I remember when I got my first TV, sometime I think in high school. Whenever I turned on the TV, there was always something on. And by college, I had two TVs on almost non-stop. (One was usually muted on CNN.) Wish I could still do that. I went to the trouble of drilling a hole through the wall and running a cable so that I could watch the DVR on the small TV in the laundry room.
I looked at my parents, who rarely watched TV. I didn't get it. Why didn't they watch TV?
I get it. Or, at least now I have one of those "transition" theories. Here goes... they used to watch a lot of TV (probably not) but over time, the networks showed showed fewer and fewer shows that they liked. And eventually, they stopped bothering to turn the TV on. And now I'm worried that I'm headed down that same route.
(That said, I hadn't planned to watch this season of Scrubs and just finished watching what might have been the best epsiode ever. Right up there with Brendan Fraser's final episode. Also envious of them sitting there on the roof of the hospital on Riverside with Burbank in the background. I miss those really warm southern California nights.)
2 comments:
Yeah, the 2nd episode of the new season was miles above the first episode. Well written and well cast.
(Dear tvjames: re-posting, as after thinking about it, I wanted to make a couple of points more clear:
1) This is by no means an indictment or personal attack on you, it's an observation on society as a whole, and on myself specifically. You're clearly a reader, clearly intelligent, have a moral compass, and you clearly engage with your kids (plural, right?) and family - that's all manifestly clear in your writing. So I'll beg your pardon and ask forgiveness if the first post sounded like a personal diatribe, or that any TV watching means you've got one foot in the mansion with Hef and the other on a banana peel. Didn't mean that in any way, shape or form...sometimes words get away from me. (is there an emoticon for 'embarrassed'?)
2) To that end, I want to start off by saying that I'm probably one of the biggest consumers of broadcast media. Plz consider posting this version instead of the first. Of course, it's your choice, and I'm happy to abide by your decision.
- Anon )
Interesting question!
Let me start by saying that we have six TVs in our house; one in each bedroom, one in each office, one in the den, and yes, one in the kitchen. All hooked up, sadly, to cable. Yikes.
Your post has caused me to reflect a bit since I read it, and I offer the following as a commentary on where we - self included (self WAY included) are going. As a society; as a country; as a people.
I think it's a lot deeper than nothing being on...several years ago, one of our kids spent a few weeks one summer with my parents; one of the things we packed up was several favorite movies (in VHS!) that we knew would be watched if at home.
But they returned unused, unopened, unpacked even. Watching movies was part of our rhythm at home, but not in my parent's house...it wasn't so much that they actively sought to replace the TV with other things, it just never became a central part of their daily lives. They'd watch the news at night, then nine out of ten times, it was simply turned off.
They picked up a book, and read. Out loud if necessary; they broke out a board game, or they worked on a project, repairing, fixing, or creating something new.
They wrote letters. They paid their bills.
Arguably that was a function of the lack of compelling content on the TV. In changing that dynamic though, look at where we've come....let me propose a quick survey.
See if you can find a show that doesn't have:
a) sexual references, innuendos, bedroom scenes or other sexually oriented visual images (whether the participants are married or not, although the former seems rare)
b) references to homosexuality or same-sex themes
c) violence, murder, abortion and/or the sanctity of human life marginalized
d) Harsh, rude or vulgar language, references, or actions (think: stuff you wouldn't do in church)
Just 4 things. 4 categories. It's actually quite hard to find something that's "compelling" but doesn't contain one of the above, even the news. And don't get me started on commercials...
Not impossible mind you - there are several PBS, Discovery, Science Channel, NatGeo, et al shows that would qualify under the above criteria; but as a percentage, they're pretty small.
I gotta reflect that this is the same generation that rarely bought things on credit, and when they did, it was a temporary convenience for record keeping, or safety (like traveling - they'd take some cash, but put most things on a credit card, then paid it off as soon as they got home).
I don't recall any major purchase that we didn't make in cash. If you wanted it and didn't have the purchase price, you saved until you did.
We went to the bank and cashed a check when we needed greenbacks.
We almost never ate fast food; candy, comic books & cereal box toys were all SO off my radar as a kid.
No microwaves, drive-thrus (except the bank) or cordless phones.
Activity required commitment, personal attention and participation.
Today we multitask, phase-shift and parallel-thread...micro-points of rapid attention, firing like our over-caffeinated synapses.
Which is not inherently bad, but just like anything else, it's a question of motivation, of intent, purpose - and the attendant cost. I'm convinced that we've kicked our appetites into turbo mode, and are feeding them at an incredibly (and increasingly) rapid rate.
As a result, we've lost focus. We've diluted morality with tolerance, and called discernment 'judgmentalism'. We've anesthetized ourselves and our children in a morality-deprivation chamber and called it "free-speech".
We don't take the time. We simply don't take the time.
Time:
- To read
- To focus on our children
- To honor our elders
- To teach our kids how to make decisions
- To teach them how to manage money
- To honor our spouse
- To grow
- To rest
- To 'be'
There's an old classic rock hit by the Atlanta Rhythm Section called "I'm So Into You" in which the lyrics are partially:
"I'm so into you -
"I can't think of nothin' else"
To play on that, we are so into ourselves - what I want, what makes ME feel good, what (God help us) SEEMS right must BE right, that we don't have time or room for nothin' else.
We've lost our lodestar; our fixed and unmoving absolute.
We're not so much an immoral nation as we are an amoral nation. Anything that anybody wants to do is okay for them. _I_ won't do it, but you go on and get your thug-thizzle on.
In the space of a single generation, we've gone from divorce being the unspoken, hidden, shameful secret that nobody brought up to it becoming not just the norm, but ADVERTISED. I saw a commercial recently for a law firm offering divorce representation, and the couple on the couch went from fighting over the remote to fighting for the phone.
We don't know what it looks like to have a successful, long-term marriage. If problems (even deeply psychological, interpersonal problems) can't be solved in the span of a 30 minute sitcom (or 60 minute show), then quit. Change the channel on your life. "I deserve to be happy"...puh-leeez. SPARE me. We (all of us) deserve to have our collective butt whupped, our caps turned around, our baggy pants cinched tight around our waist and made to live on a farm for a couple of years so we can learn that if we don't work, we don't eat. That hunting to eat is a heckuva lot different than picking off animated characters in a Nintendo game with a plastic gun, and integrity means doing what I said I would do even if I didn't get anything out of it.
The cost of all this has yet to be fully understood, but I believe some leading key indicators are things like:
a) teen pregnancies
b) broken marriages, single parent homes
c) violent crimes, including murder, rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, crimes against the most vulnerable
d) rudeness, rage and disrespect, especially towards the elders among us
e) dishonesty, lack of integrity
f) entitlement mentality, me-1st
g) sky-rocketing jail populations
h) AIDS and STDs that are in high double-digits among the population
i) an illiteracy rate that's an embarrassment among the world's nations
...etc, etc, etc.
And that's not even touching the morality behind those behaviors / indicators.
Again, TV isn't the root cause - it's a symptom, a by-product, an offshoot of the overall shift in our values. Our priorities. Of where our hearts are.
I didn't intend for this to be a manifesto, and by all means, this is as much a rant against that ugly mug I see every morning in the mirror; so I'll close by saying that the symptom you notice is only part of a far greater slide IMHO, down the proverbial slippery.
But as Dennis Miller says: "Hey, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. Who wants pie?"
:-)
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