I grew up in the halcyon days of family television in the 60’s. Our family would gather around the television
each evening after dinner and watch our favorite prime time shows until it was
time for bed. Each fall we would await
the new lineups with eager anticipation.
Some of my favorites: Man from
U.N.C.L.E, I Spy, Secret Agent, Bonanza, Walt Disney Hour, Get Smart, Green
Acres, Petticoat Junction. I could go on
and on because there were SO MANY!
A few years ago, in a moment of misguided nostalgia, I had
Netflix deliver the first season of Man from U.N.C.L.E. I watched the pilot episode for about 10
minutes and then put the DVD back in its package and out for the mail. It was unbearable, even with all the pent-up
desire to reminisce and relive my youth.
I was essentially a TV addict as a child. Fortunately, my interest in sports and girls
(not always in that order) overcame that addiction in late high school. By college I was clean, and for many years I
rarely watched TV. Other hobbies and
passions seemed to have more value to me.
TV slowly crept back into my life after marriage, but by
this time I was a bit more discerning in my viewing habits and very conscious
of a certain hierarchy in my choices of entertainment. Karen, who had rarely watched TV in her youth,
and I had a few TV shows that we indulged in over the years - Cheers and ER
come to mind – but we made a decision to ditch TV completely once our daughters
were born.
Like a former alcoholic, I am now a bit self-righteous about
my choices of entertainment, though I am in this, as in most things, a bit of a
hypocrite. At some point I began to
demean much of mass media as being a ‘cheap thrill’. I had become a snob, believing that serious
literature, art films, and more sophisticated music (not pop!) were the only media
worth one’s valuable time.
This conversion, though generally a salutary development in
my life, came with a nasty side effect.
Whenever I engage in any activity that does not measure up to my
somewhat arbitrary set of standards, I feel guilty. After having only watched movies for many
years, Karen and I began to sample some of the modern television series a few
years ago. We have seen several that we
enjoyed tremendously – Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men – to name a few. But once we opened that Pandora’s Box, the question
of how much TV is bad looms large in my life again.
Is it better to read a good book than to watch TV? Is it better to watch an artsy foreign film
than a Hollywood blockbuster with ever-more-spectacular special effects? Is it better to play guitar or take a walk
than to do any of these? How many guilty
pleasures should we allow ourselves? Is
there really a hierarchy of entertainment or is it all self-delusion? Is spending all day playing video games no
less virtuous than hiking in the mountains?
I suspect I am a bit obsessive about these questions. I am not sure why I struggle with guilt when
I spend time doing anything that I don’t view as ‘worthwhile’. Perhaps it is my regret over a somewhat
misspent youth – a sense that I could have accomplished more in life if I had
been less self-indulgent. Or perhaps it
is my ever-increasing awareness of my mortality and with it a need to make
every moment count.
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