The original post: /r/television by /u/KeptinGL6 on 2024-05-30 10:16:13.
In the beginning, TV shows were shot, edited, and broadcast in fullscreen, for fullscreen TVs. There is no question about how they appeared on TVs at that time.
In the early and mid-2000s, we transitioned to shows being shot and edited in progressive widescreen. Being edited in a natively progressive format, rather than an interlaced one, meant they could be rescaled to any arbitrary resolution without being butchered. They’d appear in their correct aspect ratio without compromises on widescreen broadcasts, but for fullscreen broadcasts, they’d often be in a sort of intermediate aspect ratio, where you’d lose a little bit but not too much off the sides, and you also had very narrow black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. I very distinctly remember Enterprise being broadcast like that.
In between, though, we had an extremely scarce few shows that were produced in natively interlaced standard-definition widescreen. Examples include Stargate SG-1 and Andromeda. Does anyone remember how these shows appeared on fullscreen TVs? Were they cropped to fit 4:3? I highly doubt that they were shown in that intermediate ratio, since that would require rescaling interlaced video, which is a Very Bad Thing.