I've thought about you while I've been mostly offline, Gentle Readers...The Long & Short Reviews question for the first week in May was "What are your favorite TV shows, and why?"
We were compatible, I said. I once rented a furnished room that came with a TV set. I watched TV only when friends were appearing on it. So I used the TV as a hat rack for six months before discovering that it didn't work.
We did watch television a few times, though. During election years we watched the debates; we watched the Olympics, and an hour or two of coverage of the horror that was New York City on September 11, 2001. One year when a friend had become involved with a bill we watched the Virginia legislature in session--from Maryland. But we didn't watch anything regularly on television. Everyone knew the news was better covered in the morning Washington Post. Back then it was, if not a frank and unbiased paper, a much better one than it is now.
I had watched enough television to have formed this low opinion of it, as a child. In primary school we actually used to have a game called TV Tag. When tagged you had to name a television program and when and where you'd watched it. You hadn't watched TV in our town; it wasn't yet available. People who hadn't travelled just had to be "it" when tagged. I had travelled enough that, though slow enough to be tagged easily, I could avoid being "it" for more than half an hour. I had liked "Lassie," and "Romper Room," and some of the Lawrence Welk and "Hee Haw" shows my parents tolerated when we stayed at motels that had television, or with Grandmother. I had not liked Julia Child. I had liked Flip Wilson but my grandmother didn't like him, thought his "The devil made me do it" jokes were antichristian, and would turn off the TV if he was on.
"Sesame Street," "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," and "The Electric Company" came out later. I enjoyed the whole two hours of children's TV. Mother said they were regressive. Sometimes after watching some skits she'd say they were too regressive even for my brother, and tell us to go outside and play. Sometimes as an alternative my brother liked to watch "Superman," which I thought was regressive. Both of us liked the Saturday morning cartoons and would spend whole Saturday mornings watching them, one summer when we were in California and could watch television any time, before the'rents found a house with no television set and Mother started taking us to Seventh-Day Adventist church meetings instead.
Early in my teen years my home town finally started picking up TV broadcasts from NBC in Bristol. I baby-sat for children who were allowed to watch reruns of "I Love Lucy" and "Looney Tunes" that were broadcast before "Sesame Street," "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," and "The Electric Company." I still enjoyed the "educational" kiddie shows. Mother still said that even for the children I baby-sat, the youngest of whom was three years old, they were probably too regressive.
At the church college I attended TV was controversial. The school offered degrees in broadcasting, with internships at an affiliated radio station, but the program was all about radio. Many Seventh-Day Adventists, like my parents, were proud of being too frugal to have a TV set in the house. There were no "good," meaning SDA, TV preachers. There was a television set in a common room in each dormitory, though not in the parlor where visitors might have watched, and some people even watched things like the final episodes of "MASH" and "Little House on the Prairie." I didn't. I hadn't watched enough of those shows to miss them though I had happened to catch the original broadcasts of the first three episodes of "Little House on the Prairie."
When I came home with mononucleosis, my parents and sister were managing the estate of Dad's rich uncle, who had just died, in Clinchport. There wasn't much to do out there but watch NBC on the rich uncle's black-and-white television. "Little House on the Prairie" and "Dukes of Hazzard" reruns in the morning, "Looney Tunes" after school, "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy" in the evenings, and sometimes "Highway to Heaven" or "Family Ties" after those. I watched quite a lot of television that year. It seemed interesting. A year later I recognized that, for me, finding even those TV shows interesting was a symptom.
In my twenties I became a social TV watcher. I didn't like any show enough to want my own TV set, or turn one on if it was furnished with a room, but I'd sit through what friends were watching. So I watched the Orioles lose an entire season of baseball games. I watched Colonel North explain how his job required him to be a good liar, but he was now going to tell the truth, so he said. I watched Ivan Lendl and Vitas Gerulaitis stretch one tennis match out for an entire day because daaang they were good; watched Martina Navratilova win matches faster. (At some point I realized that I'd never actually watched either Arthur Ashe or Billie Jean King win a match.) I watched a few horror shows with a friend's son, one based on a novel by Peter Straub, and one based on the idea that nobody liked being crawled on by the cicadas that were swarming in Washington at the time; it was about mutant insects that looked more like roaches but made a sound like cicadas, and they used this sound to summon others when one of them caught someone sleeping, and they crawled into the person's ears and ate the brain.
Cable TV was a huge fad in my late twenties. At this period I had a boyfriend, and the opportunity to practice living with him in a wholesome family environment. His parents, who were professional foster parents, positively encouraged me and his sisters' boyfriends to spend days and nights at their house--making sure we were compatible enough to get married, and also getting lots of free baby-sitting. They had color TV sets and cable subscriptions in every room. We watched MTV, "Beavis and Butthead," lots of ball games and NASCAR races, reruns of the shows I hadn't watched before. The TV programs seemed interesting when norovirus went around and I had an actual fever. The family's behavior was much more fun, though.
Then after those years when weeks went by without my husband's turning on his big-screen TV, I came home as a widow. Mother had bought the big house in Kingsport with the original "hi-fi stereo color TV" in its cabinet. I don't think she ever turned it on. My home, tucked away in a fold of the hills, never has had a television set in it, and if I have any say in the matter it never will; I like its being TV-free.
From time to time, though, I visit people who think the only decent thing to do is share with guests the benefit of their cable TV subscriptions. I watch a ball game, or NASCAR race, or "western" rerun, or game show. I stay awake by knitting, and chat with these people during the commercial breaks.
One friend likes to note how many of the young, good-looking actors in favorite rerun shows have died old by now.
One likes to laugh along with Steve Harvey, who I'll agree is funny.
One used to like gospel music programs. I miss her.
I suppose my favorite program is "Jeopardy." I wish more of the cable TV subscribers I knew watched it. And I miss Alex Trebek. A lot of TV stars I liked have died old by now--Anjelica Huston, Michael Landon, and of course Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were dead when I was watching them on reruns as a baby-sitter, and Fred Rogers, and many more whose names would come to mind if I thought about them. I don't miss them; they were old and they left lots of videotape behind. I do miss Alex Trebek, because "Jeopardy" is still entertaining but it's not the same without him. So I suppose "Jeopardy" with Alex Trebek must have been my all-time favorite TV show.
