Help, television is taking over my life, by Dale Spindel

     To be honest, I've probably always been pretty elitist.   I developed a serious taste for classical music at age 13 and will readily confess (to most people's horror) that at age  14 I turned down a FREE ticket to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium.  To this day, I prefer opera to pop and will  choose chamber music over Lady Gaga any day of the week.

     So it should probably come as no surprise to anybody to also learn that I have  spent most of my adult life looking down my nose at television, with the exception of such guilty pleasures as the Mary Tyler Moore Show,  The Rockford  Files, and anything British.  (Any Butterflies fans out there???)   I also watched Sesame Street and other kiddie shows with my kids, but in my mind  those shows didn't count.  And later on, after my son got older and turned me on to The Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead and South Park, those shows didn't count either.  And neither, of course, did watching Saturday Night Live.

    But then, when I was home recuperating from cataract surgery back in the summer of 2001, a friend loaned me her videos of the first three seasons of The Sopranos and I became hooked almost immediately, blowing through all those videotapes in a mere matter of  days.  In order to be able to watch future seasons of The Sopranos as they appeared,  I convinced my husband that we needed a subscription to HBO.  Not too long after, a subscription to Showtime was also thrown into our cable package.  It didn't take too long for me to add  The Wire, Deadwood, The Brotherhood, Sleeper Cell, and The Tudors to my list of television addictions.  

It was only a matter of time before I found myself coming face to face with the  renaissance of TV programming that eventually made its way to the non-subscription cable channels, initiating yet more addictive behaviors towards the likes of  Mad Men, Damages, Breaking Bad, and Rescue Me.   As my daughter recently remarked, "Mom, for someone who doesn't watch television, you sure watch a lot of television." 

    But lately, things have taken an  even more serious turn as more and more cable classics that I had previously missed  have suddenly become available to me in all their multi-season glory through the television miracle that is "on demand," complete with the "watch by" dates, after which they disappear.   I spent months working my way through five seasons of Weeds, only to  make the discovery that multiple season of Six Feet Under are also now available to me and that I will have to  make a commitment to regular viewing of all these episodes by their "view by" dates over a period of many, many weeks. 

Once upon a time, in the distant past, it used to be that if you missed a show when it was first broadcast, you might be able to catch it during summer reruns but if not, then it would be lost to  you pretty much forever, or at least until the series eventually went into syndication.  These days, through the magic of DVR, downloading from the web, "on demand" and friends who own the complete  sets of long running shows on DVD, there are  not enough hours in the day to watch everything that everybody tells you that you simply must watch.

    Why am I going on about all this?  The shows  that I have been hooked on (with the exception of Weeds and the most recent season of Damages) are usually an irresistable amalgam of excellent writing and acting; there is no reason for me to feel bad about  the large chunks of time that I regularly spend watching them.  And unlike the act of reading which, for me at least, is a more or less solitary pursuit, the majority of the shows that I  watch provide an opportunity for my husband and me to spend  time together.   However, as a result of all the TV watching, the amount of time that I  spend reading actual books has gone way down, leaving me feeling both frustrated and guilty.   As a librarian, it does not bode well for the future of my profession if dedicated readers like me  all start to slack off in favor of television.  

 Is anybody else out there struggling with this?  Am I just going through a phase or is this something more serious? 

Postscript:  My musical tastes are not really elitist; I'm always really surprised that everyone doesn't love classical music just as much as I do, but this is a subject for a blog other than Dead Guy.

    

Comments

[Sarah W]

Maybe we can look at it as adding to our base of cultural schema so that we may more effectively commnicate with our family, friends, and patrons?

That's my excuse for the 27 episdoes on Phineas and Ferb waiting in our DVR queue. And Leverage. And White Collar. And Covert Affairs. . . .

[Mike Dennis]

THE SOPRANOS, DEADWOOD, WEEDS...there is no end, now that premium cable channels are producing quality TV. My advice: get the boxed set of TREME. It's great.

Welcome to the world of the unwashed proletariat. You're now one of US!

[Sarah W]

"communicate," I mean.

Which I sincerely hope doesn't involve correct spelling . . .

[Dale Spindel]

I've never heard of the shows you're mentioning here which is actually kind of giving me the shakes. Are they all British?

[Dale Spindel]

I did watch Treme and enjoyed the weekly jazz lesson but I can't really say that I loved it. As I must confess now, I've watched even more television than I even admitted to in my blog posting.

[T.N. Tobias]

I hear this argument often: "It's good writing so it must be OK to watch." I have never seen an episode of ANY TV program (or movie for that matter) that had writing on par with the most excellent written work. TV is an empty medium. It's thrills are fleeting and do not stand up well to deep analysis. I can't see how hours and hours of stacked up episodes of a TV series could compare in the slightest to all the great literature that exists in the world.

[Dale Spindel]

Okay, here I go again, but have you ever actually watched any episodes of The Wire? Just because there is a lot of junk on TV doesn't automatically exclude the possibility that something broadcast in that medium can't be brilliant, as The Wire most definitely is. And just because I love the writing of Philip Roth doesn't also mean that I can't enjoy watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit.