HollyDays

I’ve just finished reading Ellen Currey-Wilson’s The Big Turnoff, a humorous, sad, introspective examination of the author’s struggles to raise her son without exposure to television and to wean herself away from her own self-named TV addiction. The book inspired me (yet again) to reflect on my own TV viewing and plot out if not a specific plan to watch less, a plan to watch better, less mindless programming and to wean myself away from one of my own worst TV habits–flipping.

Yes, I’m a flipper. I admit it. I blame my father, for whom, in the years before TV remotes (at least ones that didn’t also inadvertently open the next door neighbor’s automatic garage door), I served as the means by which he fed his flipping addiction, by virtue of my youth and relative proximity to the set, and of course, by virtue of being the last generation of children who also functioned as free slave labor for parents. As I composed yet another largely PBS-based viewing plan for myself and my husband (who doesn’t especially care what we watch), several things occurred, or reoccurred, to me.

How many hours of my life have been wasted mindlessly flipping, flipping through 100+ channels, all the while complaining that every station is broadcasting nothing but crap? And so much of it is crap, and it has been getting worse, I think. I mostly blame the impossible to fulfill promise of 24-hour-a-day broadcasting for the recent influx of more crap on TV. Rebroadcasts of the same episode of the same show have become the norm in the past few years. Repeats used to be a summertime phenomenon, back in the olden days when networks actually had clear-cut seasons of unvarying length. Now, everything new is shown 4 or 5 times, on no particular schedule, so you never know what’s going to be on when. Is it some sort of plot to keep us viewing longer–fogged in and unable to locate a show we’d like to watch, and that we know is playing somewhere, on some station, if only we can just flip long enough and carefully enough and find it?

The blue information bar along the bottom of the screen is, I guess, supposed to alleviate some of the confusion, but ours is wrong half the time, and more often than not explains not what a particular episode of a show is about, but rather what the premise of the show itself is, so that if you want to know if you’ll be interested in watching (or if you’ve seen it before), you still have to begin watching the program. Example–only about half the time does the information bar state who Larry King will be interviewing on a given night. Instead, the bar tells us who Larry King is and that he interviews interesting people on his nightly show. The bar actually uses the word “avuncular” to describe Larry King. Who writes these things? I guess in that case someone with a slightly scary goblin-like uncle who’d been married 5 or 6 times and was in the know about politics and film.

But, when it comes to flipping, I really have only myself to blame. I like it. I like the mindless wandering of it, the sense that just around the corner (or up the dial) the perfect show is just waiting for me to find it. I tell myself that, especially during the school year, I work hard and use my brain all day. I deserve to check out and flip a little. I tell myself (and others) that I have to keep up with the media world, with the TV trends, because as a composition instructor I must also be a pop-culturalist. I must know media if I am to analyze it, and to help my students to analyze it. After all, the young adults I teach are supposed to be the most media-savvy generation ever, despite the fact that when asked, they all swear they never watch TV. When asked what they do, do they moan piteously, drape themselves across their desks and lament, “Work!–and do homework!” This dedication to their homework is not particularly evident in the quality of their essays–and makes me wonder about their dedication to their jobs. And when I start quoting commercials with much comic flair, they laugh and seem to understand the references, though it’s possible they are just laughing at the weird lady capering around at the front of the room and hoping they won’t have to complete an in-class writing assignment if they play along.

The reality of course is that I’ll never get back the minutes-turned hours I’ve spent watching Ron Popeil and his minions inject flavor into and suction air out of various food products. I can never reclaim the time spent scoffing at the top 100 most shocking-embarrassing-controversial-TV-superstar-concert-when-animals-go-bad-moments. (Has anyone else noticed how much of TV these days is made up of montages of other TV events)?

So today, again, I plan. It’s not, I don’t think, that TV is wholesale a bad thing. I believe that PBS television is in fact a very good thing, and donate many hundreds of dollars a year to the local affiliate to prove it. I can’t imagine living without the local news broadcasts and national events coverage on CNN. I would really miss programs like Ghosthunters and Criss Angel’s Mindfreak. I think that some episodes of Law and Order SVU are compelling, and I do get a kick out of Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs. I like watching those medical mysteries type shows, even though I always wind up thinking I have whatever weird disease was featured in the episode. Reruns of Seinfeld and The Brady Bunch are funny, and Extreme Makeover Home Edition makes me cry.

But some of it has to go. Do I really need to watch shows that make me think I secretly have disophipdophilia? (not a real disease–I made that up). Do I really need to see Elaine parse the fine points of sponge-worthiness yet again? Will Jan not buy the stupid wig this time?

And then, I got to thinking further. Are there other ways to get news? Obviously there are, though I have to admit I very rarely avail myself to them. I almost never read news online, unless I’m following up on a story I saw on TV, or looking for links for this blog. I don’t read the local newspaper, the Toledo Blade, except for the ads and the comics on Sundays, though I do read the two local free papers, the Toledo City Paper and the Toledo Free Press. I don’t, despite my many donations to PBS, listen to NPR, even though my husband actually recorded some of his poems for the local NPR affiliate during National Poetry Month when we lived up north. They censored him–but that’s not why I don’t listen to NPR. I guess I’ve always thought it was mostly conservative talk radio and the Boston Pops–and plus, I always think of that old Saturday Night Live skit about the recipe for Schweaty Balls.

See? I’m hopeless. Seventy-five percent of my references are television-based. I was raised on TV. The TV was never, ever off in our house when I was growing up, except on Christmas morning. It was, however, always on, on Christmas Eve, when we’d go to my paternal grandmother’s for a sort of Polish pre-Christmas. It was, in fact, always blasting some sort of program that had nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas, and everyone had to shout over it, though I think they probably would have been shouting anyway. By the time I was five, I had a little black and white portable in my bedroom, so that my mother didn’t have to feel guilty for depriving me of Frosty the Snowman and The Wizard of Oz, and everything else kids liked but my father refused to watch (and also so that she didn’t have to watch The Dukes of Hazzard anymore, I think).

My father ruled the living room TV with an iron fist. Even mention It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! and he’d beat his shoe on the end table like Khrushchev. Sometimes things were good, when a network was showing one of those great old mini-series like Centennial or one of the Rocky movies, and Dad would pop corn and we’d all watch and enjoy together (no talking allowed though). But then there was the golf. And the football. And the pro bowling. And ABC’s Wide World of Sports. And 60 Minutes. Sunday night, and at 7 PM it would start, with that tick-tick-tick like a time bomb counting down to Monday morning, though I did, oddly, like Andy Rooney, even as a really little kid. Maybe I just liked TV. I didn’t advance to my own color or cable until I was 11, but up until that point cable really didn’t offer many more stations than analog–just the promise of a clearer picture without having to move the outdoor aerial with that weird clunky remote box mechanism. Then it was all about Nick at Night and MTV. No one ever “monitored” what I watched. But then, my parents weren’t exactly the monitoring types, which also explains why I listened to W.A.S.P. and left the house unchallenged in any number of microscopic see-through outfits from the age of 13. I’ve never known if they didn’t care or if they didn’t want to thwart my personal style and independence. Maybe they were too busy watching TV to notice?

How much did all that TV change the way I perceive the world? Hard to say. TV can lead to misinformation and unrealistic expectations, for sure. I wanted my parents to be like Mike and Carol Brady, but they were more like Archie and Edith Bunker. I once had a friend who thought for years that The Jeffersons were dead because they lived in a “deluxe apartment in the sky.” But I do love PBS programming (thanks Dad, for forcing all that Nova and Nature on Sunday nights). I still became a writer and a writing teacher, and I still developed a healthy love of reading. My father taught me to read when I was 3 or 4, using a book called The Gorrilla Did It, even though the only thing I’ve ever known him to read is the newspaper and I think Iacocca back in the 80s. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to read as much as I know I did, plus play as much as I did, and still watch enough TV to learn the theme song to almost every show broadcast during the 1970s and 80s. I guess I read and played during ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

Sometimes I put the TV on “for noise”–especially when I’m home alone during the day. I sometimes even leave it on while I read (a waste of electricity if I’ve ever committed one). It almost never occurs to me to listen to music “for noise” anymore, and I’m really not sure why. For that matter, what does it mean to put something on “for noise” in the first place? As I sat making the next TV plan today, I realized that last night, after my husband finally got home from his long day, I set down The Big Turnoff, saying “No, I want to hear about your day” and then promptly turned on the TV. For noise. I realize too how often I say I don’t have time to do the things I know I want to do, especially to write, and yet I always seem to make time to watch Judge Judy. Sometimes I’m amazed at the sheer banality of the crap on TV, and then other times I am profoundly impressed by certain quality programming. I know there’s good stuff there, if I make a point to find it–with a minimum of flipping. I don’t want to throw away the TV–I just want to waste less time with it. Or maybe I’m just looking for better noise.