, you don’t get to do it in as much detail as you want. But I’m convinced we’ve had an impact on the way people view popular culture.’

Plus, he added, ‘There’s nothing a professor likes better than imposing his opinion on as large a number of people as possible.’

For a man whose job is dependent on television, it’s almost shocking that there are only two television sets in Thompson’s spacious office. A color set, directly across from his desk, sits nestled between books and static lines slink rhythmically across a smaller, black-and-white TV tucked near the office’s corner.

Granted, he has five television sets in his Syracuse home. But none are older, or carry more sentimental value, than the black-and-white set.

It’s the same TV he watched as an undergraduate 22 years ago in his University of Chicago residence hall room, wondering what was wrong with him.

While Thompson ate take-out dinners, the NBC affiliate aired ‘CHiPS,’ a cheesy police drama starring Erik Estrada. A few stations down, PBS broadcast a series detailing the Western World’s history through its philosophy, architecture and arts.

Thompson, an art history and political science major, chose to watch ‘CHiPS.’

‘That drove me crazy,’ he said. ‘I was cocky. I always thought of myself as an intellectual, and here I was watching this stupid show.’

He would spend the next 22 years of his life studying why.

The question of why otherwise-educated people eschew cultured shows for cheesy programs did not always concern Thompson. The second of four children, he grew up in Westmont, Ill., about 20 miles west of Chicago. He occasionally watched television but, his sister Barb Fair said, ‘I saw him read a lot more than watch TV.’

He was an early learner, reading and writing before elementary school, said his brother, Ken Thompson. While a high school student, Robert Thompson played trumpet and listened to classical music. He’d spend afternoons reading in solitude, often about astronomy. Once, he located a star that had been uncharted, Fair said.

His dad owned a plumbing business and put in long hours. Thompson would later say that waking at 2:30 a.m. to watch TV could never compare to the backbreaking rigor of his father’s job.

His siblings said they thought Thompson would pursue a career in the natural sciences, and even Thompson never considered the possibility of studying TV for a career.

‘The thought that you could make a living watching TV sounded like a great idea, but it was absurd,’ Thompson said. ‘It would be like making a living eating ice cream or sleeping.’

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Chicago. He had intended to study to become a professor of art history, but during his junior year, he visited the campus library and perused the Italian Renaissance art section. The section spanned ‘miles of shelves,’ Thompson said.

The library’s collection of books about television as an art form, however, stretched several inches.

Thompson saw a virgin field with tremendous opportunity for growth. Thompson, the art history major, had another reason for entering the field.

‘I thought I would study the art of my upbringing,’ he said. Some of his fondest childhood memories, he said, revolved around watching television with his family.

Once the children had completed their homework, the Thompson family would gather around the television. They’d watch variety shows and World of Disney programs. On Sunday nights, ‘Bonanza’ aired at 9 p.m. Thompson and his brother Ken didn’t often get to stay up past the opening credits because it was a school night. But when they did, “Boy, we had it made,” Ken Thompson said.

Cable’s niche programming, which allowed families to splinter into different rooms when watching TV, wouldn’t arrive for another 15 years.

Back at Chicago, Robert Thompson feverishly started taping. He began reading TV Guide listings. Not just skimming them, but actually reading them, as if they were another article in the magazine.

Thompson would grip a pencil and scour the magazine, painstakingly circling the programs he needed to record. It became a hunt to find the obscure, but important, programs buried in the ink.

He graduated from Chicago in 1981 and received a master’s of radio, television and film from Northwestern University in 1982. He then enrolled in Northwestern’s radio, television and film doctoral program.

‘He had an enthusiasm for it that most people didn’t — faculty or students,’ said Professor Gary Burns, who collaborated with Thompson on a paper analyzing music videos. ‘Even then, when he was still a student, he was looking forward to publishing.’

Thompson indeed found that the papers he submitted for class could get published in academic journals. Browne’s Journal of American Culture published Thompson’s paper, “ ‘Love Boat’: High Art on the High Seas,” in 1983. Browne said he ‘couldn’t find a better paper.’

After receiving his doctorate, Thompson found a job at the State University of New York at Cortland, lecturing about the history of television.

‘We could get so much attention for what we were doing,’ Thompson said. The dumber the television programs he studied, it seemed, the greater the attention he received. Teaching about “Love Boat” garnered him more attention than did studying “Masterpiece Theater.” ’60 Minutes’ visited his classroom to report on unorthodox college courses.

When the segment aired, his profile soared — a harbinger to the notoriety he’d achieve when he came to SU several years later.

For all the talking Thompson does to the media, there are two topics he won’t discuss: his wife and his 6-year-old daughter. He did admit, though, that “whatever the gene is that first attracted me to TV has skipped (my daughter).”

He is finishing a book about the history of television programming, due out in December. Occasionally, he even finds time to watch television for enjoyment, calling “The Simpsons’ and ‘Six Feet Under’ two of the cleverest shows on television.

One thing he won’t watch, however, are the television shows of Stephen Cannell. He ‘overdosed’ on them while writing his dissertation, he said.

But if he did want to watch the ‘Rockford Files,’ he wouldn’t need to drive to the climate-controlled warehouse where he stores his tapes, the tapes he spent so many 2:30 mornings archiving.

Rather, he could just flick on the TV. Episodes air on TVLAND at two o’clock — in the afternoon.

Published on March 25, 2002 at 12:00 pm