Four Months Without TV and Counting

       

       Today marks exactly four months since I decided to go without TV for a six-month period, a kind of Thoreau-like experiment, saving the distance, of course.
       I haven't cheated, except for Game 7 back in June, when the Miami Heat won the  NBA championship. Game 7 was a the deciding, nerve-wracking, nail-biting game, and no, it doesn't count as cheating.
       Aside from that, nothing, nada. I literally haven't had TV.
       Here's what happened.
       Shortly after the Heat game, I got my bill from AT&T U-verse, and almost fell to the floor when I saw that the monthly amount for the TV had almost doubled. Turned out that the promotions I had gotten when I first signed up were now expired. And hey said no, there wasn't anything they could do for me now. Hello? Didn't they know that if there was ever a customer they needed to woo, it was me? Hadn't they read my blog? Apparently not, so I just cancelled. Radical.
       I promised my daughter I would look for a cheaper provider, and to just bear with the silence for a few days. Or maybe we would talk more, and not even notice the silence. In any event, a few days turned into a few weeks, in part due to a frustrated attempt with Comcast, in part due to other things calling for my attention, like gardening and reading. And we did talk more over dinner. Heck, I actually cooked dinner. The rest of the time, as the evening wound down, we had only the muted noises of a quiet household: the cat prancing around, the AC humming, a question about homework, pages turning on a book, texts buzzing back and forth on my daughter's phone.
       Then, just as my daughter was beginningn to contemplate running away from this TV-less home, a new offer from AT&T arrived in the mail, at the same price as before, maybe even a couple dollars cheaper! Today, four months into my six-month hiatus, we got hooked up again. A test from the universe, of course.
        When the technician turned on the set to check if all was working properly, the list of shows brightly displayed on the screen made me feel like a kid opening a chest of forgotten toys. On top of that, radio ads for new season premieres have been playing on the radio: How I Met Your Mother, Two Broke Girls, Big Bang Theory, and tons of new shows. And pretty soon, people will be talking about the more serious shows, like Scandal, and already I'm out of the conversation when it turns to Breaking Bad, which I have no idea what it's about.
       But no, I'm not falling off the wagon.

       

        An interesting thing in the first TV-less trimester is that it happened to include a short visit to Los Angeles, the cradle of TV. We toured one of the major studios, of course, Warner Brothers, chosen because it contains remains of the set for Gilmore Girls, one of my favorite TV shows ever, ever, ever. We saw the front of Luke's Diner, and I could imagine Lorelai prancing in and ordering coffee. (Gilmore fans will know what I'm talking about.)
        We saw New York and Chicago street alleys that looked so real, you expected a garbage truck to come by any minute. We saw the office for The Mentalist, as drab and cluttered as so many offices I've been in. We stepped in the coffee house for Friends, and learned that if you put a big couch right in front of the camera, the stuff behind the couch looks small, which in turn makes the overall space appear much larger on the screen. And we saw the perennially broken elevator and stairs that lead to Sheldon's and Penny's apartments in Big Bang Theory, another favorite of mine, which is still filming, but whose season premiere I won't get to see. 
         Learning the visual and engineering tricks of TV production was a lot of fun, as entertaining as the make-believe stories that are played on it. It makes me question, what exactly is the evil of TV that I seek to escape?
         There's no evil in TV. It's make-believe as engaging as storytelling has been since the days of Beowulf. (Not that I know exactly when that was, except for a notion that Beowulf is one of the first pieces of literature in the English language, if not the first.  English lit gurus, feel free to set me straight.) What is TV if not story telling? One story, after another, after another.
         While in L.A., I spent time with flesh and bone friends, friends whose story lines I know since childhood, and whose lives have continued to unfold with expected and unexpected twists and turns that don't lack for drama, as much drama as any soap opera, as much humor as any situation comedy, as much uncertainty as any suspense series.
         We write the plot and the lines as we go. You look good. You are so smart. So brave. So kind. A pain, sometimes. Me, a pain too? Ha!
        The laughter isn't canned. The jokes aren't scripted. The fears that are part of life, as real as it gets. And so is the affection. Our outcomes may or may not be perfect, we don't know. But the hoping for and rooting for and cheering on and arguing against and laughing at is live, the kind of live that goes through someone's skin. 
        There's no evil in TV, it harbors as much creativity and healthy entertainment as it does mind-numbing noise and distorted reality. But away from it and with real life friends I have a role in the story, a story that really makes me vibrate with laughter and wonder.        
       
  
        
         
    
        
          
   
        
       
   
        
        

Can I Let Go of the Heat?

       As I continue my exercise of avoiding TV for six months, I'm confronted with a dilemma: the Miami Heat are playing in the NBA finals.
       I began my six-month TV-weaning exercise on June 1. Full disclosure: On Monday (June 3) I just had to watch. It was a decisive game. So I watched the game and nothing else. Nothing before. Nothing after. Just the game. The game that would decide whether the Heat moved on to the finals.
       The stuff on the screen was gripping, inspiring. There was LeBron James strategizing cryptically with his teammates, orchestrating plays that turn a sport into art. There was Dwayne Wade executing his unique style of court acrobatics, snaking through places only he can see. There was the towering Chris Bosh shooting three-point baskets, the universe suspended for an instant. The Miami Heat did amazing stuff, and I sat on the couch and watched it on the screen for three hours.
         Okay, I can sort of let that one go by and still consider myself good for the exercise. But now come the finals.
         Some things are worth watching. Some things are worth sitting three hours for. Men able to suspend themselves in mid-air after running through multiple giant human bricks time and again might well be one of them. Further, by watching it  Monday, I got to participate in the collective glee they brought to my town. Sweet, really sweet.
         But, if the finals that begin tomorrow stretch out for all seven games, watching the worthwhile could amount to 21 hours, or almost an entire day sitting in front of the TV. Even if I just watch decisive games, am I sticking to the exercise?
          On the other hand, if what is being shown on the screen isn't a scripted show and could be experienced live if one were to have tickets, does it count as TV? What counts as "TV"? Is it simply anything and everything that comes through the apparatus, or only that which is scripted? Is there a difference between those two in terms of how one experiences them? What if I went to a sports bar and watched the game there with a group of friends -- would that count as sitting down and watching TV?
          I guess I'll wrestle with this at 8 p.m. tomorrow.
          
       
        
        
        
         
   

       

Insiduous No More

         The low point might have been the one hour I spent watching, actually sitting down and watching, an entire episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. If there is a reality show I always knew I'd never watch, it was this one. Don't ask me why these three sisters are famous, because I couldn't tell you. I had come accross photos and photo captions of them on celebrity magazine covers while in line at the supermarket, and always looked at them like I would at a beef jerky: Who would consume this and why?
         Yet here I was, slouched on the couch, following the non-plot of their show as if any scene or any dialogue in it would deliver resolution and satisfaction. (If you haven't traveled this path, trust me, it doesn't.) In my defense, I could say I sat to watch it because my daughter likes it -- supposedly because of the fashion and the seemingly glamorous lifestyle they showcase on TV -- but I sat watching long after my daughter had turned her attention to something else (namely, texting on her iPhone, which is another story). So, while the sane me watched the demented me passively viewing this atrocity, a nasty suspicion started creeping into my semi-comatose mind: TV was overpowering me.
         I looked at the apparatus. It is beautiful. I bought it earlier this year after my pre-historic, bulky, hugely three-dimensional box that weighed as much as an elephant finally gave out. After four days of void in my household, my daughter and I went to Best Buy and found an incredible special sale for a top notch plasma screen high definition something something that I think it's 36 inches, out of which the brightest images and sharpest sounds explode to fill our living room with more beauty, excitement and drama than that contained in the collective lives of my entire subdivision of 500 homes.
        TV is good. It tells good stories, entertaining stories, imaginative stories, even instructive stories. But none of them are your story, your imagination, your learning, all of which you give up at least in part when you watch TV, even good TV. Get distracted, and the apparatus will make you watch three sisters you don't know and don't care about talk endlessly about the nothing that passes as their personal lives.
        Tomorrow is Monday. Know what Monday is? The day for How I Met Your Mother. I love that show. When I see it in the program guide, it's almost as if my heart jumps.  It has a fresh format: Each episode revolves around the life of five young professional friends in New York, narrated by one of them, Ted, who is recalling the events as he tells his children how he met their mother. Episode after episode we go through humorous situations with Ted and his friends, without yet getting to the part of how Ted actually met the future mother of his children. And you want to get to that part as badly as Ted wants to fall in love, get married and raise a family.
         At the end of the show's past season some two weeks ago, the story line got closer to that critical moment, giving all the indications that she will become a character in the next season. How do they actually meet? How does he conquer her or fall for her or recognize that she's the one, after all the women we've seen  him get involved with? Meanwhile, Robin, his lingering flame, is getting married to Barney, the perennial bad boy, even though neither one seems quite ready for it. Will they go through with it?
         I guess I won't find out, not for the next six months anyway.
        Ted, I'm really going to miss you. But I'm looking at the bright side. I'm also getting rid of the Kardashians.